My father’s car smelled like him for exactly three months after he died. Cedarwood, motor oil, the ghost of a cigar he’d been swearing off since 2018. I know this because every time I walked past the driveway, I’d catch a thread of it drifting through the cracked window, like he’d just stepped out to grab something from the garage and would be right back. He wasn’t coming back.
Gerald Eastwood, my dad, died on March 11th, 2025, a Wednesday morning. He was 61 years old. He dropped in the parking lot of the Richmond Raceway complex on East Laburnum Avenue, where he’d gone every spring to watch the preliminary NASCAR test laps, just like he’d done since before I was born. His heart gave out without warning.
No dramatic speech. No final words. No chance to say anything at all. I was at work when my uncle called.
I’m a project coordinator at a mid-size construction firm in the Scott’s Addition neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. I remember staring at my laptop screen for a solid four minutes after the call ended before my brain finished loading what I’d just been told. Dad was gone. Just gone.
He left behind a 2009 Ford Crown Victoria, dark navy blue, 187,000 miles on the odometer, parked in the driveway of the house on North 28th Street in Church Hill that he’d lived in since I was 11. He left behind a storage unit on Mechanicsville Turnpike stuffed with tools I’ll never know how to use. He left behind a subscription to a fishing magazine that still showed up in the mailbox every month, like it hadn’t gotten the memo. And he left behind me, his only child, Morgan Eastwood, 32 years old, standing in a Church Hill driveway on a thick Saturday morning in June, trying to convince myself it was just a car.
The date was June 14th, 2025, three months and three days since he died. Hot already at half past nine. The kind of Richmond summer heat that presses against you from all sides like a crowd you can’t get out of. The humidity sat at about 80 percent.
The sky was white and flat, the sun a suggestion behind a thin layer of haze. And the Crown Vic sat right there in the cracked concrete driveway like it always had. I had a buyer lined up. A guy named Dennis Ford, one of those no-nonsense men in their 50s who buy old American sedans because they respect things built to last.
He’d found the listing on Facebook Marketplace, texted me twice with calm, reasonable questions, and offered $3,800 without haggling. He was coming to look at the car the following Saturday, June 21st. That gave me one week to clean it out. Vacuum the seats, wipe down the dash, empty the trunk, go through the glove box.
The glove box. I stood in the driveway and looked at the car. I’d been avoiding it for weeks, walking around it when I parked my own truck out front, refusing to even glance at it directly. There’s a particular kind of grief that lives in objects.
Not in photos. Not in words. But in the things. The scuffed steering wheel.
The seat adjusted exactly right for a man who was 6’1″. The little pine tree air freshener hanging off the mirror that was so old it didn’t smell like anything anymore. Every one of those things was a land mine. But $3,800 was $3,800, and I’d been covering his mortgage on the Church Hill house, which I inherited, while also paying my own rent on my apartment over in the museum district.
I wasn’t drowning, but I wasn’t swimming easy either. The practical thing was to sell the car, settle the last of his affairs, and figure out what to do with the house. Practical. Right.
I pulled the spare key from my front pocket. The same key I’d had since I was 16, cut for me so I could move the car off the street on street cleaning days when Dad was at work. I unlocked the door. The smell hit me immediately.
Cedarwood, motor oil, that ghost of a cigar. I sat in the driver’s seat and didn’t move for a while. The leather was cracked at the seams. There was a Richmond Times-Dispatch from February 2025 folded on the passenger seat.
A to-go cup from Buzz and Ned’s barbecue on Boulevard sat in the cup holder, long empty, the paper sleeve faded from sitting in the sun. His driving glasses, the ones he refused to wear in front of people because they made him look like a professor, sat on the dash. I put them in the small paper bag I’d brought and kept moving. The trunk was manageable.
Jumper cables, a folded emergency blanket still in its packaging, a lug wrench, a church program from last Easter at Second Baptist Church on Haines Avenue. I didn’t look at it too long. The backseat had nothing. Then I opened the glove box.
There were the expected things first. The car’s insurance card, current through October 2025 because he’d paid it six months ahead. That was so deeply, painfully Dad that I had to stop for a second. A vehicle registration.
A folded AAA card. An old pen with a chewed cap. And then, tucked behind all of it, pressed flat against the back wall of the glove box like it was trying to hide, a white legal-size envelope. No stamp.
