He put on his glasses and sat in the rocking chair on the back porch. He read slowly so he wouldn’t have to move his lips, but still, if he’d been in front of the house, where anybody could see him, he would have felt uncomfortable. When he finished, he removed his spectacles and folded the letter along its original creases. The stationery was smooth and very white, unlike the skin of his hands, which resembled coarse sandpaper. He’d understood the letter, despite his initial fear that some of the words, elegantly handwritten in black ink on both sides of the page, could stump him. “Imperative” was the only one that had given him trouble. He’d had an idea of what it might mean, but he’d wanted to be sure, and so he’d picked up the dictionary the girl had left in the house, and that had done the trick: his son-in-law needed help—urgently, a lot, whatever it might take. He’d understood the rest of the letter with no trouble. At the end, his son-in-law had written, “I leave it in your hands,”
