He wanted his mother to stop being alone in it.

Those are not the same thing, and the difference is the whole difference between a story about revenge and a story about love, and this was always, from the brown paper to the microphone to the navy sock, a story about love.

Kingston had wanted the last word, laughing, in a room full of people who did his laughing for him.

He did not get it.

The last word went to a ten-year-old who loved his mother, and it was not spoken in triumph.

It was spoken in defense of her, which is a different and far better thing, and it is the sound I choose to remember from that room — not his scream, but my son’s steady voice, refusing, at last, to let me stand there alone.

THE END.