back?”
“No.”
“Why?”
He offered a rueful smile.
“I believe we have already established that your father can be an idiot.”
Mom patted his shoulder approvingly.
“Progress.”
We laughed. Luis entered our lives through an unanswered Christmas card, not a dramatic appearance. Inez found his new Santa Fe address the following day. Dad insisted on writing.
“I need to write.”
We let him. At his old bench he stared at stationery for nearly two hours, eventually asking me how to spell a complicated word. “unnecessarily.”
I helped, then struck the word through.
“What?”
“Don’t write like a lawyer.”
“I’m not.”
“You wrote unnecessarily.”
“That is a normal word.”
“Not for apologizing to your brother.”
He scowled at me.
“What would you write?”
“Luis, I was wrong.”
Dad stared in surprise.
“That’s too short.”
“You have forty years to explain afterward.”
Dad eventually wrote three pages without excuses, telling Luis about
