I had one question to ask her before I left.

“There’s nothing I can tell you about your father,” she said.

“Does that mean you don’t know anything? Or that you choose not to tell me anything?”

She just smiled through the smoke of her cigarette. I told her I thought I had a right to know.

“No, sweetie,” she said, “you don’t have a right to know.”

“Why won’t you help me?”

“Because I can’t help you at all. None of us come from anywhere, Gus. And when we die we go straight back there. There’s nothing for it but to drink up.” She raised her glass. “To eternity. Are you joining me?”

“No,” I said. My drinking years were still ahead of me.

“Come over here,” she said. “Rest your head on my lap.”

I did, and sighed as she stroked my hair.

“Forget about what went before,” she said. “It’s gone. It’ll be back soon enough anyway, in crushingly obvious ways you completely weren’t expecting.”

“How nice,” I said. “Maybe I should kill myself now and get it over with.”

“I wouldn’t. This is the best part, Gus. The beginning. This is where you set out in the world as if you’re going to do something different. As if something different could be done. It’s all a joke, you know. If I could give you one gift, my darling, it would be the ability to see the joke. It might save you. But I’m afraid you’ll have to find another way to be saved.”

She was getting drunk. But you may recall that that never prevented her from making a certain kind of sense.