Of course I didn’t write the book thinking I was speaking to my father. If I thought he’d be listening, I’m not at all sure what I could have said. But that’s a miracle of the page; it feels private, interior, an intimate chamber, but it’s an intimacy with all the doors and windows open.

I described walking the salt marshes in winter, at the end of Cape Cod, how their austerity and immensity suited my own grief. My father, at eighty-three, writes me a letter. He describes the way he’d walk the swampy edges of the Mississippi himself, sixty years ago, and how he loved the red-winged blackbirds that darted there, and the huge owl who’d turn his head to watch my father pass, and how in spring floods the farmers’ fields would sometimes fill with fish. He remembered a toothless bulldog he used to feed boiled hominy. My father is a master of non sequitur—he once wrote me a letter which passed from his approval of my divorce to the number of watermelons ripening in his garden within a single sentence—and so I wasn’t surprised that his letter suddenly shifted registers. What startled me was what he said: how he understood, reading my book, how I’d felt when I wanted to jump from a hotel balcony. He told me a story, how he’d been so discouraged, in 1975, that he’d emptied his bank account, took his pistol, parked the county truck he drove in a garage and got a bus for Des Moines, where I lived then. He would give me the money, and then shoot himself, that was the plan. But outside of White Sands, New Mexico, he seemed to "come to." He told the driver he wanted to go back to Tucson, and the driver stopped a westbound bus. My father picked up his truck, went back to work. "I still have the gun," he wrote.

And then it was back to flowers and shrubs, his laden grapefruit tree, the sparse new crop of pomegranates.

He’s never in his life spoken to me this way, never told me a story in which he seemed so helpless or so open. 1975: year before my mother died, year of the boxes of Miltown, his wife going mad in the back bedroom. Is it the first time he’s ever actually said what he felt? It’s the first time I’ve heard him. The gun—the gun he didn’t sell after all—has divided all three of us—my father, myself, my mother’s ghost—but now it turns in my memory, and manages to bring my old father and me nearer to each other, in closer proximity than we’ve ever been.

Which is not to say we are not awkward; too late to repair that, but it doesn’t matter; I don’t expect anything from him. Something between us seems complete.