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were the same age. “His dad loved him and he did care for him,” she told me, “but it wasn’t the type of thing where he’d go over just to hang out with his dad.” But Rosell was at his side that night, as were his paternal grandparents, cousins, brothers, and sisters from his father’s side—all telling stories and saying their good-byes.
    Up until the moment they wheeled him away for his final journey to the operating room, Nicole kept it together. “She held up really well,” says Amy. “It was like she was on automatic.”
    But witnessing that final journey was too much to bear. “I wish I would have,” says Nicole. “But I couldn’t see the doors close. It was surreal. It was almost like they were taking him to have his tonsils taken out.”
    It was around three a.m. on Sunday. Nicole had been up for forty-five hours straight, during which time her life had been turned upside down and then crushed underfoot. What happened next was a blur. “I just remember breaking down and crying and all these people hovering over me, and then somebody put me in a wheelchair and took me out of the hospital. I didn’t go back to his room to pick anything up or to get anything. I didn’t go back to the hospital at all.” The fog did not clear until the viewing. “It was maybe a week after he died,” she recalls. “He was laying in his casket. And I remember that because I’d been able to touch him so much at the hospital I went right up to him and I kissed him on the forehead, and I grabbed his hand and it was cold as stone and hard. And that was when the reality hit me. Oh my God. My baby’s gone. Until I saw him go into the ground it was like going through the motions.”
    Nicole never went back to the house on Independence Way. She went straight to the Drury Inn and stayed there until Christmas, when she went to Dallas to stay with a cousin and then to Houston to stay with Amy before coming back to Grove City for New Year.

    W HEN N ICOLE WAS PREGNANT with Jaiden, she was convinced he would be a girl. She was going to call him Olivia, and then he could lyrically double up with Amy’s youngest, Khiviana: Livvy and Kivvy. But she was relieved he was a boy. “God gave me boys for a reason,” she says. At school she had been an avid and, by all accounts, excellent softball player, pitching for the Grove City High School team, which won the league every year and the state championship in 1983.
    Tall and hefty, she was often teased about her weight during her youth. “I’ve never been a girly girl. I was a tomboy. My hair’s thrown up in a bun. I’m out there watching football games and yelling. I’m that mom in the basketball stands yelling at the ref because he made a bad call. So I’m glad I had boys.”
    Jaiden’s home life sounded quite familiar to me. Like him, I was by far the youngest of three boys with a single mom at the helm. Jaidenwas indulged; Jarid, the eldest, took on a lot of responsibility for him; Jordin, the middle child, was caught between the two; and Nicole ran from pillar to post trying to keep it all together. Like mine, theirs was a loving household full of camaraderie, tough love, rough and tumble, and considerable autonomy— Lord of the Flies meets The Brady Bunch with a touch of Roseanne. “They would fight. They would torture him. They’d torment him. They’d call me all the time at work. ‘Mom, they won’t let me play on the Xbox.’ ‘They won’t let me do this or that.’ And I’d just say, ‘Well, figure it out, boys.’” Jaiden was mixed-race—Nicole is white, Rosell is black—but much lighter-skinned than his brothers, whose fathers were also black. His skin was the color of straw. If Nicole was out with him alone he could pass as white, though he was often mistaken for being Middle Eastern.
    The baseball coaches collectively called him Smiley. “Every kid has a bad day,” says Brady, his coach. “But he was always smiling. It just never seemed like the