I tell her the truth, which is: I am frightened of what she’ll say to me, and I am going to go anyway, and I do not know when.
Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a will, or a lonely old man, or a woman who married for a roof and got something better.
It is about a drawer in 2019.
I had it. Not the whole of it, but I had the thread, in my hand, in a room, on an ordinary afternoon — and the question was four words long.
Where is this from?
I did not ask, and the reason was not tact and it was not kindness to a man of seventy-six.
It was that I had worked out that the answer might make my life unlivable, and I preferred the version where I did not know.
Five years of that. Four of them after the drawer.
If there is a thing in your house that you have decided not to look at — you have already made the decision. That is what I would want anybody to take out of this.
You are not waiting for the right moment and you are not being respectful.
You have run the arithmetic, in about four seconds, on what the answer would cost you, and you have come down on the side of not knowing.
And the person you are protecting is not the one you think.
One last thing.
The photograph is out of the drawer.
It is on the shelf in the front room, in a frame I bought in the January, next to the two of Hattie’s father that I have.
She asked me who everybody in it was, and I could only do four of them, which is not many out of ten.
And she asked which one was Ambrose, and I said he is not in it, he took it.
She thought about that for a bit and then she said: so he was standing right there.
Yes. He was standing right there, about four feet away, in 1989, and thirty-one years later he sat at a kitchen table and taught that child’s daughter how to castle.
I do not know what to do with that and I have stopped needing to.
But the photograph is on a shelf, where anybody who comes into my house can see it and ask about it — and that is the entire difference between this year and the four before it.
