“I’m picky, Kim.”
“How picky?”
“Ruinously.”
I laughed and let him be.
Looking back, the signs were everywhere.
Raymond remembered the anniversary of my diagnosis and always found a reason to be around that week. He remembered the boys’ birthdays and drove three hours in a snowstorm the year Caleb broke his wrist at hockey camp.
I called it friendship. I called it luck. I called it anything except what it was because thinking too hard about it felt disloyal to a version of my life I’d worked hard to accept.
Then the boys grew up and moved out, and my house got quiet again, and I told myself I was fine with that too.
Which brings me back to that Friday.
Both of my adult sons had shown up without warning. Neither ate more than a few bites of dinner
Something was off. They were wearing the careful expressions grown children wear when they’re about to say something you won’t like.
Eventually, Caleb set his fork down.
“Mom, we’ve spent months trying to figure out how to tell you this.”
My hand stopped in mid-air.
“What’s going on?”
“Wait,” Noah said before slipping out of the room into the hallway.
Caleb was staring at his hands.
Then Noah came back carrying the basket.
My son lowered it carefully between the water pitcher and the salt shaker as if it were an ordinary object, and my whole body went cold.
I recognized it before he even let go.
