“I only worked with him eight months,” she said. “But he sang that song every single night shift. I used to want to strangle him.” She smiled. “I’d give anything to hear him do it again.”
Then they left, one car after another, until it was just me and Caleb and Ray, standing by my car in the June sun.
Caleb handed me the letter.
“You can read it,” he said. “If you want.”
I unfolded it with fingers that wouldn’t stop shaking.
It was David’s handwriting. But not his handwriting from before. It was the shaky, slanting handwriting from the last months, when holding a pen had gotten hard. I knew exactly when he must have written it. Some night when I was asleep, and he couldn’t sleep, and he’d gotten Ray or the night nurse to bring him paper.
Hey, bud.
If you’re reading this, you finally changed the strings on the old guitar. Took you long enough. I hid this in the lining of the case because I figured that’s the one place your mom would never look, and the one place you’d eventually go.
