A Patent Lie by Paul Goldstein

when they caught his father's, turned defiant. As if on its own, his hand shot up and in a single swift motion seized the gun. His other hand, clenched into a fist, swung forward, striking his father high on the jaw. Seeley felt every whisker of the man's stubble. As much from surprise as from the force of the blow, his father dropped in an instant, crashing onto the floor, blood pouring from his nose. Seeley stood above the sprawling figure, his heart throbbing, but holding the gun steady with both hands. He aimed at his father's heaving chest. He heard himself shouting, “What kind of bully threatens his family with a gun? What kind of coward does that?”
    His mother came away from the wall. “Don't speak to your father like that! You put that gun away and apologize this instant!”
    Squeeze the trigger.
Seeley remembered the seasoned cop instructing the rookie on some long-ago television show.
Squeeze, don't pull
. Seeley tasted metal at the back of his mouth. Carefully, he pointed the barrel toward where he imagined his father's heart would be, inches from the center of the man's chest. He squeezed. Nothing happened; the trigger, locked by the safety catch, failed to move.
    His father lay motionless, the blood now bubbling from his nostrils onto the linoleum. Seeley's mother came away from the wall and grabbed for the gun, but Seeley caught her by the wrist, wrenching her arm upward. An emotion flashed behind her pale eyes that Seeley had seen before, but this time he didn't know whether it was hatred or fear, or both. Her look stopped him as he realized what he had almost done. He had never struck his father before nor stopped his mother from striking him. Now everything had changed in an instant. He felt an overwhelming sense of relief, but at the same time he understood that when he seized the gun, when he aimed it at his father, when he squeezed the trigger, he had crossed a line from which retreat was impossible. He could no longer live in his parents' house.
    Seeley took a room that night at the downtown Y and for the remaining years of high school he shuttled between the Y and couches in his teammates' homes. He went to a local college, Canisius, on an athletic scholarship and took a one-room apartment off Chippewa Street, downtown, supporting himself from tutoring and part-time jobs. He did much the same when he left Buffalo to go to Harvard for law school.
    Thirty-two years later, adjusting the heater vent in the rental car, Seeley could still smell the fumes of his father's alcohol. He could see the four of them frozen there in that afflicted house: him holding his mother's arm aloft, as if he were a referee and she a victorious prizefighter, her mouth locked in a wordless
O
; his father, sprawled dumbstruck and bleeding on the linoleum floor; and Lenny hiding in the bedroom behind the closed door. It was at that moment, Seeley now remembered, that a burst of canned laughter exploded from the television.

FIVE
----
    There is a quality to the early-morning light in San Francisco that exists in no other American city. The sun shines silver, burnishing the stone-and-brick buildings like a jeweler's cloth. Only in the medieval quarters of old European cities had Seeley seen such light. Stepping out from the lobby of the Huntington Hotel, he smelled the scent of freshly mown grass from the pocket park across California Street at the top of Nob Hill. A large bird crowed, and the breeze coming off the bay mixed the smells of roasting coffee and just-baked sourdough.
    Seeley hadn't taken a break from work for years; he had no talents as a tourist and idleness made him irritable. Setting out for the half-mile walk to the Pearsall apartment on Vallejo Street on a morning like this was all the vacation he needed. The day bristled with challenge, starting with Alan Steinhardt. Seeley had no reason to believe that St. Gall's corporate ethics were above industrial espionage, but he was also certain that neither Leonard nor