what seemed to baffle Xandra most was not his extreme drunkenness (he’d been virtually unconscious at the wheel) but the location of the accident—outside Vegas, heading west, into the desert. “He would have told me, he would have told me,” she was saying sorrowfully in response to some question or other of Courtney’s, only why, I thought bleakly, sitting on the floor with my hands over my eyes, did she think it was in my father’s nature to tell the truth about anything?
