Matt Glassman was only a small boy when his grandfather vanished from his home in Lackawanna, Pennsylvania. But the circumstances, and the few words that had been uttered by his family about the matter, offer Glassman a legacy as mysterious as it is painful. Did his grandfather's disappearance signify a desire not to start or finish, but to surrender midway through? Glassman knows this feeling, but what his grandfather knew and felt remains a pressing question.<BR>Meanwhile, life in sunny south Florida proves nearly overwhelming for Glassman. Professionally, he's still settling into his first job after graduate school, editing the "Weekly Books" page for a throwaway Jewish newspaper. Personally, his family life is more work than he expected. He and his wife are trying to get pregnant, and he finds himself on call for his simultaneously needy yet distant grandmother.<BR>Glassman's decision to live among south Florida's retirement communities is motivated by his own need to connect with his grandparents' generation. But his grandmother doesn't lavish him with affection and doesn't volunteer any information about his grandfather. When Glassman gets a phone message from a man who wants help writing his memoirs he thinks nothing of it, but when the strangely familiar old man shows up unannounced at his office he thinks he may finally get some answers.