“Grandpa. Please stop sending Dad money.”
My name is Thomas Miller. I was sixty-six years old that September. I’ve run Miller’s Corner Market on Delaware Street in the same building my father bought in 1961, and I’ve got a bad shoulder from thirty-eight years of hauling produce crates and a wife I buried and a daughter I buried before her.
And on a Saturday afternoon in a town park in central Ohio, a seven-year-old girl with ice cream on her chin said eight words that took my whole life apart.
I Want You to Understand What I Thought I Was Doing, Because That’s the Part That Gets Me
Seven years earlier, my daughter Laura was killed on Highway 24.
Single vehicle. A guardrail and a culvert and a fire. The trooper who came to the store told me, standing in my own stockroom with his hat in his hands, that there would not be a viewing. He was about twenty-six years old and he could barely get the sentence out and I have never forgotten his face.
