The Stepmother Made Her Wash Every Dish Until Grandpa Came Home Early

My name is Walter Prine, I am sixty-eight years old, and for a year my granddaughter called me every Sunday morning at eight o'clock from inside a closet. I could hear the coats. I told myself it was a game. A man tells himself a great many things when the alternative is a phone call he does not want to make to his own son. On the ninth of August my connecting flight through Denver was cancelled, and I drove eleven hours instead of waiting, and I came through my son's front door at twenty to nine at night and found a seven-year-old standing on a dining chair with her hands in the sink. This is all of it, chapter by chapter, from a cancelled flight to a pair of suitcases by a door.