But I was there, and I was there because Carmen asked me to be, and she asked me to be because by then that was the kind of thing we did.

Part Eighteen: The Counting One

It was fourteen months.

He called me Wes from the fifteenth of January of the first year until the March of the second, and nobody in the world suggested otherwise to him, and I want to be clear that this was not a policy I nobly adhered to — it was a rule Carmen made and Dr.

Fontanez agreed with and I obeyed, and left to myself I would have blown it inside a month.

It happened on the steps outside her old apartment on a Saturday afternoon in March, and there was nothing about the day.

He had a guitar by then.

A three-quarter-size thing, forty-nine dollars, that Denny had found and that I had restrung because that is one of the four things I can do.

He was learning the counting song.

He had it nearly, but there is a note in the third line — on put your head on my arm — that goes down where you expect it to go up, and it is the only slightly odd thing in the whole tune, and he kept missing it.