It is a strange and painful gift, to discover that the distance you thought was rejection was only two frightened people making the same wrong guess about each other.

All those Sunday calls I had gotten through by watching the clock, I had believed Robin was enduring me out of duty; and all that time, it turned out, she had been on her end believing the same of me, each of us reading the other’s awkward silence as he doesn’t want more than this. I thought of all the years I had let Franny carry that — had been, I saw now, a little relieved to let her, because it excused me from the harder work of knowing my own child directly.

I had told myself that was just how I was made, a man for the tire and not the feelings.

Standing in the shop I understood that this was a coward’s story, and a convenient one, and that Franny had let me tell it my whole life out of love, and that her last accidental gift was to leave me no one to translate, so that at seventy I would finally have to learn the language myself or lose my daughter entirely.