“Paul should know,” I said.
“I’ll call him,” Daniel said.
“Dad — are you going to do anything else with this?
The story, I mean.
It’s — it’s a significant thing.”
“I’m writing it down,” I said.
“That feels like enough for now.”
“Mom would say that’s not enough.”
I smiled.
“Mom would say send it to a newspaper.”
“She absolutely would,” Daniel said.
“She’d have already drafted the letter.”
“I know,” I said.
“Give me a few weeks.”
That evening, I sat in the garden until it was too dark to see.
The roses were quiet.
The bench was cold.
I had Margaret’s letter in one pocket and the university letter in the other, and I sat between them and thought about what it means to be told, at sixty-eight years old, that your work was worth something.
Not by a man who shook your hand on a stage and laughed at you in a back room.
