“Stop lying, Dad,” I said, and my voice dropped into a register I did not know I had.

“I’m sitting right next to Grandma Eleanor.

I picked her up from the nursing facility where you abandoned her three hours ago.”

The silence on the line was total.

“Ivan,” he stammered, after a moment.

“You don’t understand the situation —” And that was the phrase that ended it for me, the last small hope I had carried a hundred and ninety miles that there might be some explanation. You don’t understand the situation. Not I’m sorry. Not let me explain what I did. But an appeal to my ignorance, an assumption that if I only understood the pressures he was under, the cash-flow problems, the complexities, I would see that abandoning his mother and forging her name was reasonable, was even necessary, was a thing a person could be brought to understand.

He was not ashamed.