Chapter 106
He visited the yard often in the months after Leroy died sat on the back wall looked at the mango tree let the grief move through him the way grief moves not in a straight line, not on a schedule, but in its own organic way.
Sandra
He and Nia visited Sandra every week for the first year. She was, as she had always been, specific and clear about what she needed not to be managed, not to be protected from her grief, but to be accompanied through it he ran again the week after Leroy's funeral, He ran in Hope Gardens and wept once, briefly, at the far corner of the garden, and then finished the run and went home and ate breakfast. Thomas was twenty-five and in his third year of teaching and had, in those three years, become, Marcus could see, the teacher he had always been pointing toward, Patient, Exact, Refusing to see any student as less than capable of engagement.
He started a fifth book at eighty-two. He told Nia, who said: of course you did. He told Elise, who said: what's it about? He told Thomas, who said: I knew you weren't done.
The fifth book was about Leroy. Not exclusively it was also about friendship, about what male friendship looked like when it was real and sustained and not managed down to acceptable emotional display. But Leroy was its heart. Writing about Leroy required him to write carefully to honor the reality of the man, which was specific and grounded, without turning him into a symbol. Leroy had hated abstractions. He had always wanted the specific thing.
Nia read the fifth book in draft and said: This is different from the others. He said: How? She said: You let yourself be seen more than usual. He said: Is that all right? She said: It's necessary It's true.
He wrote Sandra a letter when he finished the fifth book before publication, before anyone else had read it and asked if she was comfortable with what he had written about her husband. She replied: Leroy would have loved every word. Publish it.
The fifth book was published when Marcus was eighty-four, It was his shortest book and, Claudette had said in her response to the manuscript she was eighty-nine and read it from her retirement his most honest.