The box I was looking for was wooden and had a faded quality to it that meant it had once been a more vivid color. It was not large. I had put it in that closet eight years ago and I had not opened it since and I knew exactly what was inside.
I brought it to the kitchen table.
I set it between us.
Leo looked at it.
I lifted the lid.
His smile was gone before he finished looking inside.
The box held photographs.
Some of them were printed, the older kind, the square format of the 1980s and early 1990s, and some were printed from digital files, the crisper image of later technology, and there were perhaps thirty photographs in the box in total, and they were all of the same person at different ages.
The person was my brother.
His name was Danny, and he had Down syndrome, and he had died when I was in my late twenties, eight years before Leo was born.
