So he made me four coffees and talked about Chet Baker and waited, and on the fifth afternoon he asked me to his house, and he put me in a room with it and went to put the kettle on.
He has told me since that he stood in that kitchen for a long time and did not pick up the kettle at all.
What I had to tell him.
I told him that evening. I could have left it. He did not know who had written that letter — it is signed on behalf of the family and the handwriting meant nothing to him.
I sat in that front room and told a seventy-one-year-old man that the last letter he ever got from the only family who had written to him was written by an eighteen-year-old who thought his mother's kindness was embarrassing.
And he listened to all of it without saying anything.
