Truth in Advertising Page 0,79

bullshit.” Eddie, turning from the window.

“Let him finish.” Kevin.

Tom Hanley sips from a glass of water and continues.

It doesn’t matter who, as he’s long dead. He was married at the time. It was not something that was ever going to be. But she did love him. Your mother was a good woman and a good Catholic and the guilt and shame of it was very hard for her. She told me. She told me I had ruined her life. She said that I had taken her for granted and that the children are afraid of me. She said things I will never forget and I sat there and took them because they were true. She asked me to leave and to leave you all alone. There are things that you do that you cannot change no matter how hard you try. The rest of my life is of little consequence to you now. I met people, they saw me as a good man. I liked that. But know this. There are things I did that were good. There are memories I have, as clear to me now as if they happened this morning. I can picture each of you as small children. I can feel you, in the middle of the night, holding you as you cried, feeding you a bottle, sitting in that chair in the den rocking you back to sleep. Hundreds of times over the years. And what do they count for? To you nothing. To me so much more than you can know. I do not ask that you forgive me. I wouldn’t if I was in your place. But I would ask that you try to understand that a person can make terrible mistakes. No one in this room is free of sin. You asked me to be more than I was capable of. I ask only one thing and it is of all of you. Or any one of you. I would like my ashes spread at sea, in the Pacific, 12 nautical miles from Pearl Harbor, latitude 21 degrees, 23 minutes north longitude -158 degrees, 57 minutes west. That’s where I was the day the war ended. I would say I’m sorry but I don’t think it would mean much. Your father, Edward Dolan.

Rosemary, the stenographer, has stopped typing but she continues staring at the machine.

Tom Hanley stands. “I’ll leave you alone.” He and Rosemary leave.

I have an odd capacity to escape reality. It makes life much more pleasant. Now, in this moment, I realize I have no intention of ever spreading my father’s ashes off the coast of Hawaii or the coast of Coney Island, for that matter. A Buddhist might say that I wasn’t living in the moment. I would reply to my saffron-robe-wearing meditator that with rare exceptions there are few moments I want to live in. I like escape. I like my made-up world.

No one says anything for a long time. Until Kevin says, “I was hoping for cash.”

• • •

How do you see the world? Is there music underscoring scenes of your life? Do you slow things down for intensity and drama? Speed them up for comedy? Do you rewrite dialogue, if, say, you’ve had a fight with your boss or your wife or some jackass who cut the line at Dunkin’ Donuts? In these rewrites are you wittier, more bold? I do and I am. It makes life more interesting for me, gives me a wonderful sense of false empowerment.

And yet I know I miss the far more interesting narratives, the narratives I will never know, of strangers. Because you can’t possibly know what’s going through someone’s mind when you pass them on the street, see them standing at a traffic light, looking around in front of an office building in downtown Boston, looking left, looking right, wondering where to go. I wonder what the four of us look like as we walk out of the building. Do we look like lost tourists? What do passersby see? Does anyone notice Maura’s fast blinking or Eddie’s slightly shaking right hand as he smokes a cigarette or Kevin’s near-constant text messaging to God-only-knows who. Does anyone notice my heart palpitations and sweating palms in the twenty-degree weather, holding a cardboard-beige box with several pounds of human ash, searching out a cab to Logan for the next shuttle to LaGuardia?

In a near-perfect example of Dolan family dynamics, we all walked out of the conference room without the box containing my