But my daughter grew up and became a person who talks strangers through the worst minutes of their lives. She does it every night in Columbus, Ohio, in a room full of screens, in a headset. I listened to her once. They let me sit in. A woman called whose husband had fallen off a ladder, and Lark told her where to look. She said it the way you said it. She doesn't know where she got it. I have never had the courage to tell her. Maybe Eamon will, or maybe he won't, he's like his father, he'll decide what's right and then torture himself doing it.
So that's what I wanted you to know. Some of what you put in her that day was terrible and some of it was not. I don't get to choose which parts she kept. Neither do you.
Stop sending the money. I mean it this time. Spend it on bus fare to a meeting, or on a decent coat. You can keep writing if you want to. Eamon will have the box. He won't write back. Don't hold it against him. He has been carrying this since he was seventeen, and I let him, because I was weak, and that is the one thing in all of this I'm sure was my fault and not yours.
Stay sober.
Siobhan Fennessy
Eamon got through it. I don't know how. His voice went at "Some days I did," and came back, and went again at "he's like his father," and he stopped there for a while and stood with the paper in his hands while the rain came in sideways through the open side of the shelter and spotted it, and then he went on, and he got to the end, and he read her name, and then he folded the letter back in thirds along the old creases and stood holding it.
Nobody said anything. I don't think any of us could have. Virgil Haberle sat on the bench under the lawyer's advertisement with his hands flat on his knees and his eyes closed and tears running down into the loose skin of his face, not making a sound, and my brother stood in front of him, and I sat on the far side of the armrest and cried in a way I had not cried since I was a little girl, without any shame at all, the way you cry when a thing has been closed up so long you forgot it was a door.
A bus came. It was the Number 10. It hissed to a stop at the curb and opened its doors with a sigh and the driver looked out at the three of us, a man in a suit holding a piece of paper and a soaked woman and an old man crying on the bench, and he waited about five seconds, and then he said, "You folks getting on?" and nobody answered him, and he shrugged and closed the doors and drove away.
It was Eamon who spoke first.