Carl rents a two-bedroom apartment in Gahanna, and he pays his own rent, and he sees Ben every other Saturday.
He sent me a letter once, a single page.
It said, I thought being married to you was a thing I had, and not a thing I did. I’m sorry I understood that too late.
I read it twice.
I wrote back one line.
Be the father Ben deserves. That’s the only thing I’ll ever ask.
The mortgage was paid off in April.
David stepped down as CEO two years early, and I did not take his chair.
I did not want the corner office.
I wanted Sundays.
What I did instead was begin to write.
On the first night after Toledo, I bought a blue cloth notebook at the drugstore and started a letter that began, Dear Marie.
I wrote one every Sunday.
I told her about Grace’s chemistry exam, about the neighbor’s cat that had learned to open our screen door, and about the way her laugh, I’d been told, ended up in my chest and lived there.
