“And I want you to notice that you are reacting to it the way your mother reacts to things.”

I sat in the truck outside the shop for a long while after that call.

Because she was right, and because the thing I was actually frightened of was not that he would drop it.

It was that he would keep it, and I would have to watch him do a hard thing that I had started and could no longer carry for him, which is a specific feeling I had not had before and which I now understand is simply what having an adult child is.

Part Forty-One: Thursday