Who Do You Love by Jennifer Weiner Page B

like it was nothing special, to acknowledge that someone had died, to say that you missed her. What if Lori had a picture of his father in their place, somewhere that he could see it every day? Andy couldn’t imagine it. When he was little, she’d shown him a single shot, of her and his father on their wedding day. Lori had worn a big white dress, and her hair had been like an explosion on top of her head, barely held in place with a glittering white band. Standing beside her, lanky and tall, was his father, looking uncomfortable in his tuxedo, with his wrists sticking out from the sleeves. His father had big, dark eyes and close-cropped hair, his lips the same shape that Andy saw in the mirror in the mornings. “Do you have other pictures?” he’d asked his mom, as recently as September, but her face had gotten tight as she’d shaken her head.
    Andy followed Mr. Sills along the narrow pathway that led to two armchairs with a table between them. Under the table was a waist-high stack of old Sports Illustrated magazines, and Andy gazed at them with naked longing while Mr. Sills continued on. The room reminded Andy of a picture in his illustrated version of The Hobbit that showed Bilbo Baggins’s burrow. He looked around at the framed posters of old boxing matches, the piles of National Geographic s and old Life magazines, and the china figurines that, even to his unpracticed eye, looked much more expensive than his mother’s. There was a chess set on the low table in front of the couch, and a grouping of what Andy thought were hatboxes, some deep and some shallow, stretching almost as tall as he was, against the wall.
    â€œWhere’d all this stuff come from?” Andy asked as Mr. Sills came back with a big photo album in his hands.
    â€œHere, there, and everywhere,” said Mr. Sills. He sat down in the chair next to Andy, sipped from his cup, then opened the book. “Here we go,” he said. “Mrs. Sills put these together. One for every year DeVaughn was in high school.”
    Andy flipped through the pages slowly. There was De­Vaughn’s class picture, which depicted a round-faced boy with Mr. Sills’s smile. Then came a shot of the freshman basketball team, three rows of boys in red-and-blue uniforms, with a list of names underneath them. Andy found DeVaughn Sills in the front row. And in the row behind him was a familiar smile and his own name. Big hands cradled a basketball, the wrists and fingers the same shape as his own.
    Astonishment washed over him, pebbling his skin with goose bumps, making his mouth go dry. He skimmed through pages of DeVaughn’s report cards, a written report on the Geneva Conventions, and finally stopped on a yellowed article clipped from the Examiner. “ ‘Father Judge Falls in Semifinals , ’ ” he read. “ ‘Despite the best efforts of standout sophomore center Andrew Landis, whose 28 points tied for a school record, the Crusaders were defeated by the Knights in the semifinals of the Catholic League’s basketball tournament.’ ”
    With the story was a black-and-white shot of a man—a kid, really—caught midjump, with the basketball balanced on his fingertips, poised at the rim of the hoop. Andy bent until his nose was almost touching the photo-album plastic, studying every detail. His father, Andrew Sr., had the same long face, full lips, and wide-set eyes, but his nose was broader, and his hair more tightly curled. Andy saw his father’s legs, revealed in the brief shorts that players wore back then, long legs with visibly muscled calves and thighs. His father had the same ropy muscles in his arms, the same build as Andy, narrow but strong.
    There you are, thought Andy, with astonishment and joy. There was his other half, the rest of him, the man who’d contributed his mouth, his eyes, his long, strong legs to his son. Andy could tell that the wedding picture showed him