“He tells me about how hard you worked at the stamping plant. He told me that even when you were angry, you only did it because you cared about doing things the right way. He has your old leather baseball glove in his closet.

He showed it to me last summer when we were cleaning the garage. He still talks about you, Grandpa. He never said a single bad word about why you didn’t hold me. He just said you were a proud man who loved his family but didn’t know how to step back. I want to know the man my dad still defends.”

I couldn’t draw a breath. I sat there in the quiet kitchen, staring at the blue ink on the cheap paper.

The silver watch on my wrist felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. I began to cry. Not a quiet tear, but a hard, ragged sob that shook my seventy-year-old shoulders.

It was the sound of seventeen years of rot finally breaking free from my chest.

Martha came home from the store. She saw the grocery bags on the counter and then she saw me. She saw the letter in my hand.

She didn’t say a word. She didn’t say she told me so.

She just walked over, took my hand, and read the paper over my shoulder. Her own tears hit the page.

“Call him, Raymond,” she whispered.

My fingers were stiff. I dialed the number Martha had written in the back of her address book years ago. The phone rang three times.

“Hello?” David’s voice was deeper now. He was thirty-six, not nineteen.

Raymond cleared his throat. It felt like dry paper. “David?”

There was a long silence. I could hear the faint sound of a television in the background of his home.

“Dad?” David said. His voice was quiet.

“I got the letter,” I said. “From Sarah.”

“She didn’t tell me she was sending that,” David said quickly. He sounded nervous. “I’m sorry if she bothered you, Dad. I didn’t mean to—”

“No,” I interrupted. “She didn’t bother me.”

I took off my silver Seiko watch and laid it flat on the table.

“I want to do the interview,” I said. “But I don’t want to do it over the phone. I am going to buy a bus ticket. I want to come down to Columbus. If that’s alright.”

Another long pause. Then I heard David let out a breath. “Yeah, Dad. That’s more than alright. Clara will make some pot roast.”

Three days later, I was on the Greyhound bus. The highway was grey and wet, but for the first time in seventeen years, I wasn’t looking back.

I walked up the porch of David’s house in Columbus. It was a nice, modest ranch home with a green lawn. David was standing in the foyer when the door opened.

He had grey at his temples now. He looked like me.