Chapter 7: The Room Made for Me

My father said no.

He said it in the chapel aisle, then again on the front steps, with the reporters shouting behind the fence.

"He is my son," he told Dale. "He's going home."

"Where the hell is that?" Dale said.

Then the driver shut the car door between them, and Dale stood on the pavement with his cap in his hand.

My mother held the urn on her lap the whole way.

I sat beside her, because the urn went wherever she took it.

The house stood at the end of a long drive, behind iron gates, with a lawn cut flat and even.

I had never seen it.

I had walked past a hundred houses with gates like these on delivery runs, thinking nobody inside ever lay awake counting.

My mother carried me up the front steps.

She climbed the stairs without turning on a light, and at the end of a hallway she pushed open a door.

"This is yours," she said.

She said it softly, to the urn.

"We finished it a month ago. I did it myself. I wanted it to be ready."

She switched on the lamp.

It was a big room with a dark blue bedspread and a desk by the window. A bookshelf, a rug, a closet door standing open.

I looked inside the closet.

There were rows of shirts and jackets, shoes in boxes, and every one of them was my size.

On the desk lay a flat black box with a card on top.

I read it over her shoulder.

For Ellis, on your twentieth birthday. Proud of you always. Dad.

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