I found the book right where he said, on my own shelf, spine out, three words stamped in gold along it. For My Friend. I had never seen it before in my life. Someone had put it there, and I knew who, and I knew he could not have seen to do it himself.
I took it down with both hands. It was heavier than a book its size should be. When I opened the cover, I understood why. The pages had been hollowed into a deep square, and the words inside were not printed. They were pressed into the paper in rows of little raised dots.
Braille. A whole book of it, written by a blind man for a friend who could see, which meant he never expected me to read a word of it myself.
Folded into the hollow was a typed letter, dictated to someone, and a bank draft. And on the letter, one line he had made them set apart from the rest. You gave me the news of the world for nine years, so I had a friend at the library write down the news of my heart, which is that you were the best of it.
The draft was for a college fund. Made out in trust to my grandson, the boy I mention to everyone, the one whose report cards I used to read aloud to Mr. Abernathy on the porch because he liked to hear a child do well.
I took the Braille pages to that same library, to the woman who had helped him write them. She read the book to me, all of it, over three long afternoons with a box of tissues between us.
It was every evening we had spent together, remembered. The stories I read him. The way I described the sunsets he could not see. The sound of my grandson laughing on the steps. He had kept all of it, saved it up in the dark, and turned it into a book so that after he was gone I would know exactly what those nine years had meant to a man who could not tell me with his eyes.
My grandson starts college in two years. His whole way is paid. He knows the name of the blind man who made it possible, and he has learned enough Braille now to read the first line of that book with his own fingers.
I keep it on my shelf still, spine out, three gold words facing the room. For My Friend.
I read the world to a man in the dark. It never once occurred to me that he was listening close enough to give the whole thing back.