The Next Day
I stayed. Peter got me a cot from somewhere and I slept four hours in a chair and stayed all day Thursday.
We talked more in those hours than I would have believed two people could talk.
He told me about Peter — thirty-six, an architect, two speeding tickets in high school that his mother never found out about. He told me about his daughter Anna, who’s eight, and who apparently informs strangers that her grandfather is very funny for an old man.
I told him about my students. About the year I had a kid named Dominique who couldn’t read at fourteen and about what happened by spring.
We talked about my mother. We talked about Margaret. We talked about my father, and that took a long time.
What I Finally Understood About My Father
I was angry with him. I want to be honest about that. For about a day I was very angry with a man who’d been dead thirty-eight years.
