Linda says I should just go. Drive to the shop. Stand there and let him decide what he wants to do with me. Maybe she’s right. She usually was, and I spent two decades not listening to that either.

Some nights I think I’ll do it. I’ll get in the car in the morning and I’ll go and I’ll take whatever he gives me. Other nights I sit in that chair, the one he made, and I run my thumb over the smooth arm of it and I think about a twenty-year-old kid standing in my kitchen telling me what he loved, and me telling him it wasn’t enough.

I don’t know. I really don’t. The chair’s still there. The seat he left me is still empty. And I’m the only one who can fix that, and I’m sitting here writing this instead, which probably tells you everything about the kind of father I’ve been.