Eric unfolded the letter. “Son — if you’re reading this, you wore the red one. I knew you would. And it means I can finally tell you the thing I was never brave enough to say while I was alive.”
Chapter 2: The Son Who Was Always Too Bright
I stood in that cemetery and watched my brother read a letter from our dead father, and by the end of it I understood a lifetime of things I’d gotten wrong about both of them.
Eric had always been the bright one. Not smartest — brightest. As a kid he wanted the loud shirts, the wild colors, the red sneakers when every other boy wore white. He was theatrical, expressive, a little too much for our father, who was a career military man, rigid and quiet and buttoned all the way to the collar. Dad spent Eric’s whole childhood trying to tone him down. Wear the gray one. Sit still. Men don’t make a spectacle. And Eric, over the years, dimmed himself to fit, the way kids do when the person they love keeps flinching at who they are.
Their relationship had always been strained. I’d assumed, my whole life, that Dad was simply disappointed in Eric — that my colorful, sensitive brother was a puzzle our stern father couldn’t love the way he loved his more conventional daughter. Eric assumed it too. He’d spent his adulthood at a careful distance from Dad, both of them polite, neither of them close, a lifetime of a son believing his father wished he’d been someone else.
