“My father had a healthy disregard for social conventions: he once let me paint the house windows in rainbows with my watercolor set, to my mother's horror, and he'd clap for trees that he thought were doing a good job of exploding into red during the fall.”

“My mother painted with water," he says. "And my father played with fire.”

“When my mother died, my father's early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached.”

“Well, he's handsome and rich and you're living in his house, borrowing his boat. You're his— He's your—" he still couldn't say it. Saying it would make it real and then he'd be the other woman, sort of."Father." B supplied calmly."Father? You mean as in sugar daddy?""No, I mean father, as in father, you know, guy who had sex with my mother resulting in my existence." He was less calm.”

“I do recall hearing a conversation in our home in Strausberg, between my mother and my father, where my mother sounded very angry that my cousin had let the Rödels down by having to be dragged out of Oma’s house, crying for his mother and shouting that he did not want to return to the war in Russia.Like a great many other soldiers throughout that period, he died in Russia on 5 May, 1944. He was just twenty years of age, and is buried somewhere in that country.”

“Damn it, Tod!" He glared in the reaper's general direction. "Do not sneak up on me in my own house--I don't care how dead you are! Show yourself or get out."Harmony and I shared a small smile, but my father didn't notice.The reaper shrugged and grinned at me, then blinked out of the chair and onto the carpet at my father's back, now fully corporeal. "Fine," he said, inches from my dad's ear, and my father nearly jumped out of his shirt. "Your house, your rules."My dad spun around, his flush deepening until I thought his face would explode. "I changed my mind. Get out!”