"Your mom's from Canada."
Carter didn't say anything. He was turning the crank. Two weeks forward. A week. He was looking for something and he didn't know what until he found it, on the editorial page on March 24, under the heading LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
Sir: I would like the people of the Warren District to know that I served my country in the Second Marine Division from Guadalcanal to Saipan. I came home with a piece of Japan in my leg and I have never once complained. The young man named in your paper on March 15 is not the son of this house. I have no son. I ask my friends and neighbors not to speak his name to me or to my wife. — Walter J. Abbott, Warren.
The microfilm room hummed. Somewhere behind them the librarian's bracelets jingled.
"Man," Danny said, very quietly, the jokes all gone out of him. "That's cold."
Carter turned the crank and the page went blurry and slid away, and he sat there looking at the gray smear on the screen, and he thought about two empty boxes on a poster board. UNKNOWN. UNKNOWN. And his father saying Gone, both of them, before you were born, in that voice.
He had thought his father was lying.
He understood now, sitting in the coldest room in Tucson, that his father had been telling the truth. His parents were gone. They had just gone first, while everybody was still alive.
* * *
He didn't go looking for the cigar box. Afterward he wanted that to be clear, to himself if nobody else. He wasn't snooping. He was sent.
It was a Tuesday, his mother's night off, and the swamp cooler had started making a sound like a cat being sat on, and his father was on the kitchen phone with a lady in Oro Valley whose Betamax had eaten her wedding video. "No ma'am. No ma'am, don't pull on it. Whatever you do, don't pull." He covered the mouthpiece and said to Carter, "Go out to the bench and get me a three-amp fuse for the cooler motor. Bottom drawer, the Dutch Masters box. Says FUSES on it."
The bottom drawer of the workbench was where things went that nobody needed. Cracked knobs, coils of solder, a remote control for a television that had been dead since Carter was in first grade. There were two cigar boxes. One said FUSES in black marker. The other didn't say anything at all. It was underneath, pushed to the back, and it had a strip of electrical tape around it, old tape, gone gummy and brown at the edges.
He took out the one that said FUSES and found the three-amp in it, a little glass tube with a wire inside, and he put it in his pocket. Then he stood there.
Inside, through the screen door, he could hear his father. "Ma'am, I'll come out tomorrow. Just leave it alone. Put a towel over it if you have to. Don't let your husband near it."
Carter picked up the other box.