No postmark. Just a name written in blue ballpoint ink on the front, in handwriting I knew as well as I knew my own face in the mirror. Morgan. My name.
My father’s handwriting. I didn’t open it, not right away. I sat in that hot car with the envelope in my hands, the June heat pressing through the windshield, and I just looked at it. My name, written by a man who had been dead for three months.
Written deliberately. Hidden deliberately. Put in a place he knew I would eventually find it. Why didn’t he just give it to me?
That thought hit me like a slow cold wave. He’d had time. Whatever was in this envelope, he’d had time to hand it to me, to mail it, to call me and say, “Son, there’s something I need to tell you. ” He’d had every opportunity.
He chose the glove box. I set the envelope on the passenger seat next to his driving glasses. Then I found the second thing. Behind where the envelope had been, so thin I almost missed it, a photograph.
Old. The colors were the slightly washed-out warm tones of a photo printed in the late 1990s. It showed a woman I had never seen in my life. She looked around 30 in the picture.
She was Black, with natural hair pulled back, and she was laughing at something off camera. Genuine, unguarded laughter. She wore a yellow sundress, and behind her I could see what looked like the Virginia Capital Trail along the James River. I recognized the tree line.
On the back of the photograph, again in Dad’s handwriting, were two things: a name, Jane, and a date, August 1994. I was born in July 1993. I was five weeks old in August 1994. Jane.
I had never heard my father say that name once in 32 years. I got out of the car. I needed air, which was funny because the June air in Richmond was so thick it barely counted. I walked to the end of the driveway and stood at the edge of the sidewalk and looked at the row of old brick houses lining the block.
I thought about what I knew about my father. Born October 3rd, 1963, in Petersburg, Virginia. Raised by his mother, Patricia Eastwood, after his own father left when Gerald was nine. Patricia had died in 2007.
Gerald had never remarried. My mother, Sandra Eastwood, née Cooper, had died when I was four years old in 1997, a car accident on Interstate 95 near Chester. I had no memory of her, only photographs. Gerald had raised me alone in this house, worked 26 years as a civil engineer for the city of Richmond, and built a quiet, decent, orderly life.
That was everything I knew. That was what I thought was everything. A photograph of a woman named Jane, laughing beside the James River in August 1994, said otherwise. I went back to the car.
I picked up the envelope with my name on it. I picked up the photograph. I locked the Crown Vic, walked up the porch steps of the house, unlocked the front door, went inside to the kitchen, and sat down at the same table where I’d done homework for 12 years. And I opened the envelope.
The letter was four pages long, handwritten, both sides of each page, in my father’s precise civil engineer’s penmanship. Every letter formed like it had been measured and approved. He’d dated it at the top: February 14th, 2025, Valentine’s Day, 25 days before he died. “I have been trying to tell you this for two years,” the letter began.
“Every time you came over for dinner, every time we drove out to Lake Anna to fish, every time I picked up the phone to call you at night, I would get as far as knowing I needed to say it, and then I would run out of courage. I am not a coward in most things, Morgan, but I was a coward in this one. I am writing it down because I know I may not get another chance to find the right moment, and you deserve to know the truth. You have always deserved to know.
”
My hands were perfectly steady. That surprised me. I’d expected them to shake. In the summer of 1994, my father had been 30 years old and seven years into his career with the city of Richmond.
My mother, Sandra, had died three years earlier. Wait. I had to stop and reread that. My mother, Sandra, had died in a car accident in 1997.
That was the story I’d been told my whole life. But Dad’s letter said otherwise. Sandra had not died in 1997. Sandra and Gerald had separated in 1993, shortly after I was born.
Quietly. Mutually. With no lawyers and no drama, the way people from certain generations end marriages when they don’t have the language or the courage for formal proceedings. By August of 1994, they were living separately.
Sandra had moved to her sister’s home in Hampton, Virginia. They were functionally over. That summer, August 1994, Gerald met Jane. Her full name was Jane Louise Givens.
She was 29, a Richmond native, a schoolteacher at John Marshall High School on West Marshall Street. She and Gerald had met at a barbecue hosted by a mutual friend in the North Side neighborhood. He described it in the letter with the kind of detail that told me he’d played it in his mind 10,000 times. The paper plates.
The sound of an ice chest lid. The yellow sundress. “She was the funniest person I had ever met,” he wrote. “Not performance funny.
