What I want you to know is that I protected what I could protect. The annuity accounts are yours. Only yours. Not the estate. Yours personally. Gerald knows the details.
There is also an account I kept in my name alone that I never told you about because I wanted it to be a surprise. It is not enormous, but it is enough for you to do the thing you said you wanted to do in 1989 when you stood in front of that place with the hole in the ceiling and said you needed more time.
Go back, Thomas.
Go back and take Eli.
Tell him about the hole in the ceiling and be quiet with him underneath it.
That is the version of this story I want to have happened.
I love you. I will always love you.
Be careful.
But not too careful.
That was always your problem. You were so careful with everything that sometimes you forgot to live.
Dorothy.
I sat at the kitchen table until the room went dark.
I was not thinking about airports or documents or news cameras.
I was thinking about a parking lot in Columbus in 1981, the year we started the company. Dorothy stood beside me looking at the sign I had just paid to install.
Hargrove and Sons Construction.
The sons were theoretical at the time.
“Sons?” she had said. “You’re optimistic.”
“I’m hoping,” I said.
She took my hand.
I went back to Rome in March, six months after the verdict.
I took Eli.
He had asked me twelve times in the months between, and I told him twelve times I was working on it. That was true. I told him he would know when we were going. That was also true, because I told him the night before we left.
We stayed near Piazza Navona, in the same neighborhood as before.
The Pantheon was fifteen minutes away on foot.
We walked there on the second afternoon.
It was a weekday, and the line was not long. We went inside, and the dome rose over us just as I remembered. The oculus let in a long shaft of light that moved across the marble floor as the earth turned, the way it has been moving since the Romans poured that concrete two thousand years ago.
Eli stood underneath it and tipped his head back.
He did not speak for a long time.
Then he said, “Grandpa, do you think Grandma can see this from wherever she is?”
“I think she picked the weather,” I said.
He thought about that.
Then he nodded like I had given the right answer.
On the last day, we threw coins into the Trevi Fountain.
Eli was very serious about the technique.
“You have to throw it over your left shoulder with your right hand,” he said. “Or it doesn’t count.”
“Where did you read that?”
“I looked it up in advance. I wanted to do it correctly.”
That was so thoroughly Dorothy that I had to look away for a moment.
I threw my coin.
He threw his.
The coin hit the water and disappeared into the blue.
“There,” Eli said. “Now we have to come back.”
I put my hand on his shoulder.
The afternoon light moved over the water. Rome went about its business around us, pigeons and tourists and a man nearby selling photographs, all of it entirely indifferent to the fact that I was standing there alive, whole, seventy years old, with my grandson beside me.
That is either the most ordinary thing in the world or the most remarkable.
It depends on the road you took to get there.
Carol Beaumont calls me on the first Sunday of every month.
She is currently in Boise on a travel nurse contract. Before that, she was in Charlotte. Before that, Tucson. She has been everywhere.