Duane stopped.
By the time I caught up, Corbin was standing right in front of him, out of breath.
“You have to say hi,” Corbin told him. “You can’t just leave. Miss Kenzie says hard words are still words. You have to say them anyway.”
Duane looked at my son for a long time. Then he looked over my shoulder.
Kenzie was standing about twenty feet behind us, holding her dress up off the grass, Nate a few steps behind her.
“Hi, Kenz,” Duane said. His voice cracked right in half.
“Hi,” she said.
That was it, for a minute. Two people who’d been gone from each other for twenty years, standing on a lawn by a lake, with a kid in a mint green tie between them.
Then Duane held out the white paper bag.
“I didn’t know what to get you,” he said. “This was in your mom’s things she left at the house. I kept it.”