Genuinely funny, the kind that comes out sideways when she wasn’t trying. She made me feel like a younger man. She made me feel like I hadn’t lost everything when your mother and I fell apart. ”
They were together for two years, not casually.
Seriously. Dad described taking her to Petersburg to meet his mother, Patricia, who apparently loved her immediately. He described Sunday mornings driving out to Ashland for breakfast. He described her grading papers at his kitchen table on weeknights while he read beside her.
He described falling completely in love with her. And then he described losing her. In late 1996, Jane was diagnosed with a condition that damaged her kidneys progressively over the following year. She and Gerald managed the relationship through her treatment, and by 1997, the same year I had always believed my mother died, it was Jane who was gone.
She passed in April 1997. She was 32 years old. Dad had buried her quietly and retreated into raising me and working. He had created a simple, clean story—a car accident on I-95—to explain to a small child why there was no mother in the house.
He never revisited it. By the time I was old enough to ask real questions, the story had calcified into fact. Except it hadn’t been Sandra who died at all. Sandra, my biological mother, was alive.
“As of the time I am writing this letter,” Dad wrote, “your mother, Sandra, is 60 years old. She lives in Virginia Beach. She remarried in 2001. Her name now is Sandra Patricia Holloway.
She has two children from her second marriage, your half-siblings, a son and a daughter. I have her current address. It is on the last page of this letter. ”
I put the pages down on the kitchen table.
I pressed both palms flat on the wood and breathed. My mother was alive. My mother was alive and living in Virginia Beach, and she had been alive my entire life, and my father had carried this secret from the time I was four years old and had constructed a dead woman out of thin air to stand in her place so that I would never go looking. I was not angry yet, not in that first moment.
I was something prior to anger, something cold and still, like the seconds before a car accident, when everything slows down and your brain is still catching up to the physics of what’s about to happen. I made coffee. I know that sounds absurd. My entire life had just been restructured from the foundation, and I made a pot of coffee.
But I needed something to do with my hands, and the coffee maker on Dad’s counter had been there since 1999, and the routine of it gave me something to grip while my mind processed what I’d just read. I kept reading. He explained his reasoning. I’ll give him this—he didn’t try to make himself sound heroic.
He wrote plainly: “Sandra left. I didn’t handle it well. I was angry and ashamed, and when you were old enough to start asking about your mother, I told you she had died because I didn’t know how to tell a 4-year-old that she had simply chosen not to stay. I told myself I would correct it when you were older.
I told myself there would be a right time. There never was. Every year that passed, the lie became more load-bearing, and I became more afraid of what removing it would do to the structure. ”
Load-bearing.
That’s an engineer’s word for a wall you can’t just knock down. A wall the whole house depends on. He’d built me on top of a load-bearing lie, and then spent 28 years praying the ceiling never fell in. I read the last page.
The address was there, just as he’d promised. An address on Holly Springs Court in the Pembroke Meadows neighborhood of Virginia Beach. Sandra Patricia Holloway. Then I called my best friend, a guy I’ve known since middle school at Wythe Martin Elementary on Roanoke Street.
Darnell Cooper. Different Cooper, no relation to my mother’s maiden name. Just one of those coincidences Richmond throws at you. Darnell is 33, works as a paramedic out of Station Nine on Commerce Road, and he has a rare superpower: knowing when to talk and when to just be quiet.
I called him at 11:47 a. m. “I need you to come to my dad’s house. Church Hill.
”
A pause. “You all right? ”
“No. I mean, physically, yes, but no.
”
He came. He was there by 12:30, still in his off-duty clothes, jeans and a gray Virginia Union T-shirt, and he sat across from me at the kitchen table and read the letter. Not a summary. The actual letter.
All four pages. When he finished, he set it down and said, “So, your mom’s in Virginia Beach? ”
“Apparently. ”
“And she’s been alive your whole life?
”
“Apparently. ”
“And your dad made up a car accident? ”
“Yes. ”
Darnell rubbed the back of his neck the way he does when he’s thinking hard.
“Okay,” he finally said. “What do you want to do? ”
That was the right question. Not “How do you feel?
” Though I knew he would ask that, too, eventually. But first, “What do you want to do? ” Because I am a person who needs the action before I can process the emotion. “I want to find out if she knows I exist.
” That stopped him. He looked up. “Because,” my voice was steadier than I expected, “my father tells me she left, but I don’t know what she was told. I don’t know if she was told I existed.
