Page 23 of Piece By Piece

Liza watched from across the way to see what Grant would do.

Grant noticed the boy the way he always noticed his fellow quiet guys. The kid was standing there like he wanted to try the tangram table, but he didn’t want anyone to see him try. His mother was standing a few feet away, talking to another parent. And the boy had a look that Grant recognized from his own childhood. The look of someone who thought the puzzle was for other people.

Grant walked around the table and crouched down.

“Hey, you want to give it a shot?”

The boy shrugged. “I’m not very good at puzzles.”

“Well, nobody’s good at puzzles when they first start. I mean, that’s the whole point, right? To learn how to do something well.”

The boy looked at him with skepticism. He had probably heard many adults say encouraging things before and found them mostly useless.

Grant respected it.

“Here,” Grant said.

He picked up the seven tangram pieces and laid them out flat.

“The trick with this is you don’t want to force the shapes into something. Just listen to them. Each piece will only fit one way, and it will tell you where it goes if you’re patient.”

He slid the two large triangles toward the boy.

“Start with the big ones. They’re the loudest.”

The boy picked up the triangle and turned it in his hand. Slowly, carefully, he placed it on the card, and then the second one.

Grant guided him through the parallelogram and the medium triangle.

By the time they got to the small pieces, he was doing it on his own.

When the last piece finally clicked into place, the boy’s face broke into a grin so wide it changed the whole shape of his face.

He looked up at Grant like he had just discovered fire.

“I did it!”

“You did it.”

“Can I try another one?”

“Well, you can try all of them.”

The boy pulled the next challenge card toward him, and Grant stood and stepped back, allowing the boy to work on his own.

Then he turned and saw Liza watching him from the bookstore, her arms folded across her chest.

She was looking at him in a way he couldn’t quite name.

It wasn’t like she was teasing him.

It was softer, warmer.

Like she’d just seen something she hadn’t expected.

And that made him look away immediately.

By 7:30, Dixie seemed to have had enough of her spectating. She got up from her chair and walked over to Grant’s hardest puzzle station. It was a logic grid that most adults had been avoiding like the plague.