At another point in the novel Lucky recalls what happened to his first car, the one he had built with his own hands. Its fate is the same as the automobile my father built, and its executioner is Curly's grandfather. The invention and the memory have the same villain.
        Somewhere in the pursuit of the answers to those what if questions about my father and me came the idea of how a man like my father—not my actual father, but a man whose life resembles his, a man I could see clearly in my mind's eye—would design his own redemption: He would rebuild his life inside a schoolhouse filled with honeybees. What outcome that action would lead to was my job to discover.
        After many drafts I managed to find my way to that end—but there is another kind of discovery I might have made along the way that continues to elude me.
        The crosscurrents of memory and imagination ebb and flow and eddy. Sometimes they sweep us toward revelation. And sometimes they do not. There had to be more to my grandfather Heller than what my father told me, as any reasonable person would concede. He had to be more than a villain. Nevertheless, my father never once said anything positive about his own father in my presence. Neither has my mother, nor any other Heller. Grandma Rose, a good Catholic, surely had something good to say about the man she lived with for decades, but I never heard such words escape her lips before she died at the age of 98. Uncle Oodie and Aunt Noanie are also dead now, and I have lost touch with all but one of my nine double cousins. Louis Aloysius Heller was surely a good man in some ways. And yet I have never discovered his goodness.
        The most troubling part of the vision I've received from my father is this: I'm glad I don't remember my grandfather.
        What is the relationship between memory and imagination?
        Are the boys in the picture my father and my uncle?
        How unbridled is the power of story? How intimidating?
        Should I have tried harder to discover another story of my grandfather, different from the one I've always carried in my head and rendered on the page?
        Why have I chosen not to do this? To make a better story? Or just a clearer, easier one?
        The answers to these questions remain elusive, and only a few things are clear to me. The stories we construct do not merely come from life. Over time, they become our lives. The writer, swimming in the crosscurrents, testifying about the life he knows and the life he doesn't, finds himself with both an obligation and a limitation:
        Tell the truth and nothing but the truth.
        The whole truth is unknowable.

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