The Signature I Taught Him to Read

It is another to watch him bent over your kitchen table, tongue between his teeth in concentration, practicing your signature the way I once helped him practice his letters at that same table thirty years before.

Fourteen times.

I counted them the first time and I counted them again in the courtroom, and each stroke of the pen was a small precise wound.

He had my handwriting nearly right by the fourteenth.

He had always been a quick study; I had been proud of it once.

And then Blanche walked into the frame with my passport in her hand and said the words about moving me somewhere cheap and telling everyone I didn’t recognize them, and my son did not flinch, did not object, did not say she’s my mother, let’s not put it like that. He asked about the investments.