That Same Age

Leo didn't like rainy Saturdays. You couldn't ride bikes in the rain. You couldn't play capture the flag. You couldn't even sit on the porch swing without getting your socks wet from the spray.

So when the rain came down hard that Saturday morning, Leo flopped onto Grandpa's couch like a pancake sliding off a spatula.

"I'm bored," he announced to the ceiling.

Grandpa was in the kitchen, humming something that didn't seem to have a tune. He always hummed when he was making hot chocolate, which he made the slow way, with real milk in a pot and everything.

"Bored!" Leo said again, louder, in case the ceiling hadn't passed along the message.

"I heard you the first time," Grandpa called. "And I heard the second time too. Come in here and make yourself useful. Stir this."

Leo dragged himself into the kitchen and stood on the little step stool and stirred the chocolate while Grandpa rummaged through the hall closet. There was a lot of thumping and one small crash and something that might have been a word Grandpa wasn't supposed to say.

Then Grandpa came back holding a big cardboard box with the corners all soft and bent. He set it on the kitchen table with a thud that made dust jump.

"What's that?" Leo asked.

"Trouble," Grandpa said. Then he winked. "Old photographs. Haven't opened this box in fifteen years."

Leo poured the hot chocolate into two mugs—the blue one for him, the chipped yellow one for Grandpa—and they sat down together at the table. Grandpa pulled off the lid.

Inside were about a million photographs, all loose, all jumbled up like someone had shaken the box and never sorted it out again. Leo picked one up. It showed a woman in a funny hat standing next to a car that looked like a spaceship from an old movie.

"That's your Great-Aunt Ruthie," Grandpa said. "She drove that car into a ditch three times. Three times. Same ditch."

Leo laughed. He picked up another photo. A dog with one ear up and one ear down.

"Biscuit!" Grandpa said, and his face went soft and happy. "Best dog that ever lived."

They went through the photos one by one. Grandpa had a story for every single picture, and Leo noticed that the stories got longer and funnier as they went. There was Uncle Harold who accidentally sat on a birthday cake. There was the Christmas where the tree fell over during dinner and nobody noticed for ten whole minutes. There was Grandpa's old house with the porch that leaned so far to the left that marbles would roll off it all by themselves.

Leo was reaching for another photo when Grandpa suddenly went quiet.

He was holding a small photograph, square-shaped with a white border, the colors a little faded like someone had left it in the sun. Grandpa stared at it for a long time. Then he looked at Leo. Then back at the photo. Then back at Leo.

"What?" Leo said.

Grandpa didn't answer. He just turned the photograph around so Leo could see.

It was a boy.

He was standing in front of a brick wall, wearing a striped T-shirt that was a little too big for him. His hair was messy—not messy like he'd been playing, but messy like it just grew that way no matter what you did to it. He was grinning straight at the camera, a big, wide, fearless grin.

And right in the middle of that grin, right in the front of his mouth, there was a gap. A perfect, wonderful gap where two teeth used to be and new ones hadn't come in yet.

Leo put his hand up to his own mouth. He touched the gap in his own front teeth with the tip of his tongue, the way he always did when he was thinking.

"Is that..." Leo started.

"That's me," Grandpa said. "I was seven years old."

"No way."

"Way."

Leo took the photo and held it close. The boy in the picture had Grandpa's eyes—Leo could see that now, the same dark brown, the same little crinkle at the corners like he was always just about to laugh. And the hair. Leo reached up and touched his own messy hair, the hair that stuck up in the back no matter how much his mom wet it down.

"We have the same hair," Leo said quietly.

"We do," Grandpa said. "Drove my mother crazy too."

Leo looked at the boy in the photo, standing there with his too-big shirt and his gappy smile and his messy hair, and he felt something strange. It was like finding a secret door in a room you'd been in a hundred times.

Because the thing was—Grandpa was old. Grandpa had gray hair and big wrinkly hands and he made noises when he stood up from chairs. Grandpa knew how to fix lawn mowers and cook pot roast. Grandpa was a grandpa.

But this boy in the photo didn't know any of that yet. This boy was just seven. This boy probably got bored on rainy Saturdays too.

"Did you like capture the flag?" Leo asked.

Grandpa grinned. With his teeth all there now, it was a different smile—but also, somehow, exactly the same one.

"I loved capture the flag. I was the fastest kid on Maple Street. Nobody could catch me."

"I'm the fastest in my class," Leo said.

"I know you are. Who do you think you got it from?"

Leo held the photo up next to Grandpa's face. Grandpa held still and made his best serious-kid expression. Leo burst out laughing.

"You really look like me," Leo said. And then he corrected himself. "Wait—I really look like you. You were first."

"That's true," Grandpa said. "I was first. But you do it better."

Leo studied the photo again. The boy was standing with one foot kind of turned in, the way Leo stood when he was waiting in line at school. The boy's left shoelace was untied.

"Your shoe's untied," Leo said.

"It always was," Grandpa said. "I couldn't keep a shoe tied to save my life. Didn't learn to double-knot until I was nine."

Leo looked down at his own shoes. His left shoelace was untied. It was always his left shoelace.

"Grandpa," Leo said, and his voice came out a little quieter than he meant it to. "What was it like? Being seven?"

Grandpa leaned back in his chair. The rain tapped on the windows, and the kitchen smelled like chocolate, and outside the world was gray and soft and blurry.

"It was a lot like this," Grandpa said. "Rainy days felt like they lasted forever. Hot chocolate tasted like the best thing in the world. And I thought being a grown-up was a million years away."

"Was it?"

Grandpa looked at the photo one more time. Something moved across his face—not sadness exactly, but something close to it, something that was also mixed up with happiness, the way hot chocolate is both hot and sweet at the same time.

"It felt like it," he said. "And then it wasn't."

They sat there for a minute, just the two of them and the rain and the box of photos and the boy who was seven a long time ago.

Then Leo said, "Can I keep this picture? Just for a while?"

"You can keep it forever," Grandpa said.

Leo tucked the photo carefully into his shirt pocket and patted it flat. He could feel it there, right against his chest—that square of a boy with a gappy smile who turned into this grandpa with the big wrinkly hands who made hot chocolate the slow way.

"Grandpa?" Leo said.

"Yeah?"

"I'm not bored anymore."

Grandpa laughed. It was a big laugh, the kind that used his whole face, and for just one second—just a flash—Leo could see the seven-year-old boy in there, right behind Grandpa's eyes, grinning out.

"Come on," Grandpa said, pushing himself up from the table with the usual noises. "Let's see what other trouble is in that box."

And they spent the whole rest of that rainy Saturday together, pulling out pictures and telling stories, and outside the rain kept falling, and neither of them minded one bit.