“I’m here now.”
My mother still keeps Jesse’s old bedroom almost the same.
Not exactly.
The first change was the suit jacket.
For twenty-three years, the police had kept the original as evidence before eventually returning it, sealed in a preservation bag my mother could never bring herself to open.
After Jesse came home, she finally took it out.
She cried when she touched the sleeve.
Then she hung it in the closet beside the navy tie from his desk chair.
Now the room is also Levi’s when he visits.
There is a phone charger on the nightstand. A backpack in the corner. A stack of books Jesse never read as a teenager but Levi is slowly working through because he says he wants to know what his father might have liked.
