My parents threw me out at nineteen because I wouldn’t end my pregnancy. Ten years later I drove back with my son and knocked on the same door

I meant that there would be nothing of Rhys left at all. I was nineteen and that was the best sentence I could find and it was a terrible one.

 

He passed that June.

 

I did not know.

 

I had changed my number and moved states and my mother had no way of reaching me that she was willing to use.

 

I found out three weeks afterwards from a cousin who tracked down the girl whose room I was renting.

 

I missed my own brother’s funeral.

 

And that is why my parents’ hands were shaking on that porch.

 

Because for ten years they have believed that their son died at twenty-three and left nothing behind him at all.

 

And on the wall of that hallway, four feet from where Leo was standing, there is a photograph of Rhys at ten years old.

 

Same jaw. Same way of standing with one