got up from my chair. I walked around the table. I put my arms around my son’s wet shoulders.
He leaned against me and cried like he was twelve years old again, with a splinter in his thumb, and his father had just told him to suck it up.
“It’s all right,” I said.
“It’s not all right.”
“No,” I agreed. “It’s not. But you’re here. You put up the shutters. That’s a start.”
The storm passed in the night.
In the morning, the sky was scrubbed clean and blue.
