The MC read my name.
And Teddy came out into the light carrying a wooden box.
⸻
He'd made it entirely himself. Oak, sanded down soft enough to catch the stage lights, brass hinges he must have picked out at the hardware store on Larkspur Road, because that's the only place in town that actually sells them.
It was about the size of a shoebox.
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He held it against his chest with both hands, the exact way you carry something you don't fully trust yourself with yet, even after months of careful work.
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He walked to the microphone. It was too tall for him, set for a senior considerably taller, and nobody moved to adjust it in time, so he tipped his chin up to reach it himself.
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Then the screen behind him lit up.
It was a photo of us on Nana's old brown couch. I'm four, he's one, and I have my arm around him, and we're both laughing at something off-camera neither of us remembers anymore.
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I don't know how he found that picture. It lives in an album tucked in the back of Mom's closet, the kind nobody's opened in years.
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He set the box down carefully on the podium, and the entire room went so quiet I could hear the hinges give slightly when he lifted the lid.
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He looked out at four hundred people. His glasses had fogged slightly under the stage lights.
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"I made this in the garage," he said, his voice carrying further than I expected, steady despite everything. "It took me a long time."
He put his hand inside the box.
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He pulled out the first small wooden charm — a tiny carved shoe, no bigger than a quarter, the laces etched carefully into the wood.
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"This one's for when you taught me to tie my shoes," he said. "You did it like thirty times because I kept messing up the loop part. You never got mad."
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He set it on the podium and reached back into the box.
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