I said, “Bye, mate,” in a completely normal voice, and hung up, and sat in a parking garage for about twenty minutes.

Part Sixteen: The Day He Got Angry

It happened in the October after he turned eight, which is about seventeen months in, and it happened over nothing, which is how I have since learned these things always happen.

We were in the car.

I had picked him up from a Saturday thing and we were going to get food, and he had been quiet for about ten minutes in a way I had noticed and had decided not to poke, and then he said, out of the window rather than to me:

“How come you never called.”