A Long Year
It took most of a year for Bo to be Bo again.
Bo's parents went through with the divorce. Bo's dad moved into a small flat fifteen minutes' walk away. Bo started splitting his weeks: half at his mum's, half at his dad's. He hated it for a long time. Then he tolerated it. Then, slowly, he found a way to make it ordinary.
Pia did not try to be clever. She just kept showing up. She invited Bo to her house when his mum's house felt too sad. She invited him out on bike rides when she could see he had been crying. She did not always know what to say, but she had learned, very young, that not knowing what to say was not the same as having to say nothing. Sitting beside someone was a kind of sentence.
Bo had other friends, too. He had his cousins. He had his football team. He had Mrs Tannen, who had been very kind to him. He had a small therapist, a quiet woman who his mum had found. None of these had replaced Pia. None had made Pia less important. They had just added to the small circle of people holding Bo up.
When Bo was twelve and Pia was twelve, they were having lunch on a Saturday at Bo's mum's house, and Bo said, suddenly:
"Pia. Thank you."
"For what?"
"For — the phone call. The first one. The Saturday after. All of it. You didn't try to fix anything. You just showed up. I don't think anybody else got it right that whole year. You did."
Pia looked at her sandwich. She