The Lunch My Son Shared

What Eli said

“He told me,” the man went on, and his voice cracked all the way through now, “he said, mister, you look like you miss somebody. And it’s okay to miss somebody. My grandpa died and I miss him every day and my mom says that just means I loved him big.”

I put my hand over my mouth. My father had passed the winter before last. Eli had been six going on seven. He had asked me at the funeral, in front of everybody, why Grandpa’s hands were so cold, and I had knelt down in that funeral home in my black dress and told him that missing somebody hurts because love does not have anywhere to go anymore, and it just sits in your chest and aches, and that the ache means you loved that person big. I did not know Eli had held onto those words. I did not know they had gone all the way down into him and stayed.

“I asked him how he knew,” the man said. “How an eight-year-old kid could look at an old man on a motorcycle and know. And you know what he said? He said, because you keep looking at the little kids like you’re looking for one of them. And I do. God help me, I do.”

He turned the photograph around and looked at it himself, and his whole body seemed to fold a little.

“Danny was my boy,” he said. “That picture, he was five there. That was the last summer we were all together. His mother and me split up not long after, and it got ugly, the way it does, and she moved him three states away, and I was young and stupid and full of pride and I let the distance win. I told myself I’d fix it when he was older. When he could choose for himself. I told myself there was time.”

The riders in the yard had gone even more still, if that was possible, and I understood suddenly that they already knew this story. That they had heard it before. That some of them had lived it too.

“He died when he was nineteen,” the man said. “Car accident, on an icy road, coming home from a job he’d just gotten. I hadn’t seen him in eleven years. Eleven years. I found out from an aunt who tracked me down through the club. I never got to tell him I was sorry. I never got to hear his voice as a grown man. I have spent thirty years, ma’am, thirty years carrying a hole in me the exact size of a boy, and I have never once been able to say it out loud to a living person. And yesterday a child I have never met sat down next to me and gave me half a peanut butter sandwich and told me it was okay to miss somebody.”