“It happened because you wouldn’t spend an afternoon.”

Then she pushed it back across the table and said: “Take that to your mother.”

So I did.

I put it on Loretta’s kitchen table in the March and I did not say anything and I let her read it, and it took her a long time because the vocabulary is not friendly.

And when she had finished she said: “I don’t understand what this is.”

“It’s the test I wouldn’t take.”

“And it says there’s something wrong with you?”

“It says there was a reason to look at both of us.

That’s all it ever would have said, and it would have said it in 2013.”

My mother looked at that piece of paper on her own table and I watched her go through about four different things, and what she landed on — I want to be truthful about this, because she has done better since and this is not where she ended up — what she landed on that day was: