He shook Dr. Odom’s hand, took his diploma, and turned and faced six hundred people who were laughing at him.
I was in the third row.
And I was the only person in that auditorium who knew why he was wearing it.
I need to tell you about my daughter.
Willa Tarrant was born in June of 1998 and she died on the seventeenth of May, 2016, at seventeen years old, on a track at a meet in Corvel, in front of about two hundred people.
She was running the 800. She went down on the back straight.
It was hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Nobody knew she had it. That’s the entire nature of it — the first symptom is very often the last thing that happens.
She was eleven days from graduating.
I want to say something about the eleven days, because that number has been in my mouth for ten years.
The gowns had already come in. Hers was in a garment bag on the back of her bedroom door. She’d already done the yearbook photo, already had her name in the program, already had the little card you hand the announcer so he says it right.
And there was a dress.
She bought it on the ninth of April, 2016, at Ferro’s on Vessel Street, with money from her job at the ice cream place. Bright red. Not a subtle red. A red you could see from a parking lot.
It cost sixty-four dollars, which for her was a lot, and she came home and put it on and made me sit on the end of the bed and look at it.
She was going to wear it under the gown. That was the plan. Gown on for the stage, gown off for the photos afterward, red dress in every picture.
Cal was eight when his sister died.
