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“Mr. Ernie,” James yelled out. “I have questions.”

“And I have answers. I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Awesome!” James ran to the front door and waved after them. After that, I took James on what I thought of as the proper tour—not the quick customer sweep, but the real one, the kind where I actually explained things. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back, which I suspected he'd picked up from Adam, looking at everything with careful attention. He was killing me.

At the blanket wall, I told him he could touch.

He looked up at Adam for verification.

“If Miss Zoe says it’s okay for you to touch, you can touch.” He assured his son.

James reached out one finger and pressed it into the edge of an angora throw, then looked up at me with an expression of pure disbelief. "It's so soft."

"Right?"

"Dad." He turned. "It's so soft. Touch it."

Adam touched it obediently and confirmed that it was, in fact, very soft.

I showed him Henry Sharp’s peach alabaster sculptures—the abstract pieces that caught light in that deep, honeyed way. James stood in front of the largest one for a long moment without saying anything, which from a four-year-old felt significant.

"What is it?" he finally asked.

"It's whatever it looks like to you," I told him. "That's the whole point."

“I don’t understand.”

“A lot of times people will tell you that you have to look at something and see it a certain way, or feel about it a certain way. The man who makes these, his name is Pop-Pop, he wants to know what you think of his creations. He wants to know how you feel after looking at them and touching them.”

He thought about this. "It looks like when the sun goes behind a cloud, but then it comes back."

Adam was very quiet behind me.

I kept my voice normal. "Pop-Pop would be really impressed by what you saw."

Two customers came in around that point—a woman and her daughter, maybe twelve, who were doing what I privately called the lookers-who-become-buyers tour. You could tell by how they moved, slow and touching things, not the brisk march of someone with a specific errand.

James, who had clearly inherited something from his father about reading a room, positioned himself next to the angora wall while they were looking at blankets and said, conversationally, to the daughter, "It's so soft. You should feel it."

She did.

“Touch it with both hands,” he encouraged.

She did. Then her mother felt it.

Seven minutes later I was wrapping a blanket.

James watched the tissue paper go down with great satisfaction. When the woman had her bag and was heading for the door, he looked up at me and said, "That worked."

I pressed my lips together. "It did."

He nodded, processing this. Then he wandered toward the sculpture corner again, and I followed him, and Adam fell in beside me.

"I'm going to be honest with you," Adam said quietly, "I had no idea he could do that."

"Natural salesman," I said. "He's got the instinct."

James had stopped in front of one of Henry Sharp's smaller pieces—a polished bronze form that threw a warm reflection across the shelf—and was considering it with that same particular stillness he'd given the alabaster.