Free A Fold in the Tent of the Sky by Michael Hale

thing, indivisible.
    â€œShe’s not my Mom.” He stood with his right hand wrapped around two of his father’s fingers. His left shoe tapped at a shallow puddle.
    â€œNo. You’re right; she isn’t. Try that one, the one with the dog. Go on. Say ‘Hello.’”
    This was a game his father played when he’d had too much to drink. He would take Peter out somewhere—someplace crowded, busy, a shopping center or a park downtown—ithad been Cleveland, he later discovered—and tell him to go find his mother. To just start looking around the place, as if he’d misplaced a toy, or somehow got separated from her for a minute and she was there beyond the barrier of legs and coats and chattering feet and pyramids of canned peas—as eager to find him as he was her.
    â€œGo on. Go find your mother.”
    In time he learned how to approach these women and linger with them just long enough to satisfy his father. To know just what to say. He found he could disarm the confusion of these strangers and wipe away the suspicion on their faces by pretending to be less needy than he really was; by making them smile—even laugh sometimes.
    Eventually he found the knack of delving into their lives, even if he came up with just a torn fragment, a snatched purse of truncated images. The touch of a shopping bag; the fleeting grasp of a scarf; the smell of perfume—sometimes his face brushing against a coat would be enough. So if the day ever came when he did find his mother and she saw him for what he was (there would be tears of recognition; her eyes would dwell on the details of his face; she would crush him against her scented waist and he would never have to hold his breath again), he would have scraps of something to offer in return. This is a part of you, I own it too; it’s mine. It always has been.
    This is how you make people laugh, one of his acting coaches told him later. You give them something they already have, a way of looking at things they thought only ever belonged to them.
    When he was five or six he started having the dream where his father throws him from a bus or a taxi cab: a recurring version of the game—distorted, frantic. In the dream there wasalways the feeling that this was his last chance—if he didn’t find his mother, his father would leave him too, dissolve like a lump of sugar. The familiar sweet scent of him (it wasn’t till much later that he made the connection) would evaporate or turn into car exhaust. In the dream, as the cab pulled away, the slamming door was like a falling blade. But his mother was always waiting for him on the sidewalk, so that his father’s departure was academic; the panicked cab ride a transitional government, the slamming door a coup d’état.
    And his father did end up abandoning him—in a way—not long after the dreams took over a night or two out of every month. He left him with nothing more substantial than his first name: “Peter.”
    When he came home from school that last day three huge men kept him from going up to the apartment—an apartment over a storefront in Marquette, Michigan. A policeman was standing in the street with the landlord, along with another man with a loud voice and a lot of keys hanging from his belt. Then an old woman (looking back on it now she couldn’t have been more than fifty) took him in a car to an office building and sat him down with a Coke from a machine in the hallway; then she told him his father had “passed on.” In his child’s mind he saw his father floating away, purposefully drifting off, his feet dangling inches from the floor—carried away by the Upper Michigan wind.
    They never did find Peter’s birth certificate; his father had been living on a disability pension under the name of “Andrews.” Peter was registered at his school as “Peter Andrews” but he later discovered he had been