If I knew one thing about Miles Rickman, it was how he arrived at a crime scene. As for myself, the bulk of my behavior arose out of nothing more than habit. No matter what the urgency, I’d carefully unhook myself from the seatbelt of my conservative dark blue sedan, zip my parka up to the very top, pull my hat down over my ears and plod forward to whatever grisly breakdown in human nature was waiting. But then Miles was younger and likely had more life vibrating in the marrow of his bones.

His red truck squealed around the corner of Tyler Street. The gigantic tires clunked onto the sidewalk stopping just inches from a fire hydrant. A mop of unruly black hair fell over his eyes as he slammed the door. I watched him cross his arms in front of him and take in what he saw. I know, Miles. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Under more normal circumstances, I would have said, "Where’s the fire?" when he approached me in front of the burning building, as irony had infused every one of our conversations lately. But this was different. Model Shoe Shine Parlor had been my father’s store for forty years, and in an hour it would be cinders.

I watched ten thoughts move through Miles’ head by a rash of conflicting expressions. "Isn’t this –" he started.

I just nodded.

"Where the hell’s the fire department? I called them on my way and they said they’d been flooded with calls about this already." Miles could go from zero to outraged in the time it takes to sneeze.

"I hear the siren, so they’re coming," I said. "I yelled inside through the front door, but didn’t hear anything."

"You think he’s still in there?" Miles moved toward the small, standalone brick building and took stock of the flames bulging out the front windows and part of the roof.

I grabbed him and gave him one of my taming looks. "Ernie knows enough to get out of a burning building. For God’s sake."

"How do you know? Maybe he can’t get out. Or was someone else working tonight?"

Thirty minutes later, the kind of chaos that only an inner city crime scene can cause clogged up all of Chinatown and was spilling into East Boston. Three fire trucks, almost twenty patrol cars, crime scene investigation crew, evidence team, ambulance, EMT’s, which as usual left Miles and me to piece it all together. To make matters worse, the investigation was being proctored by a mass of a hundred frightened onlookers. Though 90% of Chinatown’s residents were Chinese, over half of the businesses were run by Vietnamese immigrants and everybody was interested in spectating the burning shoe parlor. I could imagine their thoughts. Does fire jump from one building to another? Will this hurt my business if my store is in the same block? What caused the fire in the first place?

They must have deemed this a small fire, I decided as one heavily clad firefighter unrolled a relatively thin hose from the back of the long truck. In twenty minutes, the shoe parlor was dense with water and thick black fog. There was something still in there. I could feel the familiar vibration in my hands like I usually did before we found evidence. I could tell Miles was thinking the same thing. I followed him into the eerie blackness of the store with my hat covering my nose and mouth, and after only a moment of being inside, my flashlight beam lit up a body on the north wall of the interior. Miles held the light on the face and looked up at me.

"Not him," I said without even looking. I knew it wasn’t.

While he bent down to find a pulse from the man’s exposed neck, I yelled for the EMT’s outside in the street.

"Do you recognize him?"

"He had a lot of Vietnamese clients. Could be anybody." I shook my head and wondered. Ernie was as far away from Chinatown right now as I was from my own roots. Hell, he could be back in Naples for all I knew. My father, Ernie DiTroia, was the only old world Italian business owner on the whole length of Tyler Street. "The Chinese wear shoes, Francine," he would always say. "So do the Vietnamese. Shoes get worn and dirty. Then they come to me." But having gone to work with him every day in the summers as a child, I knew shoes had little to do with why men went to Ernie’s shoe parlor. Every morning between late June and early September, we’d take the orange line, just the two of us, from the North End to Chinatown before anybody else was even out of bed. We’d stop at Montillio’s and he’d buy himself a coffee and buy me my favorite pastry – a Bismarck. We’d eat breakfast on the jiggling plastic seats of the subway and watch the flickering lights augment fleeting glimpses of the waterfront when the railcar came above ground.

