Wrenna is walking.
She is back at school three days a week. She is completely impossible about her exercises, which the physiotherapist says is a good sign and which I have decided to believe.
The crutch is still by the sofa. She does not need it any more and she has not put it away — and neither have I, and we have both noticed that about each other and said nothing.
And she asked me something in the kitchen, about two weeks after all of it, while I was doing something with a saucepan.
She said: Dad, were you ever going to tell me?
Not about the loan.
She does not know about the loan. She will not until she is about twenty-five, and possibly not then, and that is a decision I have made on my own and may be wrong about.
About them.
About the thirteen hours. About the seventeen calls at six in the morning, which she heard the end of through a door.
About why there was a gold-lettered invitation on the table for four days and then suddenly there was not.
And I said: no. I don’t think I was.
She did not react. She carried on doing whatever she was doing with a mug.
Fourteen-year-olds do not perform shock at an honest answer. They just file it, which is considerably more frightening.
And then I said the rest of it, because she was standing there and she had asked properly and she is fourteen.
I said: and that’s the bit I’ve got to fix.
And she said — and I am putting this in because it is hers and because it took the floor out from under me — she said: I know. It’s fine. You’ve been doing it a long time.
Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a man who sent his father one cent.
A man who cancelled a television subscription at two in the morning and wrote four words in a reference field.
It is a very good story. It fits in a paragraph and everybody enjoys it.
I did that.
It was eleven seconds of typing at two in the morning in a plastic chair, and about four hundred people have told me it was magnificent, and I would do it again tomorrow.
It is also the least important thing in this entire account.
