Now he folded into me and started sobbing.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“No.”
“I should’ve told you.”
“No.”
“I didn’t mean to make today worse.”
“You didn’t.”
I held the back of his head.
“Finish it.”
He pulled away.
“Are you sure?”
“Finish what Jack asked you to say.”
I returned to my seat.
Daniel was crying openly now.
Theo stood at the microphone again.
He looked at the paper.
Then he folded it. “I actually wrote a eulogy.”
He lifted several pages from the podium.
“Seven pages.”
A voice from Jack’s school friends said, “Jeez, Theo.”
Theo laughed.
“Exactly. Jack would’ve hated it.”
He put the pages aside.
“So I’m not reading it.”
And instead he talked.
Not about cancer.
Not mostly.
He talked about the time they were 12 and accidentally broke our garage window with a hockey puck, then spent three hours inventing increasingly stupid explanations.
