and I’d said yes, and they’d gone quiet, and I’d thought it was shock. It wasn’t shock. I know my boys, and what that quiet was, was two thirteen-year-olds deciding something together without needing to say it out loud.
After the ceremony, David tried to approach. Of course he did — a man who ignores his sons for thirteen years will suddenly find them fascinating the moment they’re holding gold medals and a state record. He came toward us with the warm, proud face of a father, as if it were his to wear, as if he’d been in the building for any of it.
And my sons, thirteen years old, closed ranks in front of their mother without my saying a word. The gold-medal one — the one with David’s face — looked at the man whose face he wore, and said, very politely, because I raised them polite: “I’m sorry, do
