He said, “Looks pretty cleared up to me.”

I was thirty-four years old.

I was standing in borrowed shoes with my grandmother’s silver ring loose on my right middle finger, and I did the thing I had been doing in that family since I was about nine.

I said nothing, and I looked at the book.

Part Two: What I Did Not Ask

There was one question available at the graveside and it would have cost me nothing and I did not ask it.

Because Richard did something after he threw it, in the four or five seconds before everybody started moving, and I saw it and I have gone over it several hundred times since.

He reached for it again.

His hand went out, about halfway, and his fingers hovered over the blue cover.

And then he pulled back and said, “Leave it.”

I said, “You just said nobody needed it.”

And he said, “That doesn’t mean you need to make a project out of it,” and turned away.

Make a project out of it.

That is the sentence.