A boy of about twelve came up the aisle with a napkin and a pen and asked if he could have my autograph, which no one had ever asked me for in my life, and I did not know what to write, so I wrote, “Be the one who goes back. Ethan Mercer,” and the kid read it and nodded very seriously, like he had received an instruction, which I suppose he had.
And Lily.
Lily sat in her first-class seat holding her teddy bear and her mother’s beach fund can, which she had insisted on carrying on, and she watched her father be, for one flight, the thing he actually was, instead of the thing the world had filed him under.
For two years I had been the widower who walked too slow.
The man people stepped around in stores.
The tired dad at school pickup that the other parents were a little too kind to, in the way that is really a way of looking away.
