of 2023 a sixty-five-year-old man sat in a study with a fourteen-thousand-dollar report about the man his daughter was going to marry, and did the arithmetic, and put it in a drawer.
And he has told me what the arithmetic was, because I asked, and he did not soften it.
He said: “I could have lost you in 2023 with nothing to show for it. Or I could lose you in 2026 and you’d have a son.”
“I’ve thought about it every day for three years and I would do it again. And I know that isn’t an apology.”
I did not speak to my father for four months.
From the December until the April.
Which is exactly the thing I had threatened in 2021, arriving three years late, precisely as he had calculated.
And I want to put down what those four months were, because everybody assumes I was punishing him and I was not.
