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.
