Leo was looking at the photograph.
“Twenty-five years,” he said.
“They met when they were fifteen,” I said. “Danny died at thirty-two. They were best friends for seventeen years, and then Marcus kept being his friend after he died, which is a thing that is possible to do.”
The steakhouse was his idea, specifically.
He had been asking about it since April, when his friend Marcus had been taken there for his birthday and had described it with the reverence of someone reporting from a better world. Leo had a history with good restaurants, not the fancy kind but the kind where the food was taken seriously, where you could tell that what was on the plate mattered to the people who made it, and he was the child who read menus carefully and asked questions about preparation with the same seriousness he brought to books.
The report card had been worth celebrating.
He had a learning difference, Leo, a processing challenge that had made reading slow for him in the early years despite loving books fiercely, and the work he had put into the school year just finished had produced results that were genuinely his, not the results of accommodations or of teachers adjusting the bar downward, but of a boy who had worked harder than most of his classmates and achieved something real with that work.
I was proud of him in the specific way that pride works when someone you love has earned something.
We drove to the restaurant on a Friday evening in June, the particular warm and long-lit evening that makes everything feel like the right kind of occasion, and Leo was in the passenger seat doing the thing he did when he was in a good mood, which was narrating the world outside the window with a running commentary that was too quiet to fully hear but that I could catch phrases of and that always made me smile.
We were shown to a table.
The restaurant was the kind that took its food seriously but was not precious about it, the kind of place where people were there to eat and the eating was good, with the low light and the leather booths that had the quality of somewhere that had been there long enough to mean something.
