Chapter 10: The Green Notebook

My mother slapped my father so hard the pencil jumped on the desk.

"Paula."

"Don't you say my name."

"I'm your husband."

"You wrote 'Continue' on my son's arm."

She picked up the urn.

"Paula, put it down. It's three in the morning. You aren't thinking."

"I am thinking for the first time in ten years."

She walked out of the study.

My father came after her down the hall, still in his reading glasses, saying her name again and again.

She took her coat from the hook, and her keys from the bowl, and she did not look back.

"Where are you going?"

"To the only person who told me the truth."

The front door slammed on his answer.

I sat in the passenger seat of her car with the urn between my feet and watched the sky go gray over the highway.

She drove with both hands on the wheel and did not speak.

When she took the Fulton Road exit, she slowed and looked at the paper in her pocket.

It was the pay stub from the gate. On the back, in blue pen, Dale had written an address and a phone number.

If you want to know who he was, it said. Come.

The house was a narrow brick row house with a sagging porch and a bicycle chained to the rail.

Dale opened the door in a T-shirt before she knocked.

He looked at her, and at the urn in her arms, and he stood back.

"Come in, ma'am."

The kitchen smelled like coffee and old grease.

Two men slept on the living room couches under coats, and neither stirred.

Dale led her up a short flight of stairs to a room at the back.

It held two bunk beds, a dresser and a window with a cardboard patch.

"He slept here," Dale said. "On nights he couldn't afford the bus home. I let him have the top bunk by the window."

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