I don’t know anything about her side of this. ”
Darnell was quiet for a moment. “That’s fair. That’s a real question.
”
It was. And I didn’t know yet what the answer would cost me. That afternoon, I did what any person with access to Google and unresolved feelings does. I searched for Sandra Holloway, Virginia Beach, Virginia.
She had a Facebook profile, set to mostly private, but the profile photo was public. And I stopped breathing for a solid 10 seconds. She was 60. Dad’s letter had said 60, but seeing it was different from reading it.
She looked like a woman who laughed often and slept well. There were smile lines around her eyes. Her hair was natural, cut short. She was wearing a yellow blouse in the photo.
I looked at my own face in the reflection of the laptop screen. I have my father’s jaw and his height, but I have never known where my eyes came from. That particular shape, the depth of them, the slight downward tilt at the outer corners that people always say gives me a serious look, even when I’m laughing. I was looking at where they came from right now.
I spent the rest of that day and all of Sunday trying to decide what to do. By Monday morning, June 16th, I had made exactly one concrete decision. I was going to Virginia Beach. Not to show up at her door unannounced.
I’m not a dramatic person by nature, whatever this story might suggest, but to see the neighborhood, to get close enough to the reality that I could think clearly. I told my supervisor at work I needed two personal days. She didn’t push. I’d used almost none of my personal time all year, and she knew I’d just lost my father.
I left Richmond on Tuesday, June 17th, at 7:00 a. m. in my truck, heading east on I-64 toward the coast. It’s roughly 100 miles from Church Hill to Virginia Beach, under two hours.
I found Holly Springs Court in the Pembroke Meadows neighborhood. It’s a quiet, established residential street. Mature oaks. Brick ranchers.
Well-kept lawns. The kind of neighborhood that was built in the late 1970s and has been quietly stable ever since. I drove down it once, slowly. I did not stop.
I went and got breakfast at a diner on Virginia Beach Boulevard and sat in a corner booth for an hour, drinking coffee I didn’t need and deciding whether I was going to do the thing I was already clearly going to do. I decided to write her a letter. Not show up. Not call.
A letter, because that seemed to be the language of the situation. My father had written me a letter. The only response that felt right was another letter. I wrote it in the diner in a notebook I’d brought, and I said exactly what was true: that I was Gerald Eastwood’s son, that he had passed away in March, that I had found his letter in a car I was preparing to sell, and that I had no expectations and no agenda, only one question.
Did she know I existed? Had she tried to find me? I mailed it from a Virginia Beach post office on Pacific Avenue at 10:41 a. m.
on June 17th, 2025. Then I drove home. I didn’t tell anyone except Darnell. Not my uncle, my father’s younger brother Raymond Eastwood, who lived out in Chesterfield County.
Not my co-workers. Not the woman I’d been seeing for about four months, Helen Nathanson, the physical therapist I’d met at a mutual friend’s birthday dinner in Carytown. I told Darnell, and I waited. I didn’t know it yet, but the letter was going to take exactly nine days to produce a response.
And when that response came, it wasn’t going to come back through the mail. The call came on Thursday, June 26th, 2025, at 12:14 p. m. A Virginia Beach area code, 757.
I was at my desk in Scott’s Addition, reviewing load calculations for a project out in Pump, and my phone lit up with a number I didn’t recognize. I picked up before the second ring. “Is this Morgan? ” A woman’s voice.
Clear, steady, with the particular cadence of someone who has rehearsed the opening of a phone call several times. “Yes. This is Morgan. ”
A pause.
Three seconds, maybe four. “This is Sandra Holloway. I got your letter. ”
I had prepared for this call in theory.
In practice, my mind went completely quiet, the way a room goes quiet when someone cuts the music without warning. I heard the hum of the office around me, somebody’s printer running in the background, Darnell’s old advice: let the other person talk first. “I’m glad you called. ” And I meant it.
It was true. And it was the right amount of words. She exhaled. “I’ve been sitting with your letter since Monday.
My husband, Robert, he knows. He read it with me. I didn’t want to call without thinking about it carefully, because I didn’t want to start something and then not be able to finish it. ”
“I understand that.
”
“Do you know what your father told you about me? ” she asked. “About why I wasn’t there. ”
“He told me you were dead.
” The silence that followed that sentence was the loudest silence I have ever experienced. “He told me you died in a car accident on I-95 when I was four. I found out the truth when I found the letter he left me in his car. He wrote it in February.
