Two colleagues in the April. My mother in the May, on the telephone, for about an hour.
Four people at the funeral in the September, including a woman I had never met, standing outside.
A page in the October, which is where most of this is from. Eleven hundred words and it did about nineteen thousand, which in a town like this is everybody.
And every single one of them has the same four things in it. The eleven dollars. The gummy ring. You’re not getting a cent. And twice in fourteen months.
And not one of them has the twenty-second of April in it.
I have been honest about the ages and honest about the job and honest about how it looks, and about four people have told me how brave that is.
It is not brave to admit the thing everyone can already see.
The only fact in this that nobody could have worked out on their own is the one I have left out of all thirty.
