Back at the beginning of my communication with C.G.—Chad, I chided myself—he had introduced me to the writer David Foster Wallace. I’d begun exploring Wallace’s words in whatever forms I could find them—short stories, essays, interviews—and had shared them with Grace. We were particularly enthralled with a scene from one interview, in which Wallace recalled taking a year off from college to drive a school bus. He was unhappy, and there was much he wanted to read that wouldn’t be assigned in his classes. “And I read,” Wallace said; “pretty much everything I’ve read was read during that year.”
