He'd shown Dev. Back in November, at Thanksgiving, on the couch at Aunt Kim's, scrolling on his phone. Look at this one, dude. That's the one I'd get. He didn't remember Jordan being there. He didn't remember Jordan being anywhere.
"He had a list," Grandpa said. "On that notebook paper. What it was all for. I asked him, I said, son, what's an eleven-year-old want with all that, you don't even like those shooting games. And he turned that paper around and showed me." Grandpa held up one big finger and pointed at nothing, at the air, at an invisible line on an invisible page. "Your name was on the top of it. It said, For Caleb. Then it said, It has to be in the living room. Underlined. Twice."
Caleb looked at the wall of bins. The labels went blurry. He blinked and they came back and then went blurry again.
"Why didn't he just give it to me?" His voice came out wrong. "If it was for me. Why'd he make it his birthday? Why didn't he just—"
"Ask him."
"I'm asking you."
Grandpa was quiet for a while. The heater ticked. Outside, a truck went by on Route 9, and the whole barn hummed with it for a second, and then it was gone.
"I had two girls," Grandpa said. "You know that. Your mom and your Aunt Kim."
Caleb nodded. He didn't know where this was going.
"Kim was the hard one. Kim was in trouble from the time she could walk. Ran off at fifteen, got picked up in Kansas City at sixteen, you name it, she did it, and your grandmother and I spent ten years chasing her. Ten years. Driving around at two in the morning. Hospitals. Police stations. Lawyers." He rubbed his face with one big hand. "And your mother was the good one. Straight A's. Never gave us a minute's trouble. Made her own lunches from the time she was eight years old, because nobody else was gonna do it. And I'll tell you something I never told anybody. Not even your grandmother."
He looked at Caleb. His eyes were pale blue and wet at the edges, the way old men's eyes get, so you couldn't tell if it was age or something else.
"Your mother won the county science fair in eighth grade. Went on to state. Down in Jefferson City. Some project with bean plants and music, I don't even remember. And she asked me to drive her, because her mother was in Kansas City that weekend picking Kim up from the juvenile center. And I said I couldn't. I said I had a job, a guy's tractor, I couldn't leave it. Wasn't true. I just didn't want to go. I was tired. I was so goddamn tired of my kids, and Dana was the one I could say no to, because Dana would say okay." He paused. "And she said okay. She got a ride with her teacher. Came home with a second-place ribbon, put it in a drawer. Never said one word about it. Not then, not ever."
Caleb didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say.