“You did every last thing the judge asked of you.”

“I left my own son with somebody who locked him out in the dark,” Clay said.

“I’m never going back to the oil fields.”

He looked up at me, his eyes red around the edges.

He picked up my black ballpoint pen and signed his full name on the guardian line at the bottom of page three.

“He asked me yesterday whether we could plant something along the back fence,” Clay said.

“I kept a seed packet from the pantry,” I said.