They finished their regular season without losing a game, even if they had managed to lose their head coach along the way.
Gramps still wasn’t back, and they still hadn’t heard from him. Almost every day, Lucas asked his mom if they should be worried about him, now that he felt as if anger toward his grandfather had been replaced by concern.
His mom said no.
“He might be wounded by everything that has happened,” she said. “And he is an elderly man. But he is still the toughest old bird I’ve ever met in my life. He’ll just show up one of these days, and when he does, I believe he’ll tell us where he’s been and what he did, and why.”
It was the Monday of what Lucas and Ryan and the guys were calling Championship Week, the way ESPN did when everybody was getting ready for the NCAA Tournament. On Saturday they were playing Corey Tanner and the Jazz for the title at Claremont Middle. Lucas knew there had been some talk about moving the game to the bigger gym at Claremont High School. But when Mrs. Moretti asked Lucas and his teammates what they thought, they were unanimous in telling her that they wanted to play the game where they’d played their other home games this season.
“We earned home court,” Lucas said. “And we want to stay on our home court.”
This was before practice on Monday night. Their last practice before the Jefferson game would be on Thursday night.
On Tuesday night, just as Lucas’s mom had predicted, Gramps just showed up right before dinner.
And proceeded to tell them where he’d been, and what he’d been doing.
And why.
He was wearing his old Celtics cap, but took it off when it was time to sit down and eat turkey meatloaf. It was then that Lucas discovered that Gramps had called his mom that afternoon to tell him he was back, and hoped he could still invite himself over for dinner.
She had reminded him that no invitation was required, now or ever, and that she was going to let him surprise Lucas.
“He’s been worried about you,” Lucas’s mom told him.
“In the whole crazy scheme of things,” he’d said, “I think that might actually be a good thing for me, if not for him.”
Julia told him she agreed.
Lucas asked him where he’d been.
“I went out to California to sit with Tommy Angelo before he died,” Gramps said.
“So he’s gone?” Lucas’s mom said.
“He is,” Gramps said. “You know how sometimes they say it’s a blessing when somebody passes? In his case, I believe it was, just because there wasn’t a whole lot of Tommy left by the time I got with him.”
The two of them hadn’t exchanged a single word or correspondence, he said, since Gramps had changed his name and left California for the East Coast.
“In that story in the paper, he talked about how we never forgave him,” Gramps said now. “Well, I never knew he wanted forgiving. He was just part of the life I’d left behind me.”
“Did he recognize you?” Lucas said.
“I’m not sure he would have on his own,” Gramps said. “But the first day when his wife brought me into his room, she said, ‘An old friend is here to see you.’ Then I pulled up a chair next to him and took his hand in mine and said, ‘It’s me. It’s Joe.’ I hadn’t called myself that in sixty years.”
Lucas’s mom said, “In the newspaper it sounded like his memory wasn’t very good.”
“Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t,” Gramps said. “He’d fade in and out. But the gaps he had, and some of them were pretty big ones, I’d try to fill in for him. I told him we didn’t need to talk about all that happened. But he wanted to, with me helping him along. It was important to him that I know how sorry he was about what happened.”
Gramps sighed. “But you know what ended up happening? We ended up talking more about the good times we had before those bad ones.”
Lucas’s mom smiled. “You’re the one who’s always said that one good memory in sports wipes out a whole boatload of bad ones.”
“Sometimes we’d just sit there for a long while and neither one of us would say anything,” Gramps said. “And you know what I got to thinking about in the quiet of that room? If all of it hadn’t happened, even the way it did, then I really wouldn’t have had the life I’ve had. I probably never would have met your grandmother, son. We wouldn’t have had your dad, even if we didn’t have him nearly long enough. And I never would have been blessed enough to have your mom in my life.”
“Thank you,” Lucas’s mom said.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
Gramps turned and looked at Lucas now and said, “And I sure wouldn’t have had you in my life.”
Day after day, he said, he’d sit next to Tommy Angelo’s bed. Sometimes Tommy’s wife was there, sometimes not. Mostly it was just the two of them, with Gramps sharing most of the memories because Tommy wasn’t able.
“When it was happening,” Gramps said, “to all of us, you thought you’d never forget any of it. But by the end, Tommy had forgotten most of it. Which maybe was another blessing.”
One day last week he was holding Tommy’s hand when he closed his eyes, and the hand fell away, and Gramps knew he was gone.
He stayed around to help Tommy’s wife with the funeral details. She asked him to speak at the funeral, but Gramps politely told her no.
“I told her I’d already said what I came out there to say,” he said.
“What was that?” Lucas said to his grandfather.
“ ‘I forgive you,’ ” Gramps said.