He died in March. He never got a chance to tell me in person. ”
Another long pause. Then: “Morgan, I have to tell you something, and I need you to understand that I need you to let me finish before you respond.
”
“Go ahead. ”
“I knew you were alive. I knew exactly where you were. I knew your father’s address on North 28th Street.
I drove past it three times between 1997 and 2001. ” A breath. “I did not stop, because I was told by your father in very clear terms in 1993, when you were newborn, that if I left, I was leaving completely. That I was not to come back to that house or to you.
He said it without anger. He was very calm. He said, ‘Sandra, if you walk out, you don’t come back halfway. ’ And I believed he meant it.
And I was young and ashamed, and I walked. ”
My throat was tight. “He told you not to come back. ”
“He told me not to come back.
”
Her voice cracked slightly, just at the edge. “I have not spent a day in 32 years not wondering about you. I have pictures of you. Your father sent me three photos.
One when you were two. One when you were six. One when you were ten. He never wrote anything with them.
Just the photos in envelopes, no return address. I kept all three. ”
She had kept them. He had sent them.
I thought about my father and his engineer’s way of doing things. Methodical. Structured. Building walls and load-bearing lies, but unable to completely sever the connection.
Sending photographs with no words. A man trying to do right by two different people in the most poorly designed way imaginable. He was not a villain. That was the hardest part.
He wasn’t a villain. He was a man who made a bad decision at 30 years old and then spent the next 31 years engineering his life around it without ever quite finding the courage to dismantle the structure. “I don’t know what to do with any of this yet,” I told her honestly. “Neither do I.
But I’m glad you wrote. I’m glad you exist, Morgan. I have been glad about that since the day you were born. I just never got to say it.
”
We talked for an hour and 40 minutes. Not about everything. There’s no way to cover 32 years in a phone call. But the basic architecture.
She had married a man named Robert Holloway in 2001, a retired Navy officer who now worked in logistics consulting. They had two children: a son named Deshawn, who was 22 and in his last year at Old Dominion University, and a daughter named Camille, who was 19 and studying nursing at Norfolk State. My half-siblings. Two people walking around in Virginia Beach who shared my blood and had no idea I existed until Monday of this week.
When I told Darnell that night, he sat across from me at a table at Brenner Pass restaurant on Elwood Avenue, where we’d gone because I needed real food and somewhere that wasn’t my apartment, and he just shook his head slowly. “Man. I know. Your whole life.
”
“I know. ”
“He just kept it going. He ran out of road. ” I meant it as gently as it sounds.
He’d gone so far down that road that turning around would have meant demolishing everything. He was afraid of what demolishing everything would do to me. Darnell turned his beer slowly in his hands. “Were you his reason or his excuse?
”
That question sat between us like a stone. “Both. ” The honest answer was both. And I think Dad knew that, too.
Which was probably why he’d never been able to say it out loud. I met Sandra Holloway in person on Saturday, July 5th, 2025. 19 days after I’d found the letter. 18 days after I’d mailed mine.
She suggested a neutral location: a coffee shop in the Short Pump Town Center area of Henrico County, roughly halfway between Richmond and Virginia Beach. Public. Quiet enough to talk. Easy to leave if either of us needed to.
Robert Holloway drove her. I got there 10 minutes early and sat facing the door. Sandra Holloway walked in at exactly the agreed-upon time, 11:00 a. m.
, and I knew her immediately. Not from the Facebook photo, though that helped. I knew her the way you recognize something you’ve been looking for without knowing you were looking. She had my eyes.
That exact shape. That same slight downward tilt at the outer corners. She stopped a few feet inside the door, and we looked at each other. Neither of us said anything for a moment.
Then she smiled. Careful. Uncertain. Real.
And said, “You look like your father. ”
“I’ve been told. ” A beat. “But I think I have your eyes.
”
That broke something open in her face in the most quiet way. She didn’t cry. Not right then. She just nodded and came to the table and sat down.
We talked for three hours. I asked her to tell me about herself. She asked me to tell her about myself. We moved slowly, like two people on a frozen lake who aren’t yet certain of the ice.
She told me about teaching elementary school in Virginia Beach for 22 years before she retired. She told me about Robert, who sounded steady and decent. She told me about Deshawn’s obsession with marine biology and Camille’s ambitions in health care. She asked me about my work, my apartment in the museum district, my father’s house in Church Hill.
