I’d like to tell you we made up for all of it. We didn’t. You can’t. Thirty-seven years is just gone, and no amount of talking in a parking lot brings it back. He lives ninety miles from me, did you hear me say that?

Ninety miles. The whole time. We could’ve driven it in an afternoon and we let the years stack up instead, all over a piece of ground neither one of us even owns now.

We talk on the phone every Sunday now. I’m still not used to it. The other night I picked up and started right in before he could say anything, and he stopped me and said, “Now which one of you is this?” Daddy’s old line. And I had to put the phone down on the counter for a minute because I couldn’t get a word out.

I keep going back to that parking lot, though. That’s the part that won’t leave me alone. We just sat there in his old truck with the AC blowing warm air at us because it never did work right, both of us staring out the windshield like there was something to look at. There wasn’t. Just a Dollar General and a row of carts. His hands were all busted up on the wheel, same as mine. Farmer’s hands. We never did get rid of them.