It was hard to look at him. I kept doing it in short glances the way you avoided staring at the sun because it’d hurt your eyes. If I looked at him too long, I saw how much he’d aged, the bags under his eyes, the wrinkles and salt-and-pepper hair, and my mind tried to fit that up against the memories I had from when I was a kid. Him teaching me how to ride my bike, the steady hand on the back of my seat, the other on the handlebars.
