Sunday nights he copied the week's list onto a fresh page of the Moleskine his staff gave him at Christmas, and the first line was always make list, so one box could be filled in immediately. He was forty-six, an assistant principal, and he owned three pens he did not lend out. He crossed off two things he had already finished on Friday just to watch the ink go through them.

Eleven weeks of pages, and one line had made every migration, recopied each Sunday in the same neat hand: call Dad back. He would see it, decide a call that size deserved a Tuesday, and rule a clean margin under the day's work. His father answered on the second ring the three times it happened, as though he had been sitting near the phone.