Part 1: The Red Dress
“I know half of you want me out of here right now.”
Theo stopped. His voice had cracked on the last word.
For a moment he simply stood at the microphone in that red dress while people whispered behind me. The church was so full that some stood along the back wall. Every one of them was staring at him.
My husband, Daniel, was half-risen beside me, one hand on the pew in front of us and his jaw clenched.
I had one hand wrapped around his sleeve. I no longer knew whether I was holding him back or holding on.
Theo looked down at himself.
“And I know how this looks,” he said. “It isn’t even mine. I borrowed it from my sister.”
A few people shifted in their seats. Somebody coughed. An old man near the front shook his head slowly, the way you’d shake your head at a car accident.
Theo swallowed hard.
“The reason I’m standing here in it is very simple.”
He turned and looked at my son’s coffin.
“And it’s the saddest thing I know.”
The room went quiet.
I want to be honest with you about that moment, because the whole story hinges on it. Ten minutes earlier, I had seriously considered asking the funeral director to escort that boy outside.
My son Jack died seventeen days after his eighteenth birthday.
Cancer. A kind with a long name that I learned to spell without looking, the way you learn the name of a street you never wanted to live on.
Fourteen months from diagnosis to funeral.
Boiling his whole life down to those facts still feels obscene. They fit on an index card. He didn’t.
Jack loved old horror movies, and the cheaper the better, the ones where you can see the zipper on the monster’s back.
He burned grilled cheese every single time because he refused to cook it on low heat. “Low heat is for cowards, Mom.” Then he’d scrape off the black with a butter knife over the sink and eat it anyway.
He hated tomatoes, yet he put ketchup on everything. Eggs. Rice. Once, to my horror, a slice of pizza.
“Ketchup is made of tomatoes,” I told him.
“Ketchup is made of ketchup,” he said, as though I were the one who made no sense.
He could name almost every capital city in the world. Ouagadougou. Ulaanbaatar. Tegucigalpa. Give him a country at dinner and he’d rattle one off. But he could not, for the life of him, remember to carry his laundry downstairs. His hamper would overflow into a small mountain of hoodies, and I’d stand in his doorway and say, “Burkina Faso,” and he’d say, “Ouagadougou,” and I’d say, “Laundry,” and he’d say, “I don’t know that one.”
And Theo had been beside him for most of it.
The boys met when they were seven.
Theo’s family moved into the yellow house four doors down from ours the summer before second grade. I remember the moving truck. I remember a skinny little boy with enormous ears standing in the driveway with a plastic dinosaur, watching his parents argue over where the couch should go.
Jack observed him from our front steps for about ten minutes.
Then he walked down the sidewalk holding his own plastic dinosaur.
I watched from the kitchen window. I couldn’t hear a word. I only saw Jack hold up his T. rex and Theo hold up his triceratops, and then the two of them sat on the curb and started staging a dinosaur fight.
An hour later, Jack came back inside.
“His name is Theo,” he announced. “He doesn’t know any capitals. I’m going to teach him.”
By ten, Theo practically lived at our house.
He came over after school and stayed for dinner. He knew which drawer held the good spoons and which cabinet hid the cereal we pretended was for guests. He called me Mrs. Harris for the first year, then Laura for about a week, until Daniel told him it was weird. After that he went back to Mrs. Harris and never changed it again.
He slept in our spare room so often that I eventually stopped calling it the spare room.
It became “Theo’s room.”
I bought sheets with rocket ships on them. Theo kept a green toothbrush in our bathroom, in the cup beside Jack’s blue one. When he was eleven, he taped a poster of a band I’d never heard of to the wall in there, and I left it up for six years.
His home life wasn’t easy.
I learned that slowly, and not from Theo. Theo never complained. I learned it from the things he didn’t say.
His parents separated when he was nine. Then they got back together. Then they separated again when he was eleven, and reunited again. When he was thirteen they finally divorced, with enough bitterness to poison every holiday afterward.
I heard about it in pieces. His dad had a new apartment across town. His mom had changed the locks. His sister, Emma, four years older, had stopped speaking to their father for an entire year.
Some years Theo spent Christmas with us because neither parent could agree whose house he belonged at. Each would assume he was with the other, or they’d argue about it on the phone until nobody wanted to be anywhere.
