"I don't say anything."
"My father said I was a damned coward, and my mother said I was a hypocrite. I'd been reading the Book of Job, you see, when it happened."
"They might have known," she said.
"They might have known what?"
"That you were different."
"They did know it. After that, they never let it alone. They kept rubbing it into me all the time that I was different. As my father put it, I wore my cerebro-spinal system on the outside, and I had to grow a skin or two if I wanted to be a man and not an anatomical diagram. I'd got to prove that I was a man—that I wasn't different after all."
"Well—you proved it."
"If I did my father never knew it."
"And your mother?" she said softly.
"I believe she knew."