He looked at the photographs.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “About Danny.”
“I know,” I said.
“That doesn’t make what I did okay,” he said.
I looked at my son.
He had gotten there himself, which was the thing I had been hoping for and had not known whether to expect.
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t. But it matters that you said it.”
“Would it have been different?” he said. “If I’d known. Would I not have done it?”
This was a better question than I had expected from a fourteen-year-old in the middle of a difficult conversation, the question underneath the surface question, which was whether knowing changes behavior or whether behavior has to change for different reasons.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “I hope so. But I think the goal is for it not to matter whether you know. I think the goal is to be the kind of person who doesn’t do that regardless of whether there’s a Danny in your life.”
“The kind of person you want me to be,” he said.
“The kind of person I think you actually are,” I said. “Which is why tonight was such a surprise.”
He was quiet.
“I was showing off,” he said. “For Marcus. The text.”
“I know,” I said.
“It was stupid,” he said.
“It was,” I said.
“I feel sick about it,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “Not because I want you to feel bad about yourself. But because feeling sick about it means you understand what it was.”
He picked up the photograph from the movie theater.
“He looks like he loved his job,” Leo said.
“He loved it more than I’ve loved anything in my professional life,” I said. “He talked about movies the way you talk about books.”
Leo looked at the photograph.
“Sam,” he said. “The waiter. He was like that. You could tell. He cared about doing it right.”
“Yes,” I said.
“He was reading the specials back, trying to make sure he got it right,” Leo said. “And I was texting my friend about how funny it was that he was trying to get it right.”
