I saw my stepsister and her daughter the other day. We were all at my mother's house, as they had just been swimming at the pool, and now we were getting ready to eat lunch together. I do not like to swim, so I hadn't gone to the pool. My stepsister saw that I was smoking GPCs out on the porch. "You smoke that stuff?" she said. "Those cigarettes are the hot dogs of the tobacco leaf. They just sweep the factory floor after making the good cigarettes and turn it into those GPCs." Later her daughter--she's 4 years old now--she picked up my cigarettes and looked at the package. I took them away and said, "Those are bad." "I was just looking at them," she said. I felt like a jerk for taking them from her hands and said, "Sorry. You can look at them if you want," but she didn't. I said, "Your mother used to smoke, and she had a real hard time quitting." "Was that when my daddy was around?" she said, and I started to say something and stopped, my words stuck there in the silence of my open mouth. I didn't want to say anything because I don't know what her mother is telling her about her father. He's really quite a mysterious, shadowy figure. He claimed to have been a veteran and was always talking about the action he saw in Reagan's drug war, bombing cocaine fields and taking in General Noriega, although whenever he went to the hospital for his psych problems he never went to the VA hospital, and never got any veteran's pension that my stepsister saw. He showed me his wound one time, which looked like a permanent bruise reaching out in thick black fingers across the side of his abdomen. He was always telling lies, little lies; he was a bullshitter in conversation; some people are just like that. He was also always talking about the grand, sweeping science fiction war epic he had in his head, but could never quite get onto paper. "He must have been in that action in Nicaragua," I told my brother once; "I saw his wound." "Maybe he got it in a bank robbery," my brother said, half-joking. Now he's disappeared completely. I didn't know what my step-niece knew about him, whether she remembered him at all, and so I sat there having begun not even a quarter of a word, and stopped short.