“No, wait,” Edward Everett said, frantic, the story he thought would lull Nelson only making things worse. “We worked things out.”
“You worked things out?” Nelson asked, leaning forward, cocking his head.
“I found him,” Edward Everett said cautiously, having the sense of being a man creeping across a frozen pond, the ice groaning and popping with each step, no going back, the only choice to keep on toward the far bank. “Just this summer. It was the craziest thing. I looked up his name in the phone book and called and it was him.”
Hi, this is a billion-to-one shot, but is your mother named Julie?
Dad? Oh, my God! Dad! Wait until I tell Mom.
“I found him,” Edward Everett said. “I screwed up, I admit it, worse than anything, worse than you, but I found him and worked things out.”
“That’s a helluva tale,” Nelson said, but in a way that Edward Everett couldn’t read: did he believe him or did he not believe him?
“We’ve become close,” Edward Everett said, closing his eyes, straining to conjure what occurred next in the story he was telling. “Everything’s fine. He became a pediatrician. He saved so many lives. Maybe he helped your kids.” The images came to him as clearly as the photographs of the boy-stranger he had carried around for so long: himself and the boy-stranger-now-man-son drinking beer, watching a ball game, Edward Everett saying, Look where the second baseman is playing. Here’s what’s going to happen. His son saying, You really know a lot about this. A picnic they went on, Edward Everett and the boy-now-man. As he told the story, the park where they picnicked grew around him, becoming as vivid as if he had been there: near their table, a rusted barbecue grill caked with ash that drifted over them in a breeze, specks settling onto their sandwiches. The heat of the sun warming his back. Then a new boy appeared. The boy-now-man’s own son. Edward Everett’s grandson. His name is Edward. I had no idea that was your name when he was born but it came to me the first time I held him. “You’re Edward.” It must have been in the stars. Mustard spotting his chin, the boy smiled up at Edward Everett, the man from whom he’d gotten his name.
Nelson tilted his head to the side in a manner that suggested he was weighing the story that Edward Everett had told. It was, he knew, a fantastic story.
“In fact, he’s on his way here now,” Edward Everett said. He saw a red Prius moving between sunlight and shadow as it passed beneath the trees lining the street. No, not a Prius. That was Renee’s car in her new circumstances. The car approaching was a Maverick, like the one he drove when he sold flour. “I was just waiting to take him to the game. Him and his son. My grandson. He’s never been before but he’s going today. His first game.”
In the closet, the dog was stirring. Edward Everett could hear the hangers clanging as Grizzly got to his feet, rustling the coats.
He saw the Maverick slowing outside, the driver—someone who had been there countless times by then and so knew all of the neighbors, and they knew him—rolling down his window, waving at Mrs. Greiner, who was digging in her flower bed, waving at Ron Dubois next door, setting up a ladder to paint his fascia board. They knew his grandson, too, the boy waving from the passenger seat. I’m going to see my grandpa!
Your grandpa is such a lucky man!
Edward Everett stood up and moved toward the door. “I think I hear him coming up the steps.” Nelson leaned forward and they both looked toward the door, listening for footsteps on the stone stairs.
It could happen, Edward Everett thought. It could happen. My son is going to knock on the door. He’s going to knock on the door right now.
I’m so glad to see you, he would say when he opened the door. I’m so happy you’re finally here.
Epilogue
In November, Nelson’s widow sent back the cashier’s check he had given her. He was in the breakfast nook in his house in Heredia when his housekeeper, Lucia, brought the mail she had picked up from the post office the afternoon before, several weeks-old copies of The Sporting News, a calendar for the next year Meg had made using photographs of Grizzly—Grizzly sleeping on her canopied bed; Grizzly sunning himself on her porch; Grizzly on his hind legs,