“She’s told me too,” I said. “About a hundred times.”
“Good story,” Gus said. “Better than most people get.”
I thought about that the rest of my shift, the strange geometry of it, a whole family built partly out of a paint aisle and partly out of a hardware store job I’d only taken as a joke.
Some days that summer, stocking shelves with Gus telling stories about customers from decades back, I’d catch myself thinking this was the most ordinary I’d ever felt, and how strange it was that ordinary had taken this long, and this much paperwork, to finally arrive.
Jonah started calling me “big brother” without any of the usual sibling irony, which somehow embarrassed me more than it should have.
Lily drew a family portrait for an end-of-summer school project, five stick figures under a stick-figure sun, my name written slightly larger than everyone else’s, right next to Marcus’s.
