I nodded.
And then:
“Was he scared?”
And Theo Vance didn’t answer right away.
That pause was the answer and we both knew it.
“Yeah,” he finally said.
And I started crying again, in a hallway, in a funeral home, and a seventeen-year-old in a borrowed red dress put an arm around my shoulders.
“He wasn’t scared all the time, though. I promise. Most of the time he was just — annoying.”
And I said:
“Thank you for not lying to me.”
And he said:
“I promised him that too.”
The Part That’s Mine, and There Are Three Pieces of It
I’ve told this story at a bereaved-parents group twice and both times somebody came up afterward and told me I did nothing wrong, and I need to put down why that isn’t true.
One: I interrogated two teenagers in a pew about my dead son instead of asking the one kid in the room who could have answered me.
