“So this little kid Mason shows up at my door sixteen years later and tells me he found a box in his grandma’s attic. Old vest. Bunch of photos. A patch with our club name on it. He said he’d been looking for us for months. Went to the library. Looked us up. Rode his bike across two neighborhoods to find us.”
“Why?” I whispered. “Why would he do that?”
Bear looked at me for a long time.
“Because his mama was sad. Those were his words. He said, ‘My mom is sad all the time and I don’t know why and my grandma won’t tell me and I found this stuff and I think it’s about him.’ He wanted to know who his uncle was so he could tell her. He said he was gonna make her a book.”
My hand went over my mouth. I couldn’t breathe.
“A photo book,” Bear said. “For her birthday. Her fortieth is next month, isn’t it?”
October 18th. Sarah turns forty on October 18th.
“He’s been coming every Saturday for a year,” Bear went on. “Ten in the morning to two in the afternoon. He’d tell you he was at Tyler’s. What he was really doing was sitting at our long table with a notebook, asking every one of us questions about Danny. What his favorite song was. What he ate for breakfast. How he laughed. Who his best friend at the club was. He wrote it all down. He borrowed photos from us and scanned them at the library and brought the originals back the next week. He was making the most beautiful goddamn thing I’ve ever seen a kid make.”
Bear reached into his vest and pulled out something wrapped in a bandana. He unwrapped it careful, the way you’d unwrap a bird. It was a spiral notebook with a red cover, worn soft at the corners. He handed it to me.
“He left this at the clubhouse last Saturday. Said he’d finish it up next weekend. When we heard on the news about a boy hit on Elm and Fourth, we called every hospital in the county till we found him.”
