I was thirty-one and already done with the mill. Now I spent my days making sure my father remembered to eat.
Last Tuesday, he handed me a tiny plastic bag. Inside was a single button.
‘I found this in your old closet,’ he said. Then he said something I'd waited twenty years to hear.
I was eleven. The beer league championship. My dad was supposed to come. He worked double shifts instead.
Before the game, I lost a button off my jersey. The league commissioner, Mr. Delgado, found a spare in his car. He gave it to me in that little bag, told me to keep it for luck.
I had kept that button all those years without thinking. Now my father held it.
‘I'm sorry I missed that game,’ he said. ‘I was wrong to put the mill first.’
He was already forgetting what he ate for breakfast. But he remembered that apology.
It came late. But it came.