Miles nodded again.
« He was crying, Mom. He kept saying he just wanted to know what it felt like. »
I didn’t know what to say to that.
Before I could even try, Miles looked up at me with wet eyes and whispered, « Dad would’ve played catch with him, right? »
That was it.
I pulled him into me and said, « Yes. He would have. »
Miles cried that night because he missed the glove. Not in a tantrum way. In that quiet, wrecked way kids cry when they know they did something kind and it still hurts.
After he fell asleep, I sat outside his room and thought about what grief does to children. How it can make them strangely generous. How it can make them give away the one thing they most want to keep because someone else looks even sadder.
The next morning, nothing happened. I had almost forgotten about it by the afternoon. I figured maybe the glove was gone for good, and that was that.
Then, the morning after that, our neighbor Karen screamed from my porch. Not called out. Screamed.
