And she said:
“Do you wish you’d followed him sooner?”
And I thought about lying. For maybe two seconds I thought about giving her the comfortable answer, which is the one I’m good at, which is the one that got us here.
And then I said:
“Every day of my life, sweetheart. Every single day.”
And she nodded, like that was the right answer, like she’d been checking.
And then she said:
“Okay. Me too.”
And she went back to telling me about the tinfoil.
The urn is gone. I had it taken away three weeks after the testing came back and I did not want to know where it went.
What’s on that mantel now is a photograph of Eleanor at the counter of the market in 1991 with a pencil behind her ear, and the clock my father got for twenty-five years at the plant, and a shoebox with tinfoil on it that is apparently a diorama of the solar system, and which has been there for a year and a half, and which is not going anywhere either.
