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bringing Karin to live near us. He saw Mr. Ashworth at the feed store one day and started up a conversation.
    “Looking for a new lawn mower?” my dad said.
    “Just dreaming,” Robert Ashworth said. “Wife and I are talking about selling. Moving back here.”
    My father scratched his chin. “There’s a new development going in near the post office. Have you heard about it?”
    “Used to be the old Tunney place, wasn’t it?”
    A chance conversation. Pieces of information thrown back and forth. How different would my life be if that exchange hadn’t happened?
    The warden gave me the news about my father. I was escorted to his office, the statue of Christy Mathewson and Rogers Hornsby looking down on us. The warden was not a hardened, immovable man. He even offered me coffee or a bottle of water after he said, “Your father passed, son.”
    I just stared for the longest time, unable to speak.
    “I got the news this morning. I wish I could let you attend the funeral, but I can’t. Your brother told me they’ll bury him at Mount Pleasant. He said you were familiar with it.”
    I nodded.
    The warden opened a drawer and pulled out a notebook with a Wal-Mart sticker still on the back. $1.97. He ripped out a couple of pages and tossed the notebook across the desk. “We had a counselor here before the state cut funding. When he got these calls,he’d encourage the inmate to write out his feelings. I assume by what your brother told me that you and your dad were close.”
    “Yeah.”
    “If you’d like, I can open the chapel. Give you some time in there to remember. I could even call a chaplain if you want.”
    I gazed at Christy Mathewson’s glove and wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. “I’d like that. But I’d kind of like to be alone, if that’s okay.”
    The warden leaned forward, his elbows on the huge monthly calendar that filled his desk. “I see a lot of men come through here. Most of them deserve what they get. But I’ve watched you the past few years, and I swear I don’t know why you’re here. I read the papers like everybody. I was horrified when it happened.” He glanced at his brown, wrinkled hands. They looked like my dad’s hands—the way I remembered them. “The guards say the same thing. I know terrible stuff happened in here, but somebody’s been watching out for you.”
    The words washed over me like water. I had struck up a few friendships in Clarkston, but mostly I kept to myself.
    The next day, a guard led me to the chapel and closed the door. I stood at the back and studied the crude cross carved into the lectern. It almost felt like I was back at the old white church, hearing echoes of “Standing on the Promises,” “Trust and Obey,” “’Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus.”
    Hosea. Joel. Amos. Obadiah. Jonah. Micah. Nahum. Habakkuk. Zephaniah. Haggai. Zechariah. Malachi.
    I checked my watch. Pretty close to the service time back home. It struck me that it took death to get my mother and father out of the house. Other than doctors’ visits and the grocery store, they remained inside, partly by their own choice, partly because of me.
    Some couples dream of exotic travel in their old age. Europe. China. A cruise. My parents’ dreams were confined to the homethey had built together. They hibernated, content to see the world from a couple of La-Z-Boys, underneath a circling ceiling fan, staring at a 25-inch RCA. I had contributed to this choice. My crime was against them . I had created the polluted cloud that hung over their lives.
    I tried to picture the casket. My father’s pallid face. And my voice faltered, only a whisper, as I opened the notebook and read. “‘Talk to me of a father’s love, and I will tell you of baseball. Tell me of a tender touch or a hug that lasts in your memory, and I will kiss you with stories of our game. Walk with me in moonlight, tell me the ways your father expressed deep emotion, his innermost feelings, and I will tell you of pitchouts,