Have You Seen Luis Velez?

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

The question was whether I feel loved. Not usually. Not so much. I think my baby sister loves me. My other two sisters, I don’t know. I’ll bet they do, in there somewhere.

It should not fall to you, but still I will ask if you give love to them. In a big sort of way that they can feel. Because it’s entirely possible that you might have to be the one to start this ball rolling. Somebody has to go first. It’s unfair that it should be you, but that may be the case all the same. Life is not always fair.”

But a lot of parents don’t know such things themselves, and they can’t very well teach you what they don’t know, now can they?

“Every time I say a nice thing about you, you get very quiet,” she said. “I’m not used to it.” “That’s a shame.”

When the door opened she beamed up at him, and for the first time in as long as Raymond could remember, he felt happy. From the inside out.

There’s no real reason why we didn’t. We just made the mistake of putting it off. We thought we would lose nothing by putting it off. We thought we had plenty of time. I guess that was our key mistake, right? We thought there would always be more time. Why do we do that?