The last one said, LANEY — 14 MO. — AUG 2.
Seven days before he was gone.
I pulled the flat carpenter’s pencil from the coffee tin in my bag.
I had carried that tin across town on my lap.
My mother laughed through tears, wiped her face on her sleeve, and nodded.
I stood against the frame.
She drew a line over my head.
Underneath it, in my father’s block letters, as best I could copy them, I wrote: LANEY — 18 YRS.
My mother stepped back and looked at it for a long time.
“He would’ve said you got his lucky stamp,” she said.
Two weeks earlier, she had offered to pay for a specialist, any specialist, if I wanted the mark gone.
She’d cried when she said it.
I’d told her no.
I told her again now.
“It’s mine,” I said. “It’s his. I’m keeping it.”
She kissed my forehead right on the mark.
