Sorry if I skipped the start from 73. Well, enjoy. And this story is not mine.

"Is this where the sculpture is?" Annie asked her father. "In the water," he says. "Ok.” Annie said. "But please know this about yourself. You are an especially harsh critic."

Her father tries to smother a smile.

"Why?" She asked him.

He scratches his chin. Anger is a wasted emotion, I've always thought. My parents got angry at unfair politics in New York or Port-au-Prince, but they never got angry at my grades—at all the B's I got in everything but art classes-or at my not eating vegetables or occasionally vomiting my daily spoonful of cod-liver oil. Ordinary anger, I thought, was a weakness. But now I am angry. I want to hit my father, beat the craziness out of his head.

"Annie," he says. "When I first saw your statue, I wanted to be buried with it, to take it with me into the other world." "Like the ancient Egyptians," Annie said.

He smiles, grateful, Annie think, that she still recall his passions.

"Annie," he asks, "do you remember when I read to you from "The Book of the Dead?" "Are you dying?" Annie said to her father. "Because I can only forgive you for this if you are. You can't take this back."

He is silent for a moment too long.

She think she hear crickets, though Annie cannot imagine where they might be. There is the highway, the cars racing by, the half moon, the lake dug up from the depths of the ground, the allée of royal palms beyond. And there is Annie and her father.

"You remember the judgment of the dead," Her father says, "when the heart of a person is put on a scale. If it is heavy, then this person cannot enter the other world."

It is a testament to my upbringing that Annie is not yelling at him.

"I don't deserve a statue," he says, even while looking like one: the Madonna of Humility, for example, contemplating her losses in the dust. "Annie, your father was the hunter," he says. "He was not the prey" "What are you saying?" Annie asked.

"Annie, your father was the hunter," he says. "He was not the prey." "What are you saying?" Annie asked. "We have a proverb," he says. One day for the hunter, one day for the prey. Your father was the hunter. He was not the prey."

Each word is hard won as it leaves her father's mouth, balanced like those hearts on the Egyptian scale.

"Annie, when I saw your mother the first time, I was not just out of prison. I was a guard in the prison. One of the prisoners I was questioning had scratched me with a piece of tin. I went out to the street in a rage, blood all over my face. I was about to go back and do something bad, very bad. But instead comes your mother. I smash into her, and she asks me what I am doing there. I told her I was just let go from prison and she held my face and cried in my hair." "And the nightmares, what are they?" "Of what I, your father, did to others." "Does Manman know?" "I told her, Annie, before we married." I am the one who drives back to the hotel. In the car, he says, "Annie, I am still your father, still your mother's husband. I would not do these things now."

When we get back to the hotel room, I leave a message for Officer Bo, and another for Manager Salinas, telling them that I have found my father. He has slipped into the it seems that he is never coming out, I call my mother at home in Brooklyn.

"How do you love him?" Annie whispers into the phone.

Annie’s mother is tapping her fingers against the mouthpiece.

"I don't know, Annie," she whispers back, as though there is a chance that she might also be overheard by him. "I feel only that you and me, we saved him. When I met him, it made him stop hurting the people. This is how I see it. He was a seed thrown into a rock, and you and me, Annie, we helped push a flower out of the rock."