My name is Mark Rinker.

When I was seven years old, my father pulled out his stolen cassette recorder and taped my

grandmother, singing an old folk ballad she once used as a lullaby with him.

After he hung himself, the tape came into my possession.

And five hours ago, at about nine and fifteen, I pulled it out of the basement for the first

time in twenty years and listened to it.

The sounds scratching and stuttering through the air as I sat in the backyard.

The recorder propped up on two cinder blocks.

My grandmother, who had never once been outside the country or even west of Ohio, sang in

her croaky voice about a Scottish soldier gone far away until the weary tape jammed.

I was crying.

I took the tape out and I threw it into the trash can by the back step.

It was nine fifty-eight and Kirk would arrive in two minutes.

As many bad things as there were about him, he was never late.

I sat on the sofa in the living room and waited.

I heard the porch door open at ten o' one and he came in without knocking, having parked

his awful station wagon a mile away as we'd agreed.

He groused about almost getting killed by a passing car on Holthorse Road and griped

about me living out in the middle of nowhere.

He collapsed in a chair, sweating and drinking from a bottle of sprite.

He'd gotten a fractured skull and a hockey fight back when he played for the wheeling nailers.

And long after they'd shaved his head to open him up, he'd kept the look because he

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