Part 2: The Promise
Now he was staring at the coffin.
It was a simple wooden one. Pine. Jack had wanted it that way, though I didn’t know at the time how badly he’d wanted it.
Theo pulled the microphone closer. His hand was shaking.
“About six months ago,” he said, “Jack and I were watching this terrible movie in his room.”
A tiny smile flickered across his face.
“He said it was a classic.” Theo shook his head. “It was not.”
A few of Jack’s friends laughed softly. Marcus wiped his eyes.
Theo went on.
“He’d just gotten back from another scan. His parents weren’t home yet.”
I looked at Daniel.
I remembered that scan.
I remembered the day exactly. A Tuesday in March. Daniel had driven Jack to the hospital and back because I had a shift I couldn’t miss. He’d dropped Jack at home and gone straight to the store.
The results came that evening, by phone.
They were bad.
Not hopeless. Not officially. Nobody used that word.
But bad enough that the oncologist had begun using new phrases. Phrases like next-line treatment. Phrases like managing expectations.
I remember standing in the kitchen with the phone against my ear, staring at a burned pan Jack had left in the sink, nodding at whatever she said.
I remember thinking, We just won’t tell him how bad it is yet. Not until we know more.
Jack had been upstairs. With Theo. Watching a terrible movie.
“Jack asked me if I’d speak at his funeral,” Theo said.
The air left my chest.
Daniel sat down, hard, as though his legs had given out.
Theo looked straight at us.
“I told him to shut up.”
His eyes filled.
“I was mad at him. For even saying it. I threw a pillow at his head.”
Then, somehow, he laughed through his tears.
“So then he kept going. Because he was Jack. And I said, ‘Fine. I’ll speak at your funeral when you show up to mine wearing a dress.’”
Several people smiled. Somebody near the back actually chuckled.
I didn’t.
I already knew where this was heading. I could feel it, the way you feel a wave coming before it reaches you.
Theo continued.
“And Jack said, ‘Fine. Then you have to wear one to mine.’”
Theo looked down at the red fabric.
“I told him absolutely not.”
He paused.
“Then he said, ‘Red.’”
My hands began to shake.
“Specifically red,” Theo said. “Because he said black makes me look like an undertaker.”
Someone behind me laughed out loud. Then, in the same breath, started crying. I heard both sounds come from the same throat, one right after the other.
Theo’s voice grew weaker.
“I told him there wasn’t going to be a funeral.”
He stopped again and gazed at the podium for a long time.
This time he couldn’t hide the tears. They simply came, and he didn’t wipe them away.
“I said he was going to get better.”
The church was completely silent. I could hear the old radiator clanking along the wall. I could hear a car pass by outside.
“He said, ‘Probably.’”
Theo wiped his face with the back of his hand.
“But then he made me promise.”
I couldn’t breathe.
Jack had never told us. Not once, in fourteen months.
He had asked whether his hair would grow back. “Will it come back curly? Sometimes it comes back curly. I read that. I’d be okay with curly.”
He had asked whether he could still go to college. He’d been accepted to the state university, early decision, in the middle of treatment. He’d opened the email in a hospital bed with an IV in his arm and yelled so loudly that Glenda came running.
He’d asked whether we’d let him travel if the treatment worked. He wanted to go to Mongolia. He wanted to see Ulaanbaatar, simply because he liked how it sounded. “I want to stand in the middle of it and say it out loud, and have nobody look at me weird.”
He talked about the future so constantly that I’d assumed he believed in it as fiercely as I needed him to.
And six months before his death, on the same night I stood in my kitchen deciding not to tell him how bad that scan was, my son had been upstairs making his best friend promise what to wear to his funeral.
He knew.
He’d known the whole time. Or at least he’d known it was possible.
And he’d shielded me from knowing that he knew.
“I thought if I didn’t promise,” Theo said, “he’d think I was scared.”
He looked at Jack’s coffin.
“I was scared.”
Then he reached into the pocket of the dress.
Yes.
The ridiculous thing had pockets.
