A kid near the stove muttered, “He was not joking about you.”
I looked past them.
The tall boy shot him a look, then faced me again. “We came by yesterday after we heard what happened. Saw the door frame cracked. Thought somebody had tried to break in while you were gone. We knocked. Called out. No answer. We didn’t want to leave it like that.”
I looked past them.
The room wasn’t transformed. Not perfectly. The paint line near the ceiling wobbled. One curtain rod still leaned against the wall. Walter’s shelf had been repaired but not stained yet. Calvin’s chair had new fabric on the seat, but one arm still showed the old worn patch. On the coffee table, half the surface was sanded smooth and the other half wasn’t.
That almost made me smile.
It looked unfinished.
It also looked loved.
I asked, “How did this get from fixing a door to all this?”
The boy at the stove lifted the lid. “We brought groceries.”
That almost made me smile.
The tall one drew in a breath. “My name’s Andre. Calvin knew us from the courts by Mercer. He played there in the summer. Stayed after. Talked to us. Helped us.”
The room got very quiet.
A boy by the window snorted. “Bossed us around.”
“That too,” Andre said.
Another boy spoke without looking up. “He got me through algebra.”
One from the kitchen said, “He brought groceries when my mom got sick.”
A third said, “He drove my little brother to urgent care when nobody else would.”
The room got very quiet.
Nobody had warned me grief could still find new places to break.
Andre looked at me and said, “People call us a gang. Some of us were headed that way. Some of us were already mixed up in things. Calvin never acted scared of us. He just kept showing up.”
The youngest one there had red eyes, like he had been crying. He finally said, “He talked about you all the time.”
