She used it for weeks. Happy. Fish. Dock. Dad.
One day Corbin pointed at the man and asked his very first question ever, a real question, with the little lift at the end. “Where is your dad?”
And Kenzie said, “He’s gone, buddy.”
Corbin decided that meant heaven. So did I. So did everybody.
Corbin never forgets a face. He can pick out a kid who sat behind him in a waiting room six years ago. He’d only seen that man in one faded picture, twenty-some years younger, in a ball cap. And he knew him from across a lawn.
“Kenzie,” I said softly. “Is it him?”
She didn’t answer for a long time.
“Yeah,” she finally said. “That’s him.”
Here’s the part she told me later, sitting on an upside-down bucket behind the caterer’s tent while Nate’s mom told the guests we were running “just a few minutes behind.”
