kitchen table that I was not prepared for, which is whether I was angry with his mother.
And I said no, and he said: “You’re allowed to be.”
And I said I know, and that I had tried, on the drive home from the crematorium, and that it had not taken.
Because she found that box in 1994 and she did the hardest thing available to her, which was nothing — and then thirty years later she picked up the only thread that could still be pulled and she put it in her son’s hand and told him exactly when to pull it.
She did not have to do that. There is no version of the world in which Adele Haverty owed me a phone call.
And Douglas Ferris, who I rang in the March, because it seemed cowardly not to.
He is sixty-four and he has been married since 2001
