The navy tie he had worn that night hung over the back of his desk chair. His baseball glove sat on the shelf above his bed. A half-finished sketch of a motorcycle lay beside his pencils. His sneakers were still under the bed, one upright and one tipped on its side.
The door stayed closed most of the time.
But never locked.
My mother said she did not want Jesse to think we had shut him out if he came home.
People cared at first.
Then, slowly, life made cowards of them.
They stopped saying his name because they did not know what to do with our pain. Invitations stopped coming because no one wanted to host a family carrying that kind of sadness.
At church, people squeezed my mother’s hand and told her God had a plan until one Sunday she pulled her hand away and said, “Then I would like Him to explain it to me.”
