I say all that because when people hear this story they picture a woman sitting by a window for forty years, and I want to be accurate: I had a life. It was not a waiting room.
It just had a door in it that I never opened, and I knew exactly where the door was, and about four times a year I would find myself standing near it.
On my fiftieth birthday I got out the road atlas. I did not do anything with it. I sat on this floor with an atlas on my knees for about half an hour and then put it back in the cupboard under the stairs.
That is what it looked like from the inside. Not a vigil. A road atlas, once a decade, put back.
Why he walked away.
Sam Haverty was born on the eleventh of February, 1986.
Gil married Adele in the June of 1986. The letter telling me came in the August.
