Boxes lined the walls. A few of them had clothes in them, old basketball jerseys, even his dad’s varsity letter jacket from when he’d played for Claremont High. The box with the letter jacket in it had a picture of his dad wearing it, with his arm around Lucas’s mom. They looked happy in that picture.

They had started dating in high school, and his mom had always said, “We never really stopped.”

There were a lot of boxes filled with textbooks from med school. Lucas wasn’t sure why his mom kept them. But she did, along with some old black-and-white composition books filled with his dad’s handwriting, most of which Lucas could barely read. He wasn’t one to talk, of course. His handwriting wasn’t much to look at either.

There were a couple boxes with his dad’s trophies, going all the way back to when he played seventh-trade travel basketball, all bubble-wrapped for safekeeping. There were some cool photographs of Michael Winston at that age, looking a lot like Lucas.

Lucas picked up one now, and felt himself starting to tear up, the way he did sometimes when he was up here alone with the pictures and trophies and memories.

It wasn’t just the pictures of Lucas’s dad and his mom when they were younger. He always looked happy in the pictures, no matter what age he was. If it was a team picture, Michael Winston’s smile was always the biggest one.

The tears went away. His dad looked too happy. Lucas smiled. He knew from Gramps, and from his mom, that his dad had been some player before he tore up his knee. His mom had put together a scrapbook with old clippings from the Claremont paper about his dad’s career. Lucas had read the story about the night his dad had gotten injured, making a steal at the end of a game against Sheridan that saved that game for Claremont. There was a picture with the story showing two of his dad’s teammates helping him off the court.

Gramps was right behind them.

It brought Lucas back to why he’d come up here today. He just wanted to see if there was anything about Gramps he’d missed when he’d been alone up here with these boxes. He wanted to see if there was something, or anything, that would provide even a little information about him. All the other times Lucas had been in the attic, it was almost as if he were visiting his dad’s childhood. He’d never been up here trying to learn about Gramps. Now he wished there was a box with Gramps’s stuff in it. Only there wasn’t. There was nothing up here to tell Lucas about what Gramps’s life had been like when he was a boy growing up in California.