The Capo's Second Funeral

They buried my stepfather last spring and made my stepbrother speak at the graveside. Mikha left Chicago eight years ago without telling me why, and he came back as a capo who owns a grave he knows is empty. My own father is in that grave. He's alive, in a clinic in Indiana, kept breathing by a rival family as insurance against a debt he didn't owe — except he did. He's been running the rival's payments for years, and Mikha knew, and Mikha never told me. The family wants the debt retired. The only asset left to retire it is my father's building on the southwest side, and the only signature that counts is mine. I will not sign. I will not see him. I will not speak to Mikha in the car. Three hundred miles to the clinic and back, two nights in the same hotel, and one meeting in a barn that changes everything I thought my father was. I sell the building. I close the debt. I leave the city. He follows. That's the whole of it.