The first time, Theo was twelve.
It was Christmas Eve, and snowing. We were about to sit down to dinner when the doorbell rang. Theo stood on the porch with a backpack and snow in his hair.
“Hi, Mrs. Harris,” he said. “Sorry. Is it okay if I— I don’t have to stay for dinner. I can just—”
Jack came up behind me in his socks.
“Mom,” he said. “Theo’s staying.”
Not asking.
Informing.
I always said yes.
That night, Theo opened a present under our tree. Jack had bought it with his own allowance. It was a cheap paperback atlas.
“So you can finally learn the capitals,” Jack said.
Theo laughed so hard he fell off the couch.
Jack never made a big deal of any of it. Not once. He never questioned Theo about his parents and never acted sorry for him.
He just made room.
Later I would think about that often, about how a twelve-year-old boy knew exactly how to love someone without making them feel like a charity case. I’m not sure I’ve ever learned it as well as he did.
Jack got sick in the spring of his junior year.
It began with exhaustion. Then bruises he couldn’t explain. Then a cough that wouldn’t go away, and a lump on his neck that he showed me one morning in the kitchen as though it were a funny bug bite.
“Is this weird?” he asked. “It feels weird.”
I touched it with two fingers.
It felt weird.
Two weeks later, a doctor in a gray office told us what it was. She said it gently and clearly. She said the words “very treatable” three times, and I clung to them like a rope.
Daniel drove us home. Nobody turned on the radio. Halfway there, Jack, in the backseat, said, “Well. That’s annoying.”
And Daniel laughed. It was a horrible laugh, half something else entirely. Then I laughed too. And Jack grinned at us in the rearview mirror as if he’d done it on purpose.
He probably had.
When Jack got sick, Theo repaid every favor we’d ever done him, in a way I still can’t describe.
He came over after school, every day, without being asked.
He did his homework on the floor of Jack’s bedroom, cross-legged on the rug with his back against the bed, while Jack slept or read or stared at the ceiling.
He watched bad movies with him. Horrible ones. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Jack insisted it was a documentary about his greatest enemy.
He was there for the hair loss. When Jack’s hair began coming out in clumps on his pillow, Theo turned up with Daniel’s electric clippers and said, “Okay. Let’s just get it over with.” He shaved Jack’s whole head in the bathroom while Jack sat on the closed toilet lid compiling a list of famous bald people.
Then Theo handed Jack the clippers.
“Your turn.”
“What?”
“Do mine.”
“Theo, no. You have good hair. You have, like, shampoo commercial hair.”
“Do it, or I’ll do it myself and it’ll look terrible.”
Jack did it. It looked terrible anyway. They came downstairs together, two bald teenage boys, and Daniel stood in the kitchen with a dish towel in his hands, unable to speak.
Theo was there for the steroids, the weeks Jack’s face swelled and he was hungry all the time and angry all the time and once threw a lamp, not at anyone, just at the wall. Theo gathered up the pieces and said, “That lamp was ugly anyway, man.”
He was there on the days Jack wouldn’t speak. He’d sit in the room in silence for two or three hours, just working on his calculus, then leave without saying goodbye and return the next day.
And he was there on the days Jack couldn’t stop speaking. The days he talked and talked and talked. Capital cities. Movie plots. Long, rambling theories about whether a duck could beat a goose in a fight. I understood later that he talked like that because he was terrified that if he went quiet, everyone else would get scared.
There were weeks Theo saw more of my son than I did.
Daniel and I worked opposite shifts. I was a nurse at the county clinic, and Daniel managed the hardware store on Route 9. We were trying to hold on to our jobs and our insurance while practically living at the hospital. One of us was always somewhere else.
Theo was always there.
He never complained. Not once in fourteen months.
I’d come home at eleven at night and find him asleep in the armchair in Jack’s room, a textbook open on his chest. I’d lay a blanket over him and turn off the light.
He was seventeen. Just a kid. His own life was falling apart in a yellow house four doors down.
And he gave my son every afternoon he had.
So when he walked into the funeral wearing a red dress, I didn’t understand.
It was bright red, knee-length, with short sleeves. Simple, but impossible to miss in a room full of black and navy and gray.
He came in late through the side door, just as the organ started. He walked fast with his head down, the way you enter a classroom when you’re late and hope nobody notices.
