My conviction was vacated in the spring.
There is a certificate.
It is one page and it uses the word “vacated” and not the word “innocent,” and Ruth warned me about that eleven times before it arrived and I still sat in my car with it for an hour.
Some things did not come back.
Three years.
That’s the number everybody focuses on and it is not the one that matters to me.
The one that matters is fourteen months.
Fourteen months where my father sat in a chair by a window in room 108 and the sign-in book had one name in it.
I have the book pages.
Ruth subpoenaed them and I have never been able to throw them away.
Some days I do the arithmetic — four hundred and twenty-six days, and on how many of them was he having a good one, and how many of those did I miss — and my therapist has asked me to stop, and I am working on it.
Dad lives with me now.
That is not a triumphant sentence.
It took nine months, a downstairs bathroom I could not afford, and a home health aide named Renata Achebe who is worth more than every lawyer in this story combined.
