I looked over at Kyle. He was staring at the floor with his whole body. His hand had come up on its own and was pressing that taped-up headset tighter against his ear, like he was afraid he might miss something.
I drove home at one in the morning with the windows down and the radio off, and I didn’t sleep much.
He came out to her place on a Sunday in September.
I was there. I’m there most weekends now. My wife comes too, sometimes. She and my mother sit at the kitchen table and drink coffee, and my mother tells her things she never told me, and I sit on the porch and pretend I’m not listening.
He pulled into the yard in his own car, an old Pontiac with a cracked windshield. He was wearing jeans. He had the shoebox under his arm, and he stood at the bottom of the porch steps, the ones I’d finally gotten around to fixing that summer, and he didn’t come up until she told him to come up and sit.
