Because that is the thing I had not been able to put down.
My father was not at my trial.
For three years I believed he chose not to come.
Royce looked at the table for a while.
“Yeah,” he said.
“She told him it was Thursday.
It was Tuesday.
He sat in the kitchen in a suit all day.”
And that was the whole interview.
I said thank you — I actually said thank you, which I have thought about since — and I stood up and I left, and I sat in my truck in a jail parking lot and cried harder than I have ever cried about anything, because for three years the loneliest fact of my life had been a man who didn’t come, and it turned out he had been in a kitchen in a suit.
My conviction was vacated in the spring.
There is a certificate.
It is one page and it uses the word “vacated” and not the word “innocent,” and Ruth warned me about that eleven times before it arrived and I still sat in my car with it for an hour.
Some things did not come back.
