She had a seven-year-old in front of her and a completely clean shot at me, eight years after I sat at a table and said nothing while my mother compared her to a tree, and she declined to take it.

When she told me what she had said, on the phone that night, I could not speak for a second, and she said, “Don’t.

I didn’t do it for you.”

“I know.”

“I did it because if I give him a clean story now, he’ll find out it wasn’t clean at fifteen, and then it’ll be me who lied.”

I met him as his father on the fifteenth of January in a park off Berkman with Carmen on a bench forty feet away.

He was formal.

That is the thing nobody warns you about.

He shook my hand, because somebody had taught him to, and for about twenty minutes it was one of the worst experiences of my life, two people being polite on a wood chip surface.

And then he asked me the question he had been holding.