Chapter 8: What Holt Said
Daniel had a contact in the faculty office — a woman named Carol who had worked the administrative desk for twenty years and had known Daniel since he used to pick me up from evening classes in his first year of driving.
Carol had not been in the room.
But the walls in that building were old, and the office next to Dr.
Marsh's was empty on Thursday afternoons.
"He denied it," Daniel said.
"At first.
He told her the syllabus was a misunderstanding, that the thesis was listed as a 'complex example' rather than a negative one."
"And?" I said.
"And Dr.
Marsh showed him the syllabus heading.
The exact words.
'Common Structural Failures.' He went quiet for a while.
Then he said — " Daniel paused.
"He said, 'The man is sixty-eight years old.
He was never going to use the degree.
I didn't think it would matter.'"
I set my coffee cup down.
"He said that," I said.
"That's what Carol heard."
I looked out the kitchen window at the garden.
The light was going.
The roses were dark shapes against the fence.
"What did Marsh say?" I asked.
"She said, 'That is precisely the problem, Professor.' And then she told him the meeting was concluded and that he would be hearing from the university formally within the week."
I was quiet for a moment.
"Daniel," I said.
"I want to ask you something honestly."
"Okay."
"When you and Paul decided I was wasting my time going back to school — was that what you actually believed?
That I was never going to use it?"
The line was silent for several seconds.
"Yes," he said.
"That's what we believed."
"And now?"
Another pause.
Longer.
"Now I think we were asking the wrong question," he said.
"We kept asking what you were going to do with a degree.
We never asked what the degree was going to do for you." He stopped.
"Mom's letter made that pretty clear."
"She had a way of doing that," I said.
"Dad — what are you going to do?
With all of this, I mean.
With Holt, with the degree, with — everything."
I thought about Priya and her grandmother who learned accounting at seventy-two.
I thought about Dr.
Marsh reading my thesis the night before our meeting.
I thought about Lily with her list of questions, waiting for seven o'clock.
"I'm going to call Lily," I said.
"And then I'm going to write something."
"Write what?"
"I don't know yet," I said.
"But I've been thinking about it since I read Mom's letter.
She wrote two pages by hand because she had something to say and she wanted it to last.
I think I have something to say too."
Daniel was quiet for a moment.
"Like a book?" he said.
"Maybe," I said.
"Or maybe just something true.
We'll see."
After I hung up, I sat at the kitchen table with a blank notebook in front of me.
Margaret had given it to me the Christmas before she got sick.
It had a dark green cover and her handwriting on the inside page: *For when you're ready.*
I had never opened it.
I opened it now.
I wrote the date at the top of the first page.
Then I wrote one sentence: *My wife believed I had something worth saying, and I am beginning to think she was right.*
At seven o'clock, my phone rang.
Lily's face appeared on the screen, bright and serious, a notebook of her own open on her lap.
"Okay, Grandpa John," she said.
"I have six questions."
"I'm ready," I said.
"Question one," she said.
"What's the book about that you said was your favorite?
Like, what actually happens in it?"
May you like
And for the next hour, I talked about books with my granddaughter, while the notebook stayed open on the table beside me, and the first sentence waited patiently for the second.
The formal letter from the university arrived four days later.
