You Gave Me a Beautiful Lie
When it was over, we went out through the courthouse doors into the rain.
My father tilted his face up to it — the sky, the open sky, weather on his skin — and closed his eyes, and I understood that for him even the rain was a gift beyond price.
I pushed his chair down the ramp, and I thought about the word home, which had meant, my whole life, that cold locked house in Tucson.
It did not mean that anymore.
Home was not the place I came from.
Home was these two people beside me in the rain — the father who had come back and the son waiting for us across the country — the people who had survived it with me.