“What was funny?” Leo said.
“I don’t remember,” I said. “Something his friend Marcus said, probably. Marcus always made him laugh.”
“Marcus,” Leo said. “Like my friend Marcus.”
“Yes,” I said. “Danny’s Marcus was different. He had known Danny since they were both teenagers. He gave the eulogy at Danny’s funeral.”
“What did he say?” Leo said.
I thought about Marcus at the lectern, forty-one years old and holding a single piece of paper that he had written on both sides.
“He said Danny made him better at being a person,” I said. “He said he had known Danny for twenty-five years and in that time he had watched Danny navigate things that would have made Marcus give up, and do it with a specific combination of stubbornness and grace that he had never seen in anyone else. He said he was embarrassed by how much he had learned from someone people mostly pitied, and that the embarrassment was good because it meant he had been paying attention.”
