I do not get those seven years and seven months back.

There is no arrangement and no amount of Saturdays and no quantity of remorse, and the only useful thing anybody has ever told me about them is that I should stop trying to buy them and start grieving them, which took about two years and is not finished.

What I have instead is a boy who is twelve now and who is on the other side of the truck most Fridays, and a woman who I talk to on the phone about him four times a month and who married a decent man in a backyard, and a mother I see, and a piece of paper on my phone with two words on it in my own handwriting that I look at once a month on purpose.

And four lines that were never a song about anything except a woman at a card table, which is exactly what they have gone back to being, in the mouth of a kid who does not know he is the last person on earth who still needs them.