Theo tried to give the dress back to Emma the next day. She refused to take it.
She told him, “Absolutely not. That thing has funeral energy now. It’s yours.”
So he kept it. It’s in a closet in Columbus.
He’s twenty-three now. He graduated last spring and Daniel and I drove up and sat next to his mother, who has been doing better for about three years and who hugged me in a parking lot afterward and cried.
Theo came over in his cap and gown and hugged us both, and then he leaned in and whispered:
“I considered wearing red.”
And Daniel said:
“Don’t push it, son.”
For graduation we gave him one of Jack’s watches. Nothing expensive — a black Timex, forty-one dollars at a Kohl’s in 2023, the one Jack wore every single day until treatment made his wrists too thin for it.
