an accountant who has discovered that the company he just invested his life savings with is bankrupt. “No trouble at all, what makes you think that, son?”
“Well, what’s on your mind, then?”
Herb stopped smiling, but he kept rubbing his hands together. “I don’t really know how to tell you, Johnny. I mean ...”
“Is it Charlene?”
“Well, yes. It is.”
“You popped the question.”
Herb looked at Johnny humbly. “How do you feel about coming into a stepmother at the age of twenty-nine, John?”
Johnny grinned. “I feel fine about it. Congratulations. Dad.”
Herb smiled, relieved. “Well, thanks. I was a little scared to tell you, I don’t mind admitting it. I know what you said when we talked about it before, but people sometimes feel one way when something’s maybe and another way when it’s gonna be. I loved your mom, Johnny. And I guess I always will.”
“I know that, dad.”
“But I’m alone and Charlene’s alone and ... well, I guess we can put each other to good use.”
Johnny went over to his father and kissed him. “All the best. I know you’ll have it.”
“You’re a good son, Johnny.” Herb took his handkerchief out of his back pocket and swiped at his eyes with it. “We thought we’d lost you. I did, anyway. Vera never lost hope. She always believed. Johnny, I ...”
“Don’t, Daddy. It’s over.”
“I have to,” he said. “It’s been in my gut like a stone for a year and a half now. I prayed for you to die, Johnny. My own son, and I prayed for God to take you.” He wiped his eyes again and put his handkerchief away. “Turned out God knew a smidge more than I did. Johnny ... would you stand up with me? At my wedding?”
Johnny felt something inside that was almost but not quite like sorrow. “That would be my pleasure,” he said.
“Thanks. I’m glad I’ve ... that I’ve said everything that’s on my mind. I feel better than I have in a long, long time.”
“Have you set a date?”
“As a matter of fact, we have. How does January 2 sound to you?”
“Sounds good,” Johnny said. “You can count on me.”
“We’re going to put both places on the market, I guess,” Herb said. “We’ve got our eye on a farm in Biddeford. Nice place. Twenty acres. Half of it woodlot. A new start.”
“Yes. A new start, that’s good.”
“You wouldn’t have any objections to us selling the home place?” Herb asked anxiously.
“A little tug,” Johnny said. “That’s all.”
“Yeah, that’s what I feel. A little tug.” He smiled. “Somewhere around the heart, that’s where mine is. What about you?”
“About the same,” Johnny said.
“How’s it going down there for you?”
“Good.”
“Your boy’s getting along?”
“Amazin well,” Johnny said, using one of his father’s pet expressions and grinning.
“How long do you think you’ll be there?”
“Working with Chuck? I guess I’ll stick with it through the school year, if they want me. Working one-on-one has been a new kind of experience. I like it. And this has been a really good job. Atypically good, I’d say.”
“What are you going to do after?”
Johnny shook his head. “I don’t know yet. But I know one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going out for a bottle. of champagne. We’re going to get bombed.”
His father had stood up on that September evening and clapped him on the back. “Make it two,” he said.
He still got the occasional letter from Sarah Hazlett. She and Walt were expecting their second child in April. Johnny wrote back his congratulations and his good wishes for Walt’s canvass. And he thought sometimes about his afternoon with Sarah, the long, slow afternoon. It wasn’t a memory he allowed himself to take out too often; he was afraid that constant exposure to the sunlight of recollection might cause it to wash out and fade, like the reddish-tinted proofs they used to give you of your graduation portraits.
He had gone out a few times this fall, once with the older and newly divorced sister of the girl Chuck was seeing, but nothing had developed from any of those dates.
Most of his spare time that fall he had spent in the company of Gregory Ammas Stillson.
He had become a Stillsonphile. He kept three loose-leaf notebooks in his bureau under his socks and underwear and T-shirts. They were filled with notes, speculations, and Xerox copies of news items.
Doing this had made him uneasy. At night, as he wrote around the pasted-up clippings with a fine-line Pilot pen, he sometimes felt like Arthur Bremmer or the Moore woman who had tried