“A Father's Story” was first published in the Spring 1983 issue of Black Warrior Review. It was collected in The Times Are Never So Bad (1983). It is currently most readily available in The Winter Father: Collected Short Stories and Novellas, Volume 2 (David R. Godine).

In the spring of 2010, when I was thirty years old and expecting my first child, my best friend T— showed up to one of our early morning runs with a manila envelope. He told me to open it later, when I had some time to read. I tucked it into the glovebox of my car and then we set out on the trail outside of Washington, D.C. T— and I had a history of running together. We first met at a grueling special operations course where it seemed all we did was run; this was back when he was a twenty-seven-year-old first lieutenant in the Marines and I was still in R.O.T.C., having managed to talk my way into the training.

When we had down time during that course, whether it was before lights out, or on a Sunday afternoon, I remember T— lounging on a bottom bunk in the barracks, a shower shoe dangling from the foot of his crossed legs as he read Richard Yates or Joan Didion or, as a southerner, anyone along the Faulkner-Styron axis. While the rest of us were tactically or technically preparing ourselves for war—it was 2002—he insisted that reading fiction was the best preparation for any of life's challenges, which, at their core, were always emotional. T— had been a creative writing major at the University of Virginia and, as he later confided to me, had entered the Marine Corps only after experiencing a dark night of the soul in which he nearly abandoned a military career in favor of an application he wrote but never submitted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

By the morning of that run, T— had served as my surrogate big brother in the Marines for the better part of a decade. When I was in Iraq he checked up on me every couple of weeks through email. When I was back in the States, he would put in a good word when I showed up at a new posting.