“I was terrible at reading aloud,” Sloane recalled.
“You were only seven.”
“I
knew the other kids were better.”
She rubbed the book’s worn spine.
“When I got stuck on a word, people would usually say it for me. They meant well, but I hated it.”
“I was terrible at reading aloud.”
“And Weston?”
“He waited.” She smiled faintly. “Sometimes I’d sit there staring at one word forever. He’d just wait until I tried.”
I looked down at my hands.
Weston used to do that with me.
“He’d just wait until I tried.”
Whenever I couldn’t remember somebody’s name, he’d wait instead of guessing.
It drove me crazy.
“He could be stubborn,” I said.
Sloane laughed.
“He really could.”
It drove me crazy.
She told me the reading program had ended a few days before the accident.
Weston was preparing to leave for college.
But Sloane hadn’t finished her favorite book.
“On the last day, I got upset,” she said. “I thought he’d
leave before I could read the ending.”
Weston was preparing to leave for college.
“What did he say?”
“He told me we’d find another afternoon. I said my parents were taking me to the riverside park that Saturday. He knew the place. He told me he’d come and listen to the last pages.”
“And?”
“He told me we’d find another afternoon.”
She looked down at the book.
“I didn’t tell my parents. I wanted to surprise them when they saw how much I could read.”
***
Weston had arrived before the picnic began.
Sloane’s parents were unloading their picnic things when she wandered toward the water.
“I didn’t tell my parents.”
“I dropped something near the edge,” she recounted. “I bent down to get it.”
I watched her hands tighten around the book.
“My foot slipped.”
She stopped.
I didn’t ask her to continue.
“My foot slipped.”
After a moment, she
said, “Weston was already there because he’d promised to listen to me read. I never told anyone that part. By the time I could say it out loud, we’d moved away.”
