"Esther Stevens..." he said, trying hard to place the name with a face...a face he knew all too well. "Esther Stevens..." he said again, this time noticing a tear forming in his eye. "Damn allergies," he thought to himself, "I should have taken my prescrip...my prescrp...my meds today!" Then he turned to the kid, and said "never heard of her." But, even as he said it, he knew it was a lie. A lie, to himself mostly, because he could tell the kid had already read him like yesterday's paper...not the front pages, though. No, the kid had read him like the comics and entertainment section, trying to detect the hidden meaning behind every line uttered by Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Then he asked himself, "why is it that in the Charlie Brown specials on the TV, the adults are never heard actually speaking?"
Long ago, when he used to have friends they would talk about how their children loved watching Charlie Brown specials and there were many, Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving all holidays with family in mind. How he hated hearing them talking about their families. Something he didn't have and would never want to have. Or so he told himself. But one thing one of the fathers said was that the children never noticed that the adults in the cartoon never spoke. For some odd reason, that comment stayed with him. When he told the younger version of himself no, he didn't know her, the man then reached into his trouser pocket and pulled from it, a folded laced handkerchief. Almost reverently, he began to slowly unfold it.