didn’t.
He was trying to teach me a lesson about the dignity of the forgotten.
He had no idea he was handing me back my father.
PART 4
We got my father help — real help, the kind that twenty years on the streets and a locked-away identity required. Doctors. A neurologist who explained what the head trauma had done, and how much might return, and how much might not. Slowly, over months, pieces of my father came back. Not all of them. The twenty years were a fog he’d never fully clear. But enough. Enough to know me. Enough to remember my mother, who had passed away five years before, believing to the end that her husband was dead — a grief I’ll always ache that she never got to have lifted. Enough to be, again, in the ways that mattered, my dad.
I did not leave his side. The woman
