On Easter Sunday my daughter called and asked me to come and get her, and her mother-in-law put a hand on my chest in the doorway in front of thirty guests and told me to go home. My son-in-law told me to call the police, because the Chief was standing in his back yard eating food he’d paid for. He was right about that — and it is the reason he lost everything.
There are still doors she will not stand with her back to. She does not like the smell of cut grass, which is a thing neither of us saw coming and which cost us a summer working out.
She has a dog now, an enormous stupid one, and she started a certificate at the community college in the second year and did not finish it and started a different one and did finish it.
And she talks about it. That is the part I did not expect. I assumed, at the beginning, that the job was to build a house where it never came up, and I was wrong, and a woman in Bell Fork explained to me over about four months that a house where it never comes up is a house where she is managing me.
So it comes up. At the table, on a Tuesday, in the middle of something else, the way anything does.
She went to that trial every single day. Nobody made her. I offered about nine times to sit through it on her behalf and she said no every time, and on the third day she told me why, and I am going to end with it because it is better than anything I have.
She said: Dad, you got me out of that room. That’s yours and I’m never going to be able to pay it back.
She said: but you can’t be the one who makes it true afterwards. If you do all of it, then it’s a thing that happened to me and got handled, and I want it to be a thing I did.