Men came to Ernie’s shoeshine parlor to be with other men during a time in history before it was taboo to say such a thing. Of course, there were the bread and butter clients – the steady stream of Chinese and Vietnamese businessmen who had their shoes shined every morning while they sipped coffee and read the newspaper. But it was the other populous that really kept Ernie alive all these years. A group of elderly, mostly retired Italian laborers from the North End as well as some Irishmen from Southie, two old world Chinese acupuncturists, a few low-on-the-totem-pole wise guys and Uncle Oscar, Ernie’s older brother, met there every morning at seven o’clock. Of course in the beginning, their arrivals had been staggered and haphazard. After a while, though, Ernie said the men told their wives that they were going to a neighborhood association meeting. It wasn’t that far from the truth. They’d wear their best shoes and muddy them up on the way into South Cove, then sit with their coffee and cigars and donuts and complain about lawmakers and people with authority jammed up their asses. These were the meetings I got to see. Uncle Oscar always brought donuts and an extra little white bag with a surprise for me. I got passed around from the laps of old men of every age and ethnicity, and I thought the whole world was a big social commune like this. My culture shock didn’t come until later when I encountered the homogenous student body at Skidmore College. I still tried to fit in, even though I knew I didn’t. Then when I came back south, joined the Boston PD and met Miles, I stopped trying. Suddenly I knew a bigger misfit than myself.

Ernie never said much about the other meetings, not to me or my mother or to my two older brothers. But I was convinced Frankie and Rick knew something. When I asked Frankie, he was closest to my age, if Ernie’s store was actually a secret mob front, he didn’t answer. Sometimes during the summers when I used to go to the parlor with him, he’d let me go off and wander around Chinatown by myself for a while. For the first few weeks, I went into all the Chinese markets and herbal clinics and watched the ancient healers mash up stinky concoctions of roots and berries in heavy stone bowls. Uncle Oscar, a retired cop, used to walk me to South Cove and Ping-on Alley so I could see what most kids my age never got to see. That’s when I first wanted to be a police officer. Here I was holding Oscar’s hand, ultimately protected, watching him try to rid the world of bad things and bad people. To me, it seemed better than being a movie star.

When he retired, I started sneaking into the back of the parlor from the alley between Tyler and Kneeland Streets to listen to the Friday morning business meetings. Ernie said they were just businessmen talking about normal things. But as I got older and realized the same men had been coming there for eight years, I started logging their conversations in my diary. Of the ten who arrived every Friday at eight o’clock, four were real estate developers, one real estate broker, a state senator, two city councilmen, someone named Strand who wrote for The Globe and a man who worked for City Zoning. All nine of them sucked up to the zoning guy shamelessly, as he had the power to either approve or reject plans for new development in the city. He was tall and gawky, and sometimes stuttered. But I could tell Ernie liked him the best.

Everyone there had something to either gain or lose, and not just small things, either. I’m talking hundreds of millions of dollars, or a contract or their job or credibility. Through a crevice in the wall where the back door was recessed from the doorframe, I watched Ernie polish shoes slower than he did with any of his other clients. I guess he wanted to stay busy while they were talking and arguing and sucking down cigarettes. But now, if retrospect counts for anything, I think he was scared of the information he was privy to. Like a dancer, my father had a slight and wiry build with powerful hands and feet. This virtue made it easy for him to move around quietly without getting in the way of conversations. It was years later before I realized he was a spy.

Like I half expected, the doorbell sounded at quarter to eight. I was already in my robe and slippers.

"If you want I’ll come back later. I can see you’re trying to relax," Miles said, regarding me over the tops of his glasses.

"I was gonna call you anyway," I said and moved aside.

"Good. I need a drink."

He fixed himself a Manhattan and pulled the typical late night meeting accoutrements from a paper bag – Kung Pao Chicken, beef and broccoli, and egg rolls from Asian Garden Seafood Restaurant, the best in Chinatown. "Hungry?" he said biting into an egg roll.

I didn’t answer. With Miles, I didn’t need to. Being partners for seven years allowed us to bypass most of the usual bullshit that goes on between strangers. By now, he knew what to say and what not to. Or should have known.

"So what do we know so far?"

"Nothing."

"Well, we at least know –," he looked up at me and put his plate down. "Francine, will you eat something for God’s sake? A bite? I brought all this food over…"

"You brought it over for yourself. I don’t like Kung Pao Chicken."

He stood up and went to the kitchen shaking his head. "You ate Kung Pao Chicken with me last Friday. You’re just upset tonight. I’ll make you a sandwich then. Peanut butter, peanut butter," he was slamming the cabinets, "here. I know you eat that. I’ve seen you." Rummaging through the fridge for jam, he knocked over a quart of milk from the top shelf. I couldn’t help but laugh.

"I hope you never have kids, Miles."

"Why? Because I am one myself?"

