Chapter 67
Leroy turned forty-five in the same yard where Marcus had turned thirty, in the same community of people who had become, over the decades, the irreducible core of both of their lives.
His business had grown again he had expanded into regional logistics, his fleet now operating across Jamaica and with partnerships in Barbados and Trinidad. He had hired properly, built systems, managed the growth with the steadiness that characterized him. He had two children: a daughter in university and a son in secondary school. He and Sandra had been married for twelve years.
He was, Marcus thought, watching him move through his party with the wide laugh and the total physical presence that had always been Leroy, exactly the person he had been at seven years old in the yard. The same loyalty, the same directness, the same uncomplicated love for the people around him. Life had grown him but had not changed his essential nature, which was as good an outcome as Marcus could imagine for any person.
He pulled Marcus aside near the end of the evening, out to the back wall where they had sat on so many evenings over so many decades.
'You know what I want to tell you?' Leroy said.
'What?'
'That you are the best decision I ever made.'
Marcus looked at him.
'You didn't decide me,' he said. 'I was next door.'
'Seven years old,' Leroy said. 'I decided you were my person. That was a decision. The best one.' He looked at Marcus. 'You never stopped being worth it. You know that?'
Marcus held that.
'You didn't either,' he said. 'Not for one day.'
They sat on the back wall with their drinks, comfortable in the silence, the Kingston night around them, the sounds of the party drifting out.
Marcus thought about being nine years old and not wanting to leave. About Leroy at the airport with his mother, twenty-one years later, because of course he had come.
'You always knew,' Marcus said.
'Always,' Leroy said. 'From before I knew what always meant.'
The stars came out above the yard.
They stayed on the wall until Sandra came to find them, which was, they both privately agreed, exactly how it should be.