Then he lowered himself back onto the floor, placed the blue car beside the green pickup, and looked up at Eli.
"All right, little man. You ready for the championship?"
Eli grinned.
"Three, two, one... GO!"
The cars rolled across the tiles.
And I stood in the doorway holding a paper cup of cold coffee, trying to understand how a stranger with tattooed hands had managed to give my son something that months of treatment had nearly taken away.
That was the first time I met Wade.
I had no idea he would return the next morning.
Or the morning after that.
I certainly didn't know he would keep coming for an entire year.
And I never imagined that the reason he showed up every day was connected to a little red toy car he kept hidden in his pocket.
A car that had once belonged to a six-year-old girl who never got to grow up.
Before leukemia entered our lives, Eli was the kind of little boy who could turn almost anything into a race.
He raced leaves floating down the gutter after a storm. He raced his shadow across the driveway when the afternoon sun was behind him. He raced cereal pieces around the breakfast table with his fingertips, announcing elaborate victories that only made sense to him.
His favorite possessions were toy cars.
Not expensive battery-powered models or remote-controlled machines, but ordinary little die-cast vehicles with scratched paint and wheels that didn't always spin properly. He collected them in a blue plastic box beneath his bed and gave each one a name.
A silver car was called Moon Rocket.
A green truck was Pickle Monster.
A yellow racing car was Banana Speed.
His favorite was a small blue sports car he called Thunder.
He slept with it beneath his pillow until I convinced him that metal wheels weren't particularly comfortable against his cheek.
On Saturday mornings, he arranged the cars along the living room rug and built imaginary racetracks out of books, cereal boxes, and strips of masking tape. He narrated every race himself, making engine noises so loudly that our neighbor once knocked to ask whether I had started a motorcycle inside the apartment.
I used to complain about stepping on toy cars.
Now I would have given anything to hear him racing down the hallway again.
The first signs that something was wrong were easy to explain away.
Eli seemed more tired than usual.
He stopped halfway through games and asked to sit down. Bruises appeared on his legs, and he complained about aches that seemed to move from one place to another. Then came the fevers.