"That wasn’t what I was going to say, but that’ll work fine."

"Breslin called me at home as I was leaving. He heard from the coroner."

"And?"

"Victim was shot in the stomach. They did a toxicological that revealed cocaine and some over the counter pain meds."

"How much coke was in him?"

"I don’t know. I haven’t seen the report yet." Miles sat opposite me and presented a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on wheat bread on my good china.

"Thanks," I said and set it aside. "What else?"

He had a mouthful of beef now, which he chewed slower than ever. Stalling – an overdone tactic.

"I’m cranky tonight, Miles. Out with it already."

"The evidence team picked up traces of cocaine from a counter in the back of the shop."

"A counter? Where?" I tried to control my voice.

"In the bathroom. Who did Ernie have working for him recently?"

"No one."

Miles looked up confused.

"It’s a shoe shine parlor, Miles, not a fast food restaurant. You come in, get your damn shoes shined and pay your tab. He had my cousin Andy helping him for a while just to give him something to do, but that only lasted a summer."

"When was this?"

"Couple years ago."

His silence told me there was more. There had to be, after all. My father’s business randomly burns to the ground and he’s nowhere in sight. I stopped believing in coincidences a long time ago. "Breslin’s issued a warrant for Ernie’s arrest. They found a gun on the premises and it had his fingerprints on it."

"It’s his gun, Miles, registered in his name. Naturally his prints would be on it! How can he do that? Why would Breslin, why would anyone think Ernie burned down his own store? Jesus. He’s been there since 1960." I picked up the plate and took a bite of the sandwich.

"Insurance money?"

"Ridiculous. This whole thing’s ridiculous. He didn’t need the money, and he sure as hell didn’t do drugs if that’s what you’re thinking."

"I’m not thinking it, and even if I were it doesn’t matter what I think. I’m not in charge of this investigation."

"Investigation? Now it’s an investigation? We’re talking about my seventy-five year old father, Miles. Little old Ernie DiTroia who pays his taxes and follows the speed limit and…"

"And went to prison for three years for grand theft auto."

"Go to hell. That was thirty years ago." I hate you, Miles, I thought. I slammed the plate down again and looked at the crumbs on the carpet, then wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my bathrobe. "You’d better go. And don’t give me that wounded look. Not tonight. I have to go talk to Breslin."

He leaned forward and grabbed my hand. I felt my stomach clench even tighter. "Francine, listen to me. If you know where Ernie is, you’ll be helping everyone out by telling me, especially Ernie. We need someone to identify the body found in the shop before we can even think about the fire and who set it and why."

"I have no idea where he is." And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you of all people. "I’m turning in."

But I didn’t exactly go to bed, now, did I? And how could I, after all? Any woman who’s ever had any relationship with her father would understand my need to protect him, to insulate him from the legal retribution being jammed down his throat based on predisposed assumptions such as once a criminal, always a criminal. It was a warm night, and I decided to walk to the incinerated shoe parlor from my house off Boylston Street. I loved walking near Boston Common this time of year. All the leaves on the trees in the perimeter were fire maple red and decorated the urban landscape like Christmas lights. Miles always hated the city. He grew up in St. Johnsbury, Vermont where you don’t need someone’s street address to send them mail.

I picked up bits and pieces of Chinese and Vietnamese conversations as I walked the late night streets of Chinatown, throbbing with the vitality of a landscape in flux. With a population of 5,000 residents, Chinatown had been in the process of constant urban revitalization for the past ten years. I mentally translated as I passed the corner of Hudson and Kneeland Streets. Not fluent by any means, I could understand certain familiar phrases in both languages.

"How do you know? Did he tell you that?" a young Vietnamese woman asked the man walking beside her.

A homeless man named Slick Willie lay in a heap at the bottom of the stairs leading from the street to a tobacco shop. His eyes were a haunting green that followed me as I moved past him. Part of me had learned to disengage from the homeless, because if I hadn’t I would go home crying every night. But another part of me could have stopped and sat with Willie a while, held his hand and listened to one of his stories. I had never been homeless before, but I knew what it was like to feel on the outside of everything, of everyone, cast out and alone. I nodded at Willie and slid into the alley that led to the back of the shoe parlor. The front was blocked off with yellow tape now and guarded by a squad car parked half on the sidewalk. I was lucky tonight. The blaring drums from the band at the bar across the street would mask the sound of my movements and keep the cop out front focused on the hordes of gawking onlookers parading past him on each side.

