I looked at him. “Did he.”
The boy nodded. “Your pie. Your rules. Your Sunday dinners. He said you were his favorite person on earth.”
Nobody had warned me grief could still find new places to break.
That made a broken laugh tear out of me.
Andre went on, softer now. “He said if anything ever happened to him, somebody had to make sure his Nana wasn’t alone.”
I sat down because my knees gave out.
No one rushed me. That was smart. They just stood there, awkward and worried, like they’d all realized at once that an old woman crying was a problem none of them knew how to solve.
Then one of them said, “The roast is gonna dry out.”
That made a broken laugh tear out of me.
They kept coming back.
I covered my face. “Then somebody baste it.”
That should have been the end of it. One strange afternoon. One meal. One thank-you.
It wasn’t.
They kept coming back.
At first it was Andre, to finish the door frame and install a better lock. Then Mateo, the boy with glasses, to repair the leak under my sink. Then Rico to cut the grass. Then Dev, the youngest one, who mostly sat at my kitchen table and ate whatever I put in front of him like he was afraid it might vanish.
And I started cooking too much food again.
I learned their names. Andre. Mateo. Rico. Dev. Jamal. Luis. Benji. Trey. Noah. Omar.
I learned they were not a gang so much as boys who had learned to stand close together because nobody else stood with them.
I learned which ones still had mothers and which ones had only phone numbers they no longer called. Which ones slept in beds and which ones slept wherever they could.
And I started cooking too much food again.
The first Sunday they all came for dinner, Andre stopped in the doorway and looked at the table.
