Then he glanced down. “But she gave me the dress anyway.”
A young woman near the back covered her mouth.
Theo’s sister.
I’d barely noticed her.
Theo looked at me.
“I didn’t want to upset you.”
That broke me.
Because he’d been sitting ten feet away, terrified of hurting us, while I’d been wondering whether to have him removed.
I stood.
Daniel looked at me.
I walked toward Theo.
He froze.
For one horrible second, I think he thought I was coming to take him away from the microphone.
Instead, I hugged him.
He was taller than me now.
When had that happened?
I’d known this boy since he had missing teeth.
Now he folded into me and started sobbing.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“No.”
“I should’ve told you.”
“No.”
“I didn’t mean to make today worse.”
“You didn’t.”
I held the back of his head.
“Finish it.”
He pulled away.
“Are you sure?”
“Finish what Jack asked you to say.”
I returned to my seat.
Daniel was crying openly now.
Theo stood at the microphone again.
He looked at the paper.
Then he folded it. “I actually wrote a eulogy.”
He lifted several pages from the podium.
“Seven pages.”
A voice from Jack’s school friends said, “Jeez, Theo.”
Theo laughed.
“Exactly. Jack would’ve hated it.”
He put the pages aside.
“So I’m not reading it.”
And instead he talked.
Not about cancer.
Not mostly.
He talked about the time they were 12 and accidentally broke our garage window with a hockey puck, then spent three hours inventing increasingly stupid explanations.
They eventually blamed a bird.
Daniel had asked, “What kind of bird carries a hockey puck?”
Jack answered, “A strong one.”
Theo told everyone about Jack cheating at Monopoly and insisting it wasn’t cheating because “the bank has insurance.”
He talked about the first day of high school, when Theo had a panic attack in the bathroom, and Jack sat on the floor outside the stall pretending they were skipping class intentionally.