"Fancy meeting you here."

"Jesus," I said slapping my hand to my chest. "Miles. You startled me."

"That was the point." He gestured for me to move away from the back door.

"This is my store you know, partly anyway. My name’s on the lease along with Ernie’s. So it belongs to both of us."

"Then why are you breaking through the back?"

I tilted my head. "You may have noticed that the front door’s burned down."

"All the more reason for you to get out of here. You know you can’t have any part in this investigation, Fran. Move away from the door."

I knew there was a reason why I put on lipstick before leaving the house, and why I dabbed the perfume Miles got me for Christmas last year behind my ears and on my throat. I probed my mind for an answer before taking even a step forward. Was I ready to resort to something like this, a behavior so low on the acceptability scale that I’d have to break all the mirrors in my house? The answer was easy. Ernie was out there somewhere hiding from the law, hiding from his past and I was the only one qualified to find him, and what’s more, the only one he would want to see right now. I slid close to Miles and put my hand around his thick waist.

"I came here to see you."

"Liar."

"It’s true. I knew after I kicked you out that you’d come here, if for no other reason than to keep me from doing the same thing."

He considered this and at the same time allowed my hand to rub his back. Even in the dark I could see his eyes darting left and right, trying to discern even a kernel of authenticity in my slick moves. It was a ruthless ploy and I was heartless to pull his strings like this. I knew how he felt about me and I was using it to my advantage. Fine, I’m a terrible person. So be it.

I stood on my toes to reach my face up to his and angled my neck toward him, but he wedged his leather-clad arm between our bodies before I could kiss him.

"Stop right there."

"Are you sure?"

"You don’t love me, Francine. I know it, you know it. The door’s unlocked. You have ten minutes."

I looked down at the step we were standing on and felt like a speck of dusk. No, make that a cockroach. I pushed past him into the back room of the shoe parlor and turned on my flashlight.

"Make that five," he said lighting a cigarette.

It rained in South Cove for the next three days. Miles didn’t call me like usual and ask what I wanted from the donut shop round the corner of the precinct, nor did he try to pretend that everything was all right between us. I knew then that, deep inside, I was fundamentally flawed. I had crossed an invisible line, ostracizing the one person who would have swum across the Atlantic for me if only I asked. At least he’d never arrest me for breaking and entering his own house.

Using the spare key he gave me year ago, I made coffee and toast, and started cracking eggs into the only clean bowl I could find – clean because I took it out of the stack of soiled dishes and washed it myself.

Twenty minutes later he stumbled into the kitchen rubbing his face. "This is how you apologize?"

"I guess," I said and scooped the scrambled eggs onto a plate.

He ate, but wouldn’t look at me. "I’m not telling you anything."

"I talked to Breslin; he already filled me in."

His head jerked up like it were spring-loaded.

"What did you expect, Miles? Ernie’s my father. Most people understand why I’d be curious. What’s the harm in bringing me up to speed?"

"He told you about the Fire Chief, and the body?"

"Uh huh," I lied.

Miles glanced up at me every two seconds, suspecting as much. A shadowy smile crept into his lips. "So I guess you know already that the Chief concluded that it was an accident, not arson."

"That’s what Breslin said, yeah."

Again, the smile. "And of course you know already that detectives have pieced together a scenario of the Vietnamese fugitive running into the parlor from the street where he was being chased."

"Of course."

"And that he was found with fifty grand on him that he stole from a Ping-on Alley drug lord named Mickey Nguyen."

I just looked up this time, out of phony affirmatives. I stood up and slid into my coat. "I gotta run."

"Where?"

"I guess I need to go find Ernie."

"Any ideas?"

I considered not telling him, just to pay him back for making me resort to such low behavior lately, then decided to finish my eggs. I pulled two marbles out of my coat pocket and set them on the table.

Miles lifted them up with his fat fingers and rolled them around in his palm. "Where’d you get these?"

"In an old cardboard box in the back room."

"You went back there? Francine, I told you –"

"Please, Miles. Get your head out of the sand. The shoe parlor was my father’s store and where I spent a good part of my childhood, the only good part. I’m the only one who can find him. I think I already did."

With my eyes on the marbles, I could see prisms of light dancing around the colors intricately woven into the glass. As a child, I thought they were miniature crystal balls.

