I looked at him, then at the envelope. My fingers curled around the little bouquet of grocery-store flowers in my lap. They were yellow and white carnations, nothing special, but I’d chosen them because Kevin used to pick those same flowers for me when he was little. He would bring them home from school, sometimes crushed in his backpack, and announce that they were the prettiest things he’d ever seen.
Now he was standing in front of me with something that had the power to destroy the last beautiful thing we had left.
« Kevin, sweetheart, please don’t do this here. »
He swallowed. His eyes were red, and there was a tightness around his mouth I had never seen before. Even when he was a little boy and scraped both knees falling off his bicycle, he had never looked at me with such guarded pain.
« You said I deserved the truth. »
« I know what I said, but— »
« No, Grandma. » He lowered his voice, though the microphone still carried his words through the auditorium. « You don’t get to ask me to wait anymore. I’ve waited my whole life without knowing what I was waiting for. »
The people seated around us had gone completely still. I could hear the faint hum of the auditorium’s ventilation system, the rustling of someone’s graduation program, and the distant click of a camera being lowered. Hundreds of people were watching a conversation that should have happened in my kitchen, behind a closed door, where nobody could see me fall apart.
