She told him I had a place on the nursing programme starting the following autumn and that I was going to give it up and go full-time at the plant.
And then she asked him — and he was very clear on the telephone that she asked, she did not tell — to give it a year.
Because if he proposed that summer, I was going to marry him instead of going, and she knew it, and so did he.
He agreed.
And then he went to Carrow Street with the ring money and bought my father’s guitar back off that shop for a hundred and forty dollars, and took it to my mother, and asked her to give it to me and not say where it came from.
PART 4 — NOVEMBER
She never gave it to me.
She could not, because giving it to me meant explaining where it came from, and she had just asked a nineteen-year-old boy to disappear for a year and she was not going to have that in the house.
