begging for a snack—a handful of bills and a plain white envelope with no return address that the Perabo City post office had forwarded to him in Costa Rica. Even before he opened it, he knew what it would contain, since it was the third time Cindy Nelson had returned the check. The other times she’d done so with no note, but this time there was one, two words, unsigned: “Please stop.”
He had tried to give the check to her the first time at Nelson’s wake, leaving an envelope in the wicker basket on the table with the guest book outside the parlor where Nelson’s body lay in a closed casket; three thousand dollars. On the memo line he’d had the bank teller type, “For your children.” Three days later, when he came home from the hardware store with Meg—back from buying closet organizers, wire racks for his kitchen cupboards, mulch for his neglected flower beds, all to “stage his house” for sale, Meg said—the envelope lay on his back deck.
“Oh, a fan letter,” Meg said, stepping over it, carrying in a bag.
“Not quite,” Edward Everett said, bending to pick it up.
After he told her what it was, Meg said, “I can’t believe you would do that for her, after what her husband put you through.”
I don’t see it that way, Edward Everett thought, but he only shook his head and mailed the check the next day to Nelson’s widow again, in care of her brother at the Lakeport Police Department. Four days later, it came back again, this time in the mail, with no return address. When he sent it a third time—a week before he got on a plane for Costa Rica—and it didn’t come back, he thought maybe she had finally accepted it, forgiven him, seen it as a chance to do a small thing for her son and daughter who had lost their father. But then, almost two months after that, it found him again.
When no one came to the door—when the son Edward Everett had never met didn’t pull to the curb in a 1973 Maverick; didn’t, on his way up the front walk, wave to Ron Dubois touching up the paint on the fascia board under his gutters; didn’t knock on the door in the distinctive manner Edward Everett might have recognized had his son ever been there—Nelson stood up from the couch. Edward Everett shut his eyes in a way he would always think of as cowardly, and waited for the gunshot, wondering, would he hear it first? What he did hear was the front door creaking open and then clicking shut, gently, as if whoever closed it wanted to be certain he did not damage the door or the frame. As he sat, quaking, thinking, It’s over, telling himself to call someone, from outside came what sounded like a single, quick hammer blow driving a nail, and then someone shouted, “Oh, my God.” He pushed himself out of the chair but his legs were so weak he fell back again. By the time he managed to get outside, Ron Dubois was sprinting from his yard into Edward Everett’s faster than he would have thought someone sixty pounds overweight could move, yanking his paint-spattered T-shirt over his head. “For God’s sake, Ed, call 911,” he shouted.
Then Ron was kneeling on the lawn and laying his shirt delicately over Nelson’s face, blood pooling on the grass. When Ron glanced up, he said, “Don’t look.”
Although Meg told him he shouldn’t, he went to the wake. The lot was so full he had to park on the street, and at first he thought it was for Nelson, that some of his former teammates had come, but it wasn’t. A man who had operated an Italian restaurant for thirty-seven years had also died and his wake was in a large double parlor, the room shoulder to shoulder with people talking in muted tones, every once in a while someone laughing. Nelson was in an anteroom near the back, and when Edward Everett arrived, there were only four people there, Nelson’s wife and her brother, and an older man and woman he imagined were Nelson’s parents. He stopped to sign the guest book and lay his envelope in the basket, where there was only one other card. As he stepped into the parlor, Nelson’s widow looked toward the doorway with expectation but then her eyes narrowed and she said something quietly to her brother. Everyone there turned in