“Who is this?” Leo said.
“Your uncle Danny,” I said.
Leo was quiet.
He picked up the photograph.
“Mom,” he said.
“He had Down syndrome,” I said. “Like our waiter tonight.”
Leo put the photograph down very carefully.
He looked at me.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“There are a lot of things you don’t know,” I said. “About Danny. I’m going to tell you some of them.”
I sat down across from him.
I am going to try to tell you what I told Leo, not verbatim, because I did not speak in complete sentences and I do not have perfect memory, but in substance.
Danny was three years younger than me, which meant we had grown up together in the specific way that older and younger siblings grow up, with the whole range of that experience, the competition and the alliance and the particular love that forms when you are each other’s closest companion for the years when the world is very large and you are very small.
