“There was no way to take the story back, folding it neatly into the place I'd keptit all this time. No matterwhat else happened, from here on out, I would always remember Wes, becausewith this telling, he'd become part of that story, of my story, too.”

“The worst part was that I had things I wanted to tell my mother, too many to count, but none of them would go down so easy. She'd been through too much, between my siters-I could not add to the weight. So instead, I did my best to balance it out, bit by bit, word by word, story by story, even if none of them were true.”

“But those words were only the middle of the story. There was a beginning here, too.”

“Isn't it weird," I said, "the way you remember things, when someone's gone?"What do you mean?"I ate another piece of waffle. "When my dad first died, all I could think about was that day. It's taken me so long to be able to think back to before that, to everything else."Wes was nodding before I even finished. "It's even worse when someone's sick for a long time," he said. "You forget they were ever healthy, ever okay. It's like there was never a time when you weren't waiting for something awful to happen."But there was," I said. "I mean, it's only been in the last few months that I've started remembering all this good stuff, funny stuff about my dad. I can't believe I ever forgot it in the first place."You didn't forget," Wes said, taking a sip of his water. "You just couldn't remember right then. But now you're ready to, so you can."I thought about this as I finished off my waffle.”

“I wondered which was harder, in the end. The act of telling, or who you told it to. Or maybe if, when you finally got it out, the story was really all that mattered.”

“But it was too early to know: there were always more pages to go, more words to be written, before the story was over.”

“There was no short answer to this; like so much else, it was a long story. But what really makes any story real is knowing someone will hear it. And understand.”