He looked exactly the same, which surprised me more than anything else about that year.
“You came to gloat,” he said.
“No.”
“Then what.”
“I want to ask you one question and then I’ll go, and you can answer it or not.”
He shrugged.
“Three years,” I said.
“Not the money.
I don’t care about the money.
When they read the verdict and my father wasn’t in that courtroom — did you know she’d told him it was a different day?”
Because that is the thing I had not been able to put down.
My father was not at my trial.
For three years I believed he chose not to come.
Royce looked at the table for a while.
“Yeah,” he said.
“She told him it was Thursday.
It was Tuesday.
He sat in the kitchen in a suit all day.”
And that was the whole interview.
I said thank you — I actually said thank you, which I have thought about since — and I stood up and I left, and I sat in my truck in a jail parking lot and cried harder than I have ever cried about anything, because for three years the loneliest fact of my life had been a man who didn’t come, and it turned out he had been in a kitchen in a suit.
