He forgot that he had scratched his own name into the bottom of a box in about 1971.
I have asked him about the rows.
Because that is the part I cannot get past, more than the money. Fifty lunchboxes laid out evenly, spaced, in the dark, on wet grass, by a man of seventy-four with bad hands.
It would have been easier to put them in a heap by the porch. It would have taken eleven minutes.
He said, when I asked: well, you couldn’t just dump them.
I said why not.
And he said: because then it looks like rubbish. Then somebody’s mother comes out at six in the morning and thinks the street’s had a go at her.
He had thought about that. Standing in a dark garden at three in the morning, a man who had not spoken to me properly in seven years had thought about what a woman would assume when she opened her front door.
So he laid them in rows, and it took him over an hour, and he went home.
I have been told by two separate people that this is the detail that makes them cry, and I have stopped arguing about which detail is allowed to.
PART 5
We did not keep the money.
I want to say that early because the version of this that went round our town has us buying a car.
Ozias would not take it back. He was immovable about it, for four days, in a way that I have since learned is the only mode that man has.
What he eventually agreed to — and it took Hesper, not me, because Hesper is much better at this than I am — is that it went into a trust for Wilda’s therapy, administered by a woman at a firm in Corriden Street, with his name nowhere on any of it.
It pays for about four years. Hesper cried about it in my kitchen for a long time and then stopped and did the accounts on it, which is the most Hesper thing there is.
I told Orson about Marigold in the September, when he was nine, and I did it badly and I had rehearsed it for three weeks.
He asked me two questions.
The first was how old she was, and I told him eleven.
And the second was: does he have any drawings of her?
I said I did not know.
