Because I had been. That’s the part I hadn’t known. For two years I had told everybody — my dad, the counselor, the girls at work — that I was done with her, and I had believed it, and there had been some small filament in me still running, some part that was standing by for the day she’d say the sentence.

And she can’t. Not won’t. Can’t. It isn’t in her. It’s like waiting for a chair to say it.

I stood up at fourteen minutes and I said thank you for the coffee cake and she said “you’ll come back,” not as a question, and I said “no,” and she said “you’re just like your father,” which she meant as an insult and which I decided on the drive home to keep.

I have not seen her since. I don’t expect to. She’s in reasonable health and she might have twenty years.

People keep telling me I’ll regret it when she dies. I think about that honestly and I don’t think I will. I think I’ll be sad about a thing that was never available, which is a different grief and one I’ve been doing since I was ten and had a purple dress and a window.

The letter’s still in the drawer. I read it again after Renton. It’s actually a masterpiece — four paragraphs about how much she’s suffered and not one question about my head.