Page 604 begins mid-paragraph, in the middle of a scene about a car, and then there’s a line break and the typeface changes because he’d switched ribbons, and it says: Michael, if you are reading this then I am dead and you are old enough, and I have to tell you that the man who came to the house that November was not a friend of mine and I did know he was coming. Then eleven pages, single-spaced, no chapter headings, no attempt at the third person anymore. The night I have carried since I was nine — the noise, my mother taking me out to the car in a coat over pajamas, the version where my father was somewhere else — is not what happened. He was there. He’d arranged for the man to come. He’d been paying a debt off for two years and had run out of ways to do it quietly, and what happened in that kitchen happened because he’d chosen the least bad hour for it and had gotten it wrong.
He wrote that he’d told my mother a story that night and stuck to it for thirty-one years. He wrote that she’d believed it for maybe six months and then hadn’t, and that neither of them ever said so, and that this was the actual reason for the thing my sister and I always called how they are. Then he wrote about watching me tell the story wrong at a Thanksgiving in 2003 — my version, the one where he was at work — and how he’d sat there and let me finish and then gone out to the garage. He put the date of that Thanksgiving in. He put everything in. Fifteen years of a man going down to a basement three nights a week to type a confession into a novel because the sentence would not come out of his mouth in a room with people in it.
I stopped reading for nine days after page 604. Then I went back and finished it, and the last two hundred pages are not about that night at all — they’re about my mother, and they are the most tender thing I have ever read, and about a third of it is stuff I did not know about her. He wrote her death in 2011 twice: once as it happened, and then again, two chapters later, the way he’d have wanted it to go. Both versions are in there. He never went back and cut either one, and I think that’s because he was never once writing for a reader.
I’ve had it three years now. My sister has read to page 600 and has decided that’s where she’s stopping, and I have not argued with her about it, because I understand exactly what she’s protecting and it isn’t mine to take. I’ve had two people ask whether I’d publish it and the answer is no, not ever, not any part of it. What I did do was drive to the town it’s set in last spring and sit outside a house that has other people’s curtains in the windows now. And I keep thinking about a man carrying a thing alone from 1979 to 1994, typing it out in a basement, addressing eleven pages to a nine-year-old who wouldn’t be old enough for thirty years — and then getting up, and coming upstairs, and asking me how school was.
