She let the video finish. Then she reached into the side of the couch and pulled out an envelope. Plain white one. My name on the front in his handwriting, which I’d have known anywhere even after all this time, those tall skinny letters he’s had since he was a kid.

My hands weren’t steady. I’m not going to pretend they were. I opened it and there was one paragraph. Just one. He never was a guy to use ten words when three would do, and I used to criticize him for that too, God help me.

It said: “You told me a hammer wasn’t enough. I built everything with one. The chair in your living room. Mom commissioned it. I made it myself. I carved something underneath the seat. Go look.”

I looked up at Linda. She’d ordered that chair maybe two years back. Told me a friend made it. I never asked which friend. It’s this beautiful thing, walnut, smooth as anything, and I’d sat in it a hundred times reading the paper, complaining the cushion was too firm, never once knowing my own kid’s hands had shaped every inch of it. He’d been in my house the whole time. In the wood. And I’d been sitting on him like he was furniture.

I got up. My knees aren’t what they were and I felt every year of it crossing that room. Linda didn’t help me. She just watched, and I think she needed to watch, after all the times I made her carry this thing alone. I got down on the floor next to the chair, this old man on his knees in his own living room, and I tipped it back so I could see the underside of the seat.

He’d carved it deep, so it would last. The letters were clean and careful, the work of somebody who knew exactly what he was doing and took his time doing it.

I stared at it for a long time before I could even read the words right, because my eyes had gone blurry and I kept having to blink them clear.

It said: “You said no son of yours would build with his hands. So I built you a place to sit. I left a seat for you, Dad. You just never showed up.”

I’m not going to tell you I called him and we fixed it and cried and everything’s good now. I want to tell you that. But that’s the movie version and this isn’t a movie. I haven’t called him yet. I’ve started to maybe thirty times. I get his name up on the phone and I sit there and I don’t know what a man says after seven years of being wrong out loud. Sorry feels like a word that’s way too small for the size of what I broke.