I want him to be the kind of person who says the sentence.

She wrote that in February 2014, on lined paper, about the baby in her stomach, five months after sitting at a table waiting one and a half seconds for four or five words.

And I had finally said it.

In a kitchen, to my mother, out loud, with nobody else in the room.

Eight years and one month late, about a woman I was no longer married to, with no possibility of it fixing anything.

I pulled over on Ed Bluestein and sat there for a while.

I never told Carmen.

I want to record that, because it would have been the easiest thing in the world to tell her and it would have bought me something, and buying something was exactly what it would have been.

My mother sees Beto about twice a month now, unsupervised since the second year, and he calls her Loretta, and he likes her.

He likes her because she is good at a specific card game and because she lets him do things in her kitchen that nobody else does, and because she is the only adult in his life who has no history with him at all.