Chapter 2 - Our Proud Boy
Inside were photographs. Not many — maybe a dozen, held together with a dried-out rubber band that snapped when I touched it.
Mason picked up the one on top and didn't set it back down.
A young man, nineteen or twenty, in a graduation cap and gown, grinning at the camera like he'd just been handed the world.
"Who is this?" Mason asked.
"That's your Uncle Nathan."
He looked up. "I don't have an Uncle Nathan."
"You did. He was my brother."
Mason turned the photo over. On the back, in my mother's slanted handwriting, was a date and three words. *Our proud boy.*
He reached for the next picture and I let him take it. Nathan at somebody's birthday party, paper hat crooked. Nathan knee-deep in the ocean, arms thrown up. Nathan in a kitchen with his mouth full, caught mid-laugh.
Then he got to the last one and went completely still.
Nathan in a hospital bed. Thin. Worn out. Still smiling, but it was a different smile.
"What happened to him?" Mason asked. His voice had dropped.
I made myself look at my son. "He had Down syndrome. And he spent his entire life being laughed at by people who decided they were better than him."
Mason set the photo down like it had gotten heavy.
"He died when he was twenty-six," I said. "Bad heart. It runs with the condition sometimes. And I have not stopped missing him for one single day since."
May you like
The kitchen was dead quiet. The refrigerator hummed and clicked off.
Then Mason's phone buzzed against the table between us. He glanced down at the screen out of habit — and whatever name he saw there drained the color right out of his face.
