Part One
My grandson, Caleb, is nine years old.
He has his father’s ears, which stick out a little. He has his father’s habit of chewing the inside of his cheek when he’s thinking. He has his father’s way of going very quiet when something hurts, instead of crying.
He carries one photograph of his father everywhere he goes.
It’s a small, square picture. Four inches by four inches. A little bent at one corner.
In it, my son Danny is sitting on the back steps of our house in Norfolk, Virginia. He’s wearing a gray Navy T-shirt and jeans. He’s holding Caleb on his knee. Caleb is about eighteen months old,
with a sippy cup in one hand and a fistful of his father’s shirt in the other.
They’re both laughing at something off-camera. I know what it was. It was me, pretending to be a dog.
