close, a lifetime of a son believing his father wished he’d been someone else.
The letter said the opposite. And it broke both of us open in that cemetery, in the best possible way.
“I spent your whole childhood trying to make you smaller,” Dad had written, “because the world I came from punished men who stood out, and I was terrified it would punish you. I thought I was protecting you. I was suffocating you. I made you wear gray because I was afraid of what red would cost you, and the cost of the gray was that you grew up thinking your father didn’t love the brightest thing about you. I loved it most, son. I was just too much of a coward, and too much a product of my time, to ever tell you.”
Chapter 3: The Suit He Made
Mr. Lawson explained the rest, because Dad
