Chapter 22: The Bend

My father went on television at seven in the morning.

I did not see it, because the urn was upstairs and the screen was not.

Bram told me afterward, in the car.

My father had stood alone at a plain desk and read the words my mother wrote.

He took back every line of the statement.

He said his son never refused help, because no one ever offered it.

He said his name and his company's name and what he had signed in the memo.

He did not say it was a misunderstanding.

By nine o'clock the clip had four million views.

By ten, my father was in the lawyers' office with a pen.

At two in the afternoon we drove to the river.

Dale led us in his own truck, with the urn on the seat beside him.

My mother had asked for that.

"He sat with you," she said. "Let him ride with you."

Dale had only nodded and looked straight ahead.

The road ran past the back fence of Plant 4.

It turned into a dirt track between two dead cornfields.

It ended at a bend in the river where the bank sloped to flat gray stones.

A single bench stood there, weathered white, with a rusted lunch tin bolted to the armrest.

Dale parked and got out.

He lifted me from the seat.

"This is where he ate," he said. "Every day. Twenty minutes. He'd come down here with a sandwich."

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