He put it in my hand.
My hand shook as I held it. I couldn’t believe it was real. Forty-six years, and he’d kept a piece of cardboard.
“Why?” I asked.
He looked down at his own hands for a moment.
“That summer, my mother left,” he said. “For good. I went into foster care in August. Three homes in two years. Some of them were fine. One of them wasn’t.”
He paused.
“I carried that ticket in my shoe,” he said. “Every day. Under the insole. When I thought nobody in the whole world cared whether I ate or not, I’d take it out and look at it. And it reminded me that one person did.”
I started crying again. But this time, it wasn’t for the same reason.
He told me the rest of his story while I held that little yellow ticket.
