 I'm going to read you a short scene and all you need to know, I basically loosely disguised my psychological journey going through all the steps of forgiveness that took me fifteen years, going from anger, denial, all those things to the point where I was finally able to acknowledge that I needed to acknowledge this man who had taken so much from me when I was twenty-two years old. So all you need to know here is that there's a little boy whose name is Eli Yoder, he's the narrator in this book, and he feels, he's terrified that his father has found out that he has stolen a camera. And the reason that he's stolen a camera when he was nine, which is the whole setting for the story, is that this outsider has taken a photo of his hands. And the Amish have, I grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and the Amish have a common genetic disorder, well it's not exactly, everybody has webbed hands, but they have a pretty small gene pool, and this little boy's got webbed hands, he doesn't want anybody to see them and have them exposed. I found my father the next morning with a rolled up newspaper in hand, waiting for me in his roller chair. Behind him in the window, the sun was rising, the sky streaked with silver and pink. To anyone but dad, it might have been a beautiful morning. He drummed the table with tar-black in thumbs and snapped the pink rubber band around the newspaper. Sit down, Eli. I sat. Dad rolled across the linoleum to sit in the sink as coffee mug, staying with the dark ring of his only addiction. Then rolled back to the table and stared at me with outstretched hands. They were twice the size of mine and completely opposite in their form, full grown and competent. I'd never seen my father lose his temper, although I knew of other fathers who had seen the blistered backs of boys whose skin had endured their lashings of cracked leather. My father, a notoriously impatient man, had never hit me, but I wondered then if I had given him a reason to try. Give me your hand, he said. I felt myself shaking and reluctantly extended my left hand and closed my eyes, wondering how much it would sting when he struck me. Stand up. I stood with my eyes closed. My father placed my hand upon a crumpled up piece of paper. I didn't have to see it to know what it was. And a voice tinged with distress and disgrace, he simply said, look. I squeezed my eyes shut tighter and my father roared, open your eyes, Eli. The boom of his voice rolled through my body and my chin quivered when he spoke again. There's only one set of hands on earth that match these. That's all he needed to say. I snapped my eyes open and saw the crumpled flyers smudge with grease and catch up from the trash cans. I'm sure the horror he read on my face was enough to confirm his suspicions. He sat in his chair, chin propped on a fist. He shifted his heavy gaze from me to the wall and said, do you know when a man breaks the law, the police often use fingerprints to know who the bad man is? Maybe it was a bad man here, I said, and pulled my hands away and threw them behind my back. My mother came in from the garden just then, seeing the two of us at the table. She turned on the bare heels and headed outside again to occupy my sisters. My father saved his voice for auction and rarely used more than one breath, one line of communication at home, grunts really, the codes of which only ma'am could decipher. To hear him utter fool phrases indicated something was very wrong. Did you take these flyers and stuff them in the trash? The flyers are from the boy who lost his camera. I closed my eyes knowing that if I lied again, I might never be forgiven. The pressure built up like the gases in a barn stuffed with hay bales, and I feared that I would explode with the secret inside me. I hadn't realized I'd been holding my breath and sounded like a leaky balloon when I finally spoke. I pointed to the hand prints. Those are mine. I took the flyers. My father leaned back in his chair. He dug his elbow into the table and propped his chin in his hands, scrutinizing the grain in the wood for the right words. It is not your turn to determine the value of things, he said, even though I had never imagined he would teach me. We'd never spoken about me learning how to assess things for market, and I'd never expressed any interest in it, hoping he would never ask. It seemed scary to me to have so many people depending on you to sell their junk. I had hoped he would teach Ruth instead. She liked auctions and could speak English well and fast. No girls in our family had been auctioneers. Ruth had wanted to be the first. Did you ever stop to think about what that boy lost, he asked? I shrugged and picked a scab on my knee while he continued. The camera meant a lot to him. It was his grandad's. I stared at him confused and unable to understand why that mattered. See, the English like their sentimental things, the Amish do too, he said. What's a semi-mental thing, I asked, sounding out the new word. My father laughed, but his smile looked sad. What did you do with Eli? I swallowed feeling as if my throat had already been stuffed with his fist. I paused trying to find the truth. I didn't want Marcus to find his camera, I said, waiting for him to ask me if I had taken a two or worse if my sister had told him herself. My father only sighed and said, okay, Eli, okay, that's understandable. My father nodded and slowly quietly began to hum a song from the Osbun. I knew the song but didn't like the melody and only moved my lips to the words about an ancestor who survived a near drowning in the Danube. It was an awful story and I chose my own words, recalling the lyrics of a song I'd heard on Leroy's car radio, thinking I'd heard bad, bad Eli Brown. It would have been about right. Thanks.