Walt sat on the far end of that bench the entire hour with his coffee and said absolutely nothing to the kid.
At fifty-five minutes Brayden started crying. Hard, the ugly kind, with his hands over his face, sixteen years old and absolutely wrecked on a park bench in March.
Walt didn’t comfort him. He didn’t scold him either.
He just slid the coffee down the bench toward him and went back to watching the playground.
The video is still up. It has eighty thousand views now. I have made my peace with it the way you make peace with a scar, which is to say not entirely and not on most days.
Last month Eli came apart in a Kroger.
Fluorescent light started ticking, and that’s a bad one for him, and he went down in the cereal aisle with about nine people watching.
And I did what I have done every single time since July.
