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'If your mother was dead, and cared, she'd be turning in her grave.'
He lifted his glass to drink but a smile cracked through his beard and he started to laugh. I couldn't help but join in. This was the way I'd played the scene in my head. My father was predictable. I knew he'd jump at the chance to fly out and see me. I knew he'd want to head straight from the airport to a bar. And I knew he'd order two straight Jack Daniels and insult my mother. I liked his reliability, something I hadn't inherited from him.
'So, who's the unlucky girl?'
'Her name's Sarah. I met her at the newspaper a few months ago.'
'And you're marrying her already. I hope she's not like your mother?'
'Well she's dying to meet you, so I guess not.'
I began to hear in my head how I overcompensated for my assimilated accent. I rolled my r's and coughed my g's. I began using words I'd barely used back home. I felt like I'd abandoned my heritage. It was good to talk to him. I hadn't forgotten why I'd left, but he reminded me why I still missed it.
We talked a lot about how things had changed since I'd left. Who'd died, who'd married, who'd moved. He listed people that were asking for me and I didn't know half of them.
I could see that we were at the junction of the night, we could both leave now and sleep it off or we could stagger through the uncomfortable pleasantries and be father and son.
'Isn't it about time we got home?'
'Well for tonight home is a lot facing room with two single beds.'
'What! She already thrown you out?'
My dad was past the point of remembering why I'd met him almost a thousand miles from where I lived. We'd already taken the road well travelled and beset on both sides by drunk driver crashes.

It was a universal scene, understood back home as well as here, father and son swaggering drunk from a bar sharing sober secrets of affection. We eventually found our room and the sound of the American dream somewhere out on the highway put us to sleep.

The morning found us mercifully. The sun was less forgiving however and as soon as I stepped out of the door my head exploded and my eyes felt like tiny suns burning in their sockets. I walked to the other side of the lot with my head down, my eyes squinting at the concrete.
My father was sitting at one end of the diner with a pot of coffee and a plate of French toast.
'Looking good, champ.'
'Dad, please.'
I sat beside him.
'What can I get you?'
'A coffee and some dry toast.'
'That your idea of a hangover cure?'
I put my head on the cool glass counter and didn't answer him. I could feel a migraine coming on in waves and the air conditioning was little relief.
He flirted with the young waitress who brought my breakfast. She looked younger than me but not by much. Her little plastic nametag read, "Hello, my name is PENELOPE." It was the name of a girl whose parents entered her in baby beauty pageants. Whose best friend would be prom queen. She smiled each time she filled our coffee and only charged us for one pot. We both left her a tip.

I went back to my room and had a shower. I hadn't shaved since I'd been on the trip and in the mirror I saw my fathers jaw, my fathers eyes, younger and less worn but definitely his. I think there had always been some suspicion on his part as to when my mother started her affairs but there was no question now about whether we were blood.

We left our rooms as we'd found them and checked out. The air in my rental car had baked in the heat so we opened all the windows. As I pulled the car out of the lot we saw Penelope sitting on the curb outside the diner smoking a cigarette. I slowed down and we waved. She waved back but looked older with the cigarette stuck between her pale lips. It didn't take long for us to get out of the small town and onto the open road.

We were coasting through quiet farmland. We'd occasionally pass a pick up truck or an 18-wheeler but other than that we were alone. My father sat with his shirt open and his elbow out the window. We hadn't properly spoken since last night and before that it had been months. The road we were on was lined on one side with wooden telephone poles and each time one broke the sun it was like a photocopier in the sky. It wasn't helping my migraine.
'Headache?'
'Yeah. You wouldn't mind driving would you?'
'As long as I can drive on the left hand side of the road?'
'If you're at the wheel you can jump the Snake River Canyon for all I care.'
I could see that I'd struck a chord with him. When I was 7 he'd bought me an Evel Knievil BMX for my Christmas. That was the first year he found out about the affairs. We pulled into the next gas station and he took the wheel and I lay down across the back seat.
'So tell me again why we're all the way out here?'
'It's for a writing project I'm working on.'
'For the newspaper?'
'No, it's going to be a book. If I finish it.'
'What's it about?'
I didn't really know what to tell him. Not that I didn't know what I should tell him. That for the last 6 months I'd been having crippling migraines. That for the last 4 months I'd known it was an inoperable brain tumour causing them. That I was marrying a girl I met 3 months ago because I didn't want to die without knowing love. That the reason I met him 4 state lines from my home was because I'd been visiting every miracle worker, every native American witch doctor, every psychic healer and writing about the whole thing in hope of a posthumous Pulitzer. That I was scared of disappearing from the Earth without a trace.
'It's about growing up.'
'So am I in it? Is your mother?'
He spat out of the window after the mention of her and a small spray was blown back into the car onto the side of my face. It didn't matter, it was my father. I started life as worse than his spit. We were deep into the Great Plains and I sat up to admire the nothingness, that all at once scared me and made me feel light. And the car rolled towards the end of the earth with my father in the front seat and me in the back just like when he drove me home to my mothers, after my weekends visiting him.