When I told her about his death, the parking lot, the NASCAR laps, the Wednesday morning in March, her expression went to a place I recognized: the face of someone processing the death of a person they had complicated feelings about. Not grief, exactly. Not indifference. Something in between that doesn’t have a clean name.
“Was he happy? ” she asked. “I think so, in a quiet way. He was never a loud happy person, but he fished.
He followed NASCAR. He made his coffee exactly right every morning, like it was a religious ritual. He had a good friend group, guys he’d known for 30 years. He came to everything that mattered in my life.
” A pause. “He was a good father. ”
She nodded. “I believe that.
He was just a bad narrator of his own life. ” She looked at her coffee cup. “He wasn’t the only one. I should have found a way.
Regardless of what he said in 1993, I should have found a way to at least tell you I was out there. I’m not going to sit here and make myself the victim of his decision. I made choices, too. ”
That cost her something to say.
I could hear it. “I’m not here to assign blame,” I told her. And I meant it. “He’s gone.
Whatever accounting needs to happen between the two of you, that’s between you and whatever you believe comes next. I’m here because I want to know who I actually am. And part of that is knowing who you are. ”
She reached across the table and put her hand over mine for just a moment.
Quick. Careful. Not presumptuous. Then she pulled back.
“I would like to know who you are, too, if you’ll let me. ”
I did not sell the Crown Victoria to Dennis Ford. I called him on June 22nd, the day after he came to look at the car, and told him I’d decided to hold on to it. He was gracious about it.
I think he could hear something in my voice that told him this wasn’t about the money. I drove that car down to Virginia Beach on July 5th to meet Sandra. I’m not sure why, exactly. Maybe because it had started everything.
Maybe because driving it felt like a conversation with Dad I couldn’t have any other way. Maybe because 187,000 miles means a car has been somewhere, and it deserved to go somewhere new. The engine ran smooth the whole way down I-64. In the weeks that followed, the arrangements were cautious and incremental.
The way they should be when you’re building something new out of wreckage. I had a video call with Deshawn in mid-July. He was 22, broad-shouldered, studying marine biology at Old Dominion, with an easy, open manner that made the strangeness of the situation feel slightly less strange. He asked me what music I liked and seemed genuinely surprised when I mentioned jazz.
“Mom likes jazz. ” He looked like he wasn’t sure how to continue that sentence. I met Camille in August, briefly, when Sandra came to Richmond for an afternoon. She was 19, quieter than Deshawn, studying nursing at Norfolk State, and she watched me the way medical people watch things: taking inventory, not committing to conclusions yet.
I respected it. My uncle Raymond came to know everything by mid-August, when I sat with him at his house in Chesterfield County and read him the relevant parts of the letter. Raymond is 57, eight years younger than Dad, and he sat in silence for a long time afterward. “He never told me,” he finally said.
“Not once in 32 years. ” Raymond shook his head, and I saw something in his face that I think was grief meeting admiration and not being sure which to feel more. “He always did think he could engineer his way out of anything. He almost could.
Almost. ”
I told Helen about it on a Sunday afternoon in late August, sitting on the back porch of her apartment in Carytown. She listened the way she does, fully, without interrupting. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment, then said, “How are you doing with it?
”
“Better than I expected. Some days worse, but better in general. ”
“Because it explains things? ”
“Because it explains things.
”
I’ve spent 32 years with a small, quiet confusion living in me. A background static I couldn’t identify, about why I felt like some part of the story was missing. Like there was a room in the house I’d never been allowed to open. I looked at the late August light coming through the maple tree in her yard.
Now I know what was in the room. “Is it worse than you expected? Or better? ”
I thought about Sandra’s eyes.
About the photographs he’d sent her: a 2-year-old, a 6-year-old, a 10-year-old, with no words and no return address. About a man who drove to Virginia Beach three times and never stopped. About an engineer who knew that sometimes the most dangerous thing you can do to a structure is try to fix it. “It’s just true.
”
“It’s just true. ”
“And that’s enough. ”
“It’s actually enough. ”
The Crown Victoria sat in the driveway of the Church Hill house, which I’ve decided to keep.
I’m not ready to sell it yet, the house or the car. Some things you hold on to while you figure out what they mean. Dad would understand that. He held on to plenty.
I left the glove box empty. Whatever comes next, it’s not going in there.