Everybody noticed.
People turned. Some stared openly. A woman two rows ahead of us actually stood halfway up for a better look, then sat back down.
He wore black dress shoes and black socks. His hair, which had grown back thick after he shaved it for Jack, was neatly combed. A white shirt collar showed at his neck, as though he’d tried to wear the dress over a dress shirt and given up halfway.
His face was pale. His hands were empty.
One of Daniel’s brothers, Rick, leaned forward from the pew behind us.
“What the hell?” he whispered.
Not quietly enough.
My first thought embarrasses me now.
I thought Theo was trying to make the funeral about himself.
That’s what I thought, about that boy. The boy who shaved his own head in my bathroom.
I thought, Not today. Not Jack’s day. How could you?
Then I wondered whether he and Jack had quarreled before Jack died. Something I didn’t know about. Something secret. Something ugly. Maybe this was a kind of revenge.
It made no sense, and I knew it made no sense. But grief doesn’t care about sense.
I leaned across the aisle toward two of Jack’s school friends, Marcus and Devin. They’d come to the hospital nearly every week those last two months.
“Did something happen between them?” I whispered.
Both boys shook their heads at once.
“No, Mrs. Harris,” Marcus whispered back, eyes wide. “Nothing. I swear.”
Devin looked at Theo. Then at me. Then down at his hands.
I don’t think he knew either.
Theo sat alone near the aisle, about four rows behind us.
Nobody sat beside him. The pew was half-empty, and the people at the far end slid a little farther away.
He didn’t look up. His hands were clenched together in his lap so tightly that his knuckles had gone white against the red fabric.
Daniel spotted him a few minutes later.
I felt him go rigid beside me, through his whole body.
“What is he doing?” he whispered.
“I don’t know.”
“This is Jack’s funeral.”
“I know.”
He started to stand.
I grabbed his sleeve.
“Don’t.”
“He’s wearing a dress, Laura.”
“I can see that.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Daniel looked at me.
His face was raw from seventeen days of barely sleeping, and his eyes were red. He’d cut himself shaving that morning, and a tiny scrap of tissue still clung to his jaw. I hadn’t had the heart to tell him.
Mine probably looked the same.
Grief leaves you with less patience for mystery. Everything feels like one more insult. You have no room left inside to absorb one more strange thing. Not one.
Daniel sat back down. But his hand gripped the edge of the pew so hard I thought the wood might crack.
I need to tell you about those seventeen days, because they explain Daniel’s face, and mine.
Jack turned eighteen in the hospital. We brought a cake to his room, chocolate with blue frosting. Theo brought eighteen candles and a lighter, and a nurse named Glenda pretended not to notice.
Jack was too tired to blow them all out. He managed about six. Theo and I did the rest.
“Make a wish,” Daniel said.
Jack closed his eyes for a long time.
“Done,” he said.
“What’d you wish for?”
“If I tell you, it won’t come true,” Jack said. “Everyone knows that. Honestly, Dad.”
Three days later, he couldn’t sit up without help.
Ten days later, the doctors stopped talking about next steps.
On the seventeenth day, early in the morning, with the sky turning gray outside the window, Daniel asleep in the chair and my hand on his chest, my son stopped breathing.
It was very quiet.
I’d always thought it would be louder.
Then Theo’s name was announced for the eulogy.
I’d forgotten.
I had completely forgotten he was supposed to speak. Months earlier, during one of the good weeks, Jack had told us. “If, you know. If. Theo’s doing the speech. Not Uncle Rick. Uncle Rick will talk about fishing for an hour.”
I’d said, “Don’t talk like that.”
And Jack had said, “Okay,” and changed the subject. And I’d let him. And last week I’d written Theo’s name on the funeral director’s form without even thinking.
Now the pastor said it aloud.
“Jack’s best friend, Theo Moreno, will now share a few words.”
Theo stood.
The whispers followed him all the way down the aisle to the front of the church. I heard them. What is he wearing? Is this a joke? Somebody should say something. His poor mother.
His poor mother.
They meant me.
Daniel started to rise again, half off the pew. I don’t know what he meant to do. I don’t think he knew either.
I held on to his sleeve.
Theo reached the microphone, turned around, and saw all of us looking at him.
And that’s when he said it.
I know half of you want me out of here right now.
