And my daughter said: “Uncle Cade backed the truck up and I was behind it.”

I want to put down exactly what I felt, because it was not what anybody expects and it is the reason I did not do anything stupid in the following four days.

What I felt was relief.

An accident.

A terrible accident in a driveway, the kind of thing that happens eleven times a day in this country, and my kid was alive and talking and there was a fish on the ceiling.

Then I said, “When did this happen, Wrennie?”

“Yesterday.”

“Yesterday when?”

“After lunch.

We were doing the burgers.”

Twenty-eight hours.

I did the arithmetic standing on asphalt in the dark in my socks and I got twenty-eight hours and I said, carefully, “And nobody called me?”

“Mommy said she would.”

“Okay.”