"These were the eyes of a stuffed dog Ernie bought me in Old Orchard Beach. He piled everyone in the van every summer and took us to different places. Maine, New Hampshire, Virginia. Old Orchard had arcades everywhere you look. Games, rides, it was like an amusement park set on the edge of the sea. He threw three beanbag balls and hit the target every time, and Dixie was the jackpot. It was the best thing I’d ever gotten. It was too big for me to carry and my brothers threatened to toss it out the window every time I talked about it."

"Who pulled the eyes out?"

I laughed, and wondered how I could put into words a lifetime of family folklore in a way that he would understand. "I got lost in Old Orchard Beach once, the night Ernie gave me Dixie. I guess I took too long at one of the arcades and when I turned around to catch up to the rest of the family, I was alone. They had cops looking all over for me, and I ran around frantic until my legs gave out and I collapsed in front of the merry-go-round. Then when I closed my eyes, I heard a familiar voice say, ‘There you are,’ and it was Ernie. He said the dog was to be my companion anytime I lost my way.

"When Ernie got arrested and went to prison, I took the eyes out of Dixie and mailed them to him as a reminder of what he gave me. He wrote me back a note and said he’d keep them while he was in there, but if I ever needed something to help me find my way in the meantime, he told me to return to the first church I ever went to." I picked up the marbles again.

"And do what?"

"I don’t know. Whatever normal people do in churches. Kneel down and pray I guess, or just sit there and listen to organ music. I haven’t been to church, I mean other than the neighborhood bake sales and occasional lectures, since I was ten. But Ernie’s a devout Catholic and still goes to mass every Sunday."

"Where?"

"I’m not sure. He might go to Sacred Heart now because it’s on the way from the North End to Chinatown. But if I had to guess, I’d say St. Agnes was the first church he ever went to."

"Which is closer to where he grew up?"

I shook my head. "I never went to that house. I’ll have to check with Ernie’s sister. I’ll call you later." I kissed Miles on the cheek, not to apologize and not to be a tease but to show some degree of normal affection for somebody I cared about. After all, if I can change, anybody can.

But then I’d lied again, hadn’t I? I knew damn well that Ernie grew up in a large three-family house on the south side of Bennet Street and St. Leonard’s was on North Bennet. That had to be the one. Jiggling Dixie’s eyes in my pocket, I walked the whole way from Chinatown. I never walked anywhere anymore. Ironic, since as a kid I sometimes walked fifteen miles in one day. That’s what kids did back then. We weren’t old enough to drive, and those who were couldn’t afford a car. There wasn’t even a subway back then. If there was a kid we wanted to play with but he lived in Southie, we’d cluster up and walk from the North End through Haymarket, through Chinatown and the Common and get to the South End later that day, of course stopping along the way at the aquarium to see the sharks, the waterfront to watch the fishing boats bobbing in the harbor and every single ice cream parlor along the way.

The precise angle of sun sheeting its diagonal laser through St. Leonard’s stained glass bled a rainbow of color on the dreary rainsoaked sidewalk. I missed the North End.

Ernie looked so small sitting there in that lonely pew. I knew what he was feeling and I knew why, and even though I didn’t blame him for anything, nothing I could say would change how he felt about himself and about his own life now. They were just words, and therefore not worth much when it came to relationships. Maybe not anything. I plopped down next to him and touched him on the leg.

"Angela. What are you doing here?"

"Pop, call me Francine, will you? No one’s called me Angela since the second grade."

He turned and faced me, showing a lifetime of grooves in his skin and a gray, desolate cast to his eyes. "You’ll always be Angela to me. That’s the prettiest name I could have given you."

"But this way I’m named after someone I loved."

"Ahhh," he said and waved his hand in the air. "She was a lunatic, your grandmother. She used to mumble bad words in Italian and pluck the hairs off live chickens in the pantry. She never had a good word to say about anybody."

I smiled. Ernie saw this.

"Okay, except you," he said tilting his head. "I suppose you and your big partner are gonna arrest me. Huh?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"It was an accident. It wasn’t your fault."

I was surprised at how loud he was talking, even how he looked. Worn pants, shirt untucked, hair matted and sticking up. Had he been living here? Sleeping here? It occurred to me then that he had divorced himself from that old life already, though separations like this were inconceivable to me. I could tell by his blank, indifferent stare that he had no intention of applying for insurance money to rebuild the shoe parlor or ever even going back there.

