Chapter 12: Driver

I read the whole file that night, at the card table, with the two boys watching my face.

It was forty pages.

I read the police report first.

On the night of the crash, my father had been at my uncle's thirty-eighth birthday.

He had been drinking since the afternoon.

At 11:20, he drove my uncle and his wife home in his own car, because my uncle had been drinking too.

The report said my father ran a stop sign at the bottom of Millbrook Hill at forty-eight miles an hour.

A pickup truck hit the passenger side.

The pickup's driver lived. My uncle and his wife did not.

My father walked out of it with a broken wrist.

His blood alcohol was .14.

I read the word Driver on the line beside his name.

I had sat at a table with that man every night of my life.

"Cass," Tyler said.

"Wait."

I turned the page.

There was a plea agreement. My father had pleaded guilty to two counts of vehicular manslaughter.

There was a sentencing order, signed by a judge.

Eighteen months of supervised probation, a suspended license for three years, two hundred hours of community service.

There was a letter on the next page, in my father's handwriting.

Your Honor, it said. My brother's daughter is six years old. She has no one.

My wife and I will raise her as our own. I will never take another drink.

I ask the court to let me spend the rest of my life making this right.

The judge had written in the margin: Guardianship considered a mitigating factor.

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