By this time Tim Pantaleoni's mother had arrived from the mainland, posting yellow flyers on every telephone pole and fence post I passed on the long, discouraging walk home. In large bold letters the flyers proclaimed: MISSING MAN. Beneath the letters was a xeroxed picture of a thin-faced, determined-looking young man in his early thirties. Something about the image immediately haunted me. It brought to mind something I couldn't identify—until all at once it hit me: The missing man looked like my father. My father as I never actually saw him in the flesh, my father as I've seen him only in faded black and white pictures my mother keeps in a stack of thick yellowed envelopes in a desk in her apartment in Manhattan, Kansas. One image in particular came to mind: PFC Steve Heller, Sr., in his mustering-out uniform, just back from the Second World War, khaki tie tucked neatly into his uniform shirt. He leans against the driver's side door of a 1938 Mercury convertible with white sidewalls, his left arm draped over the base of the open window, his right fist braced on his hip just below his regulation khaki belt. His body language is jaunty, cocky. Everything life has to offer is within his reach, and he will have everything he can grasp. Behind him stretches the dusty, unpaved path of Fairmont Street climbing Mulligan's Bluff in Kansas City, Missouri. This is the street Father grew up on, but the truth is he would never travel this path again. A minute after Mother took this picture, they climbed back into the Mercury, and Father turned off Fairmont onto a side street and left Kansas City for good, choosing to seek their future by a new path. The paths Father chose weren't really paths, but gambles. Whenever the trail became too familiar, he would leave it. In the almost half century that followed the photograph, Father would hold at least fifty different blue collar jobs, ranging from janitor to electrician. Twice, he would go into business for himself. He would win and lose a small fortune. He would attain, then lose his life's dream of owning his own garage and autobody shop. He would ignore advice that might have served him well, preferring always to go his own way. And he would always keep going, no matter what, through an amazing array of injuries and illnesses: a twice-broken back, broken arms and legs, ulcers, diabetes, heart disease, a series of devastating strokes, and, near the end, the beginnings of Parkinson's Syndrome. Through all these things, he always worked to provide for my mother Elizabeth and me. Though his decisions were often quirky or hard-headed, they were never selfish. Mother and I always came first.
        On Kamehameha Day, a couple of weeks before Tim Pantaleoni disappeared, Mother had called from Kansas with the news that Dad had died in his room in the health care wing of Meadow Lark Hills Retirement Community. “He was in no pain,” Mother explained. “His body just gave out.”
        No pain. That sounded like a path Father would have never chosen willingly. The one supposedly pain-free path he always claimed he wanted to take before he died would have brought him right here, to Hawai`i, which he had seen only through my eyes. He and Mother intended to fly out and visit us in Maunawili at the end of the summer, just in time for their 50th wedding anniversary. Now he would make the trip one day ahead of Mother, in a plastic bag sealed inside a vinyl box the size of a small purse.

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