Jack would have appreciated that. Jack had very strong opinions about pockets. He once wrote a letter to a clothing company complaining that his mother’s jeans had fake pockets. I never asked him to. He was fourteen.
Theo pulled out a piece of paper. Lined notebook paper, folded into a small square, soft and worn at the creases, as if it had been opened and refolded a hundred times.
“This is why I didn’t just ignore him,” Theo said.
He held it up.
“Jack wrote it down.”
My head snapped up.
Theo looked right at me.
“Mrs. Harris, I’m sorry,” he said. “I should’ve told you before today. I just—” His voice broke. “I couldn’t.”
He unfolded the paper slowly.
I recognized the handwriting from across the room. Jack’s handwriting was terrible, slanted and cramped, half print and half cursive, with little circles over the i’s that he’d started as a joke in fourth grade and never been able to stop.
Theo cleared his throat.
“It says, ‘Theo. If you’re reading this because I died, first of all, that’s embarrassing for me.’”
A ripple of laughter moved through the church.
Real laughter. Painful, but real.
That sounded exactly like Jack. It sounded so much like him that for a second I could almost hear him say it, in that flat, deadpan voice he used for jokes, with one eyebrow raised.
Theo kept reading.
“‘Second, you promised. Red dress. Don’t chicken out just because my relatives are judgmental.’”
Daniel made a sound beside me, half sob and half laugh. He pressed his fist against his mouth.
Theo glanced up from the paper.
He looked, very deliberately, at the pew behind us. At Daniel’s brother Rick. The one who’d whispered What the hell?
Rick turned red from his collar to his hairline.
A few people laughed harder.
Then Theo’s face changed.
He looked back down at the paper. And when he read the next part, his voice went very quiet.
“‘Third. Don’t let my funeral be the first time you lie to me just because I’m not there to call you out.’”
Theo lowered the paper.
He stood a long moment, gripping the edge of the podium.
“I almost didn’t come,” he said.
I looked at him.
“My dad told me not to wear it,” Theo said. “He said I’d embarrass myself. He said I’d embarrass your family.” He looked at me. “My mom said people would misunderstand. That they’d think I was making fun of Jack. My sister told me I was insane.”
Then he glanced down at himself.
“But she gave me the dress anyway.”
A young woman near the back covered her mouth with both hands.
Theo’s sister. Emma.
I’d barely noticed her. She sat alone in the last pew, in a black coat, her eyes red-rimmed. She must have slipped in right behind him.
She was twenty-two now. I remembered her at eleven, standing in the driveway of the yellow house, glaring at her parents while they argued about the couch.
Theo looked back at me.
“I didn’t want to upset you,” he said.
That broke me.
Because he’d been sitting there. Four rows behind me. Ten feet away. In his sister’s dress, hands clenched white in his lap, terrified of hurting us.
While I sat in the front row wondering whether to have him removed.
I stood.
I didn’t decide to. My body simply did it.
Daniel looked up at me. He didn’t grab my sleeve. He let me go.
I walked to the front of the church. My heels clicked on the floor. Every eye in the room followed me.
Theo froze at the microphone.
For one horrible second, I think he believed I was coming to take him away. To make him stop. To ask him to leave. I saw it in his face. I saw him brace, like a kid who’s been yelled at by adults his whole life and knows exactly what it looks like when it’s coming.
Instead, I hugged him.
He was taller than me now.
When had that happened? I’d known this boy since he had missing teeth. Since he was a skinny little thing with enormous ears and a plastic triceratops. I’d put a blanket over him a hundred times.
Now I had to reach up to wrap my arms around his neck.
He folded into me, all of him. His whole body simply gave way, and he started sobbing into my shoulder. Big, wrenching sobs, the kind that come from the bottom of your lungs.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“No.”
“I should’ve told you.”
“No.”
“I didn’t mean to make today worse.”
“You didn’t.”
I held the back of his head with one hand, the way I used to hold Jack’s when he was small.
“Theo,” I said into his ear. “Finish it.”
He pulled back and looked at me. His face was a mess.
“Are you sure?”
