Chapter 12: Year Eight

Odalys,

I told myself I was done. I was done for six years, and I was good at it.

I was engaged to a good woman for a while, a nurse.

I ended it because I wasn't in it.

I'm telling you so you know I didn't sit in a window all that time.

This week your mother stood at the pharmacy counter with a bag of her pills.

She told the pharmacist your engagement was over and that you were alone in Chicago.

I was standing next to the cough drops.

I decided right there. I want you to know it was a decision.

Nobody made me. Nobody told me to.

I was twenty-eight, with a house and a job and a clear head.

I stood between the cough drops and the register and chose to be a fool again, on purpose, with my eyes open.

I am not going to wait for you. I did that arithmetic at twenty and I haven't changed it.

What I am going to do is write to you once a year on the third of October, because I like to.

I will put it in your mother's box.

I am not asking you to come home. I am not asking you to write.

If you do, I'll be glad. If you don't, I'll still write.

I'm telling you all of this so you never think I was stuck.

Alister

I read it twice standing at the stove.

Then I sat down on my mother's kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet and the pages in my lap.

I had come to Marietta carrying fourteen years of a man's loyalty on my back, and I had been bending under it for ten days.

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