Free The Good Atheist by Michael Manto

from me and read them where she was, standing over me next to the chair. It didn’t take her long to finish.
    “Are you sure? Marcus is a common name.”
    “It’s safe to infer,” I said. “Marcus was my father’s name, and no one else is going to refer to my grandfather as Dad. And he asks about me, by name, as well as referring to me as ‘my son’. It’s a pretty safe bet.”
    “Yes, but he’s dead, hon. There must be another explanation. Maybe ‘Dad’ is just an affectionate term. When I was a little girl, my mom had a friend named Clarissa. Mom had known her forever, and we called her Aunt Clarissa. She wasn’t a real aunt – it was an honorary title. This might be something like that.”
    “Someone who just happens to be named Marcus? Who has a son named Jack? It’s too much of a coincidence. And the term ‘Dad’ is used too directly and too often. If my grandfather was an honorary ‘Dad’ to this person, than I think the term was being stretched an awful lot. And the writer also asks about me, remember, as his son.”
    She nodded, getting the point. “But he died in a car accident when you were young.”
    “So my mother says. But I only have her word on it, and we both know how reliable that is.”
    “It was in the news. We’ve both seen the news stories.”
    “Yeah, and we both know the news is never wrong, right?”
    “But your mother wouldn’t lie about a thing like this.”
    I just looked at her. I knew full well my mother’s capacity for lies and deceit. “It should be easy enough to check,” I said. “But it will have to wait until we return to the land of the living. We’ve got no internet or phone coverage out here in the boonies. But I think I know what I’m going to find.”
    She sat on an arm of the chair, leaned in, and put her arms around me. I rested my head against her, and we remained like that for a long time, not saying anything.
    Selene finally broke the silence. “What are you going to do?”
    “I don’t know just yet. I still need more time to absorb this. The letters tells me he’s alive, but there is no indication where he is. He may not even know Grandpa is dead. He wasn’t at the funeral. He could be worried, wondering why the letters from Grandpa have stopped. I’m going to look around for more letters, pictures, documents, emails, anything that might tell me where he is and what happened to him.”
    “Did you look in the desk?”
    “What?”
    “The desk, silly. In the old days when people wrote letters on paper, they would often keep them in a desk drawer. I remember my old Aunt Lillie doing that.”
    Why hadn’t I thought of that? I spun around in the chair and searched the desk. I found a bundle of letters held together with a rubber band in one of the drawers. A quick look through the stack confirmed that they were from the same man – this Marcus who called my grandfather Dad.
    “Bingo,” I said. I placed them with the other letters.
    Selene looked around the room. “It’s late and we’ve had a long day. Let’s get to back to the motel. I wouldn’t mind getting a decent meal and a hot shower.”
    I checked my watch. It was past dinner. “Why don’t we just stay here?”
    She shook her head. “Uh-uh. I’m not spending the night in this dusty old place. I need to get back to civilization. Check my messages, get a hot shower. And I’m not sure how we can cook in this primitive kitchen. There are no droids to help us clean, and the stove can’t even cook. We’d have to do everything ourselves.”
    I was too wired with excitement to leave. I had to stay. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I’d finished reading all the letters. But I could see the tiredness in her eyes. “Hon, why don’t you go ahead without me? I’ll stay, read the rest of the letters, and look around for anything else that might tell me more about my dad.”
    “We can come back in the morning,” Selene suggested.
    I shook my head. “No way. Don’t you