I gazed up at the ceiling murals inside St. Leonard’s Cathedral, one of the oldest churches in the North End, and remembered as a child being frightened by the Sistine-Chapel replica of the extended finger reaching out to God.

"You gonna tell me why you stole that car now?" I asked.

He looked at me and shrugged, as if he hadn’t been waiting thirty years to tell me.

"No more lies and no more excuses. I’m a big girl. I can take it."

"Did you read the Globe this morning?" he asked.

"Yeah, why?"

"Did you read the article about that huge Atlantic Transportation Center under review by the City Council?"

"They’re never gonna build that thing. They’ve been talking about it since I was in high school."

"Even before that. The reason why those plans will never be approved is because I stole that car."

"What?" I said, not sure if I’d heard him correctly.

Ernie had his hand on his chest, and played with the flannel fabric on his favorite red plaid shirt. Fidgeting again. "I stole that car so I would have a chance to bury a piece of evidence that would have sent a good man to jail, someone I cared about, and would have exposed the crimes of a lot of the men you saw every week at the shoe parlor."

"What kind of crimes?"

"Hard to say. White collared, if anything, and even that was on the fence. The zoning guy was being paid off to approve a set of preliminary plans that ended up being this transportation center. He opposed them because in order to build it, the city would have had to get rid of the oldest park in downtown Boston. It wasn’t just historical either. It was sentimental, a monument decorating every man who served in the war. When we all came back from Europe after the war was over, we used to meet there after work and smoke cigarettes and talk about our jobs and our families and share war stories. It was a melting pot. There were other Navy men like me and Oscar, and from every branch of the military. Anyway, a lot of old timers like me opposed the plans, and so did the zoning guy. Someone on the city council tried to pay him off, but he wouldn’t take the bribe. So it went bad after that. They got a photograph of him with some fifteen year old girl, I don’t know how they did it but I don’t believe for one second he ever did that or that he ever even knew that girl. I heard from your Uncle Oscar that the photograph was gonna be dropped off and left on the zoning guy’s front seat. So I walked to where I knew he parked while he was at work in City Hall, and I saw the envelope. So I picked the lock and was about to just take the envelope with me, but a cop was driving up and I knew he saw me break into the car, so I hot wired the engine and took off. He chased me up and down the North End for a while, and by the time I got to Boylston Street, I had time to stop and ditch the envelope in a trash can. So I went to jail for three years for grand theft auto and resisting arrest. But I probably saved a man’s life, his credibility, not to mention his marriage and the peace of mind that every righteous man deserves."

"But you never told anyone? Why didn’t you explain to the police what happened and who you were trying to protect?"

He just looked at me like I was a complete idiot. "That would have defeated the purpose of my crime. My explanation would bring publicity to something I was trying to keep quiet. So sometimes you just gotta take it on the chin. You understand." He paused and shook his head sadly. "But it doesn’t matter anyway. It all came out a year later. I kept all the newspaper articles. They’re in a box in the back room of the store. I’m not going back there, but you still have a key."

"What will you do? I mean you’ve been getting up every morning for forty years to go to that store. Won’t it feel strange?"

"You can do things for too long. You don’t realize it because it becomes a habit, something you get used to, maybe someone. I’m not saying I’m glad about the fire. It was my own damn fault for bringing that twenty-year-old hotplate to the store for my tea every morning. I should have just walked to the Dunkin Donuts on the corner. I would have liked to sell the place to someone, maybe give it to you someday. But being a grown up means being able to recognize the end of things. It was a sign. It’s time."

Ernie started coming over for dinner every night, said the long walk from Bennett Street was good for his arthritis. A week later, I went to the store and dug up the old newspaper articles and brought them with me one morning to Dunkin Donuts where Miles and I met.

"The usual?" Miles asked and then walked away. I was getting too predictable.

And while he was standing at the counter with his broad back facing me, I nearly died as I looked at an old photograph and read about the scandal.

"Miles?" I said and waited for him to turn around. It was the same face only one generation earlier. Same features, same dimpled chin, wild hair, scattered look in the eyes. Bruce Rickman – former Boston City Zoning Supervisor – Miles’ father. So Ernie, without realizing it, had gone to jail for Miles, or me depending on how you look at it.

"How you feeling today" Miles asked setting the styrofoam cup and donut on the table. "You take something for that cold?"

"No, I’m gonna be fine." We both are, I thought.