I do not intend to make that trade again.

So I drive out on Fridays, and I sit on this deck, and I watch my father tend his flowers in his short-sleeved shirts, and sometimes we don’t talk at all, and the not-talking is the sweetest part.

He is seventy-nine now.

I do not know how many summers of geraniums are left.

But I know that the ones there are, he will spend as himself — bareskinned in the sun, unafraid, believed, safe — and that whatever else I have done or failed to do, I made that much true.

The coat is gone.