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.
