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I felt the sense of total accomplishment you can only feel at sixteen, before you understand consequence. I put on an item he kept for a joke, a saccharine barbershop quartet called the Hi-Lo’s doing “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” and said “I want this.” Pop laughed hard enough not to kill himself that day. The air hung over the bonsai in shafts of sun, dead still, as if the room were being preserved for what I had to imagine as an indifferent posterity. He told me he was going to kill himself and that I should take the things I wanted from his house. Whiskey had taken its own toll, and an ill-advised romance had sucked up his severance from the only good job he’d ever had. One afternoon I found Pop putting his affairs in order. At 16, I would drive over after school to smoke cigarettes and listen to Stan Getz.
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