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By Root 514 0

and not just a laugh. Such a bright man, you were sincere by design and not merely by nature, American by personal fiat, and you would embrace all that was good in that. Is it called naïveté when you’re naive on purpose? You would go on picnics. You would take conventional vacations to national monuments. You would sing O’er the la-and of the free! at the top of your tuneless voice at Mets games, and never with a smirk. The United States, you claimed, was on the existential cutting edge. It was a country whose prosperity was without precedence, where virtually everyone had enough to eat; a country that strove for justice and offered up nearly every entertainment and sport, every religion, ethnicity, occupation, and political affiliation to be had, with a wild wealth of landscapes, of flora and fauna and weather. If it was not possible to have a fine, rich, sumptuous life in this country, with a beautiful wife and a healthy, growing boy, then it was not possible anywhere. And even now, I believe that you may be right. But that it may not be possible anywhere.

9 P.M. (BACK HOME)

The waitress was tolerant, but the Bagel Café was closing. And printout may be impersonal, but it’s easier on the eye. For that matter, I worry that throughout that handwritten passage you’ve been skimming, reading ahead. I worry that the instant you spotted “Chatham” up top you could think of nothing else, and that you for once couldn’t care less about my feelings for the United States. Chatham. I go to Chatham?

I do. I go at every opportunity. Fortunately, these journeys every two weeks up to Claverack Juvenile Correctional Facility are aimed at such a restrictive window of visiting hours that I am not free to consider going an hour later or another day. I leave at exactly 11:30 because it is the first Saturday of the month and I must arrive immediately after the second lunch slot at 2:00. I do not indulge myself in reflection over how much I dread going to see him, or, more improbably, look forward to it. I just go.

You’re astonished. You shouldn’t be. He’s my son, too, and a mother should visit her child in prison. I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules. If anything, following the letter of the unwritten parental law was one of my failings. That came out in the trial—the civil suit. I was appalled by how upstanding I looked on paper. Vince Mancini, Mary’s lawyer, accused me in court of visiting my son so dutifully in detention during his own trial only because I anticipated being sued for parental negligence. I was acting a part, he claimed, going through the motions. Of course, the trouble with jurisprudence is that it cannot accommodate subtleties. Mancini was onto something. There may indeed be an element of theater in these visits. But they continue when no one is watching, because if I am trying to prove that I am a good mother, I am proving this, dismally, as it happens, to myself.

Kevin himself has been surprised by my dogged appearances, which is not to say, in the beginning at least, pleased. Back in 1999, at sixteen, he was still at that age when to be seen with your mother was embarrassing; how bittersweetly these truisms about teenagers persist through the most adult of troubles. And in those first few visits he seemed to regard my very presence as an accusation, so before I said a single word he’d get angry. It didn’t seem sensible that he should be the one mad at me.

But in the same vein, when a car nearly sideswipes me in a crosswalk, I’ve noticed that the driver is frequently furious—shouting, gesticulating, cursing—at me, whom he nearly ran over and who had the undisputed right of way. This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad. If I’d had the presence back then to seize on the first part of that proof, I might have glimpsed in Kevin’s instantaneous