I thought my son was just hiding senior-year jitters in the garage. But when his prom date stepped out of the car, she wasn’t a teenage girl. She was my dead husband’s biggest secret.
The kitchen window framed a soft spring evening, the kind of gold light that made the lawn look like something out of a magazine.
I stood at the sink with a dish towel in my hand that I had forgotten to use, watching the sky go pink behind the neighbor’s maple.
For the first time in months, I let my shoulders drop.
Austin had been quiet all year.
Not sad, exactly.
Just somewhere I couldn’t reach.
I had told myself it was senior-year jitters. College letters.
The weight of being almost-grown.
But it was more than that, and I knew it, even if I refused to name it.
His father had been gone nine years. Long enough that I had stopped flinching at the empty chair, and still I caught myself, some nights, setting the table for three without thinking.
Most nights Austin disappeared into the garage.
He was fixing an old motorcycle out there.
It didn’t run, hadn’t run since before his father died.
I had told him it was a junker from an uncle, though lately he had stopped repeating the line back to me, and I had stopped offering it.
Footsteps on the stairs pulled me back.
I turned, and there he was, my boy in a charcoal suit, his tie a little crooked.
“Well?” he asked, holding out his arms.
“Come here. Your boutonniere is fighting you. And your tie.”
“Jamie tried to fix it after school,” he said, glancing down.
“Apparently neither of us can knot a Windsor.”
“Jamie,” I repeated, smiling because he was smiling.
The name slid past me like a dozen other names from a dozen other afternoons.
“A friend,” Austin said, and shrugged.
He stepped close and let me pin the flower.
Austin smelled like his father’s old cologne, the bottle I had left on the dresser and never moved.
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