My Favourite Crime. Deni Ellis Bechard

of riches and a new life, and my father was still dreaming of a better place, just one beyond this world.

      We often talked all night. He told stories and then asked what I’d learned about Buddhism or Hinduism. When I would share what I’d read, he would interrupt to say, “Drop out of college. You don’t need an education. Education is useless. I never needed one. Come work with me. We’ll go fishing.”

      “I can’t,” I told him, and continued to explain the beliefs of each distant culture, their punishments and heavens.

Shortly before Christmas he shot himself up with heroin and drank a glass of antifreeze. Two years later, I found the strength to return to Vancouver to get his ashes and his few remaining possessions. There was a single plastic suitcase with a nylon and acrylic jacket and a pair of jeans and a few shirts. In the jacket’s inside pocket were three pieces of paper: a recipe for homemade beer written on several notepad sheets, in a woman’s neat hand; the corner of a page torn from Playboy advertising a calendar with a photo of Miss January, a naked blond arched back onto her shoulders; and a pamphlet from a church, with a New Testament verse and a place to sign one’s soul over to Jesus – signed by my father.

PART II