worried they might catch it off him if he started to cough. I thought I could stop it from ever happening.” His voice roughened, and he dropped his cards.
“That’s enough of this,” Gallagher said. He took Hayes’s hand and glared at me. “Who the fuck are you? Come in here and ruin our game of cards.”
Ralph Tanner spoke very softly. “Mr. Davies has also lost people. And only wants to do the right thing. But he’s dealing with something only Loren really understands.” It was the first I was sure Ralph knew about my parents. He had known right from the start, I suppose. Like I said, Kingsward is a big town, but not big enough for secrets.
Hayes said, “I wrote a letter. I had it all ready to go. I had stamps from different time periods, because you don’t know where they’ll come from. I had some from the early sixties, some from the mid-eighties, and everything in between. One day a woman climbs on, buxom redhead. Glasses. Very strict, stern, right-wing dominatrix type. Gallagher, you woulda had a stroke. You would’ve been almost as hot for her as you were for them to impeach Clinton. We got to talking, and she wondered aloud if the terrorists were going to kill the Jewish athletes in Munich, and that was how I knew she was one of them, a Late Return. She liked legal thrillers, so I got her a Scott Turow that wouldn’t be published for another twenty years. Then I asked if she’d post a letter. She looked at the envelope and laughed and rubbed her eyes. I slipped the letter in the back of her book. Well. I went back to my time. She went back to hers. In her time, 1972, she was a paralegal having an office romance, and her ex-husband shotgunned her and her lover both. In my time Alex Sommers weighed about ninety pounds and was black all over with Kaposi’s sarcoma. I couldn’t figure what went wrong. I tried to talk to him about it. I asked him if he got a letter when he was ten years old from someone he didn’t know, and he went paler than his sheets. He said he read the part about being gay and tore it up. He said he vomited for days afterward. Not just because of what it said but because trying to read it had made him sick. He said the words kept swimming away when he tried to look at them. Later he decided he was mental and had hallucinated the whole thing. He thought his subconscious was trying to find some way to make him accept that he was gay and came up with an imaginary letter. He remembered some stuff about sickness but assumed that was just his guilt talking. He had a lot of guilt back then. Anyway. I couldn’t change it.” Hayes’s bloodshot eyes were damp.
I knew that Ralph and Gallagher had heard some of this before. I could tell from how Ralph stared mildly down at his cards, refusing to make eye contact. I could tell from the way Gallagher glared at me with a kind of naked hatred. I liked him better for his hate. It was born from the love of a comrade.
“There you go,” Gallagher said. “Get what you wanted?”
“I’m sorry you couldn’t do him any good,” I said.
Ralph said, “But he did.”
“I don’t know about that,” Hayes said.
“He did,” Ralph repeated. “You said Alex had a lot of guilt as a kid. Enough to kill himself? Maybe. Plenty of young gay men do and did, especially then. But the letter was the living proof that he had a future where someone cared about him. He got that much, even if you couldn’t prevent him from contracting a tragic illness, and it was a reason to carry on with his life.” He fell back to the study of his cards. “Then there was the Harry Potter situation. I think that’s particularly illustrative of the good you’ve done, Loren.”
“Good I’ve done,” Hayes said scornfully.
“What was the Harry Potter situation?” I asked, although I already had an idea.
Loren Hayes took a long, measuring look at Terry Gallagher, then lowered his head and told it. “The last year I drove the Bookmobile was 2009. At that time I had a Monday stop at the hospital. Sometimes a few of the kids from the cancer ward would march out, if they were having a good day, for