And that woman would have been completely correct, and she would have been right about every fact, and she would have gone to work that Tuesday and bought one coffee instead of two, and some time in the following January she would have noticed that the pillar was empty.

Part Thirty-Eight: Telling People

I told my mother in the April, four months after the funeral and two months after the letter from Iowa.

Lorna Doerr is seventy-one and lives in Eau Claire and I drove over on a Sunday specifically to do it, and I had it written down in the car in bullet points, which tells you everything.

She listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which is not like her, and at the end she said: “Why didn’t you tell me in December?”