PART 6
Jonah started college that fall, on the coast, three hours from Hollowbrook Lane, the trust covering every part of it that used to keep me awake doing math at midnight, trying to figure out how two of us were going to manage tuition on a single income.
He calls most Sundays. Some weeks it's fifteen minutes about nothing in particular. Some weeks it's an hour, and I can tell, even over the phone, when something's actually weighing on him.
Preston and Diane have both come to visit twice since that afternoon in our kitchen, once for Jonah's high school graduation that spring, once just because Diane said she happened to be in the area, which none of us quite believed but were glad of anyway.
Last month, Preston mentioned, almost in passing, that he'd started stopping by his own son's baseball practices more often, not because anything forced him to, just because a version of the same math had finally worked itself out in his head, the one his father's letter had been trying to hand him for a while before any of us understood what it was actually saying.
