He had been playing with a ball near the school gate. A car came too fast from the side street.
One second he was there.
The next second he was gone.
There was no farewell. No final words. Only silence where his laughter once lived.
For years afterward, I would still turn whenever I heard boys laughing down the street.
Sometimes I even imagined hearing a ball bouncing in our driveway.
Hope can be cruel that way.
People urged me to try again.
“Have another child,” they said.
“It might ease the pain.”
But grief had carved out something inside me.
I couldn’t imagine loving another child while still mourning the one I had lost.
So Carl and I became quiet people in a quiet home.
And for a long time, that silence felt safer.
The Moving Truck
Then one afternoon, a moving truck pulled up to the house next door.
Carl stood by the front window watching.
“Looks like we’ve got neighbors again,” he said.
I nodded from the kitchen doorway.
“I’ll bake something to welcome them.”
It was something my mother always used to do. A simple gesture of kindness.
So that afternoon I baked an apple pie.
Once it cooled enough to carry, I walked across the lawn holding it carefully with both hands.
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