“How did you know?” I called after him. “How did you know what to do?”
Walt stopped. He had his back to me and he stayed that way for a second, and when he turned around he looked about ten years older than he had a minute before.
“Got a son,” he said. “He’s thirty-four.”
Then he got on his bike and left, and I stood in that woodchip pit holding a crooked business card and trying to work out what thirty-four meant.
I found out Monday morning.
Not about Walt. About the video.
My sister called me at 7:15 in the morning and the first thing she said was, “Don’t open Facebook.”
Which is the single worst sentence in the English language.
It had forty-one thousand views. The tall kid had posted it, and somebody with a bigger page had grabbed it, and by Monday it was on three different accounts with three different captions and the kindest one of them used the word “meltdown” in quotation marks.
