I turned seventy-one. On my birthday, I sat on the porch at the point by myself and thought about how many summers I had left. Five? Ten? If I was lucky, fifteen.
And I thought about Nile.
When Nile was in the hospital, those last two days, he couldn’t talk much. The stroke took most of his words. But on the second night, he asked for a pen. The nurse brought him one, and a pad of paper from the nurses’ station. And he wrote something in his big, shaky
