LATE THAT DAY, I CHANGED MY FLIGHT from the next morning to the next afternoon. I knew that Maren would be flying home from New York, and I wanted to give her some private hours with her mother before I arrived.
Chuck called again. “Jack told Janice a while back that he wanted you to speak at the services,” he said. “She didn’t know if he’d ever said anything to you.”
“No,” I said. “He never mentioned it. But I figured.”
Chuck said that he was going to call Allen in Canton; he asked me if I’d call Dan.
I did. The receptionist at the cold storage plant said he was in the freezer.
I asked that they get him. He came to the phone. We made plans to go to Jack’s house together when I got in.
ON SATURDAY NIGHT CARS WERE LINED UP all along Bexley Park Road.
The front door was open a crack. Dan and I saw, as soon as we walked in, that the house was crowded to the walls.
There was a hand-lettered sign taped to the bottom of the staircase, saying that people could take their coats and leave them in the bedroom upstairs.
The last time I was here, he was in that bedroom. It’s where he had told me I couldn’t leave until I promised to wear his heavy jacket.
Now people were dropping off their overcoats in the same room.
I couldn’t make myself go up.
JANICE WAS THERE; MAREN WAS THERE; Chuck was there; Joyce was there. So were dozens of other people whose faces I didn’t know.
There was a lot of conversation about finalizing preparations for the next day’s services—who would ride with whom, who would sit where, how people would get back afterward.
As everyone moved from room to room, I saw something displayed on a stand next to one wall of the kitchen.
It was a white plate, with writing on its surface. Jack’s signature was in the center; the rest of our signatures surrounded his.
Toddle House.
I walked over and touched its edges.
I AWAKENED IN MY AIRPORT HOTEL TO AN ice storm outside the windows.
It was a day like the guardrail day—a day for slippery streets and blowing snow, a day on which no one, if they could avoid it, would want to leave the house.
Dan picked me up and we drove to the services. The parking lot was full; it would have taken a hurricane to keep people from coming to honor Jack, and maybe even that wouldn’t have stopped them.
I DON’T KNOW WHAT I SAID WHEN I SPOKE. I hadn’t written anything down. I’d only been getting ready for it for fifty years.
The casket was a few feet in front of the lectern. It was closed. I tried not to look at it, but couldn’t help myself.
On the way up the aisle at the end of the services, I walked behind it. I wanted to talk to him about it—I wanted to tell him:
Man, Jack, we thought we’d seen everything. But you won’t believe this. Do you know where we were today? Take as many guesses as you want—you’ll never guess this one. Not in a million years. This one tops them all. Keep guessing. You’ll never get it.
Four rows from the back, four rows from the door, sitting on the aisle, was a woman in her seventies.
As Jack passed her, and then as I passed her, I sensed that she was reaching out her hand toward me.
I looked over at her as I walked.
She was Miss Barbara.
I took her hand in mine and she squeezed it, and then we were out the door, and again I wanted to tell him. Guess who was here, Jack. I know you’ll get it—think hard. Guess who came to see you today.
I wanted to tell him everything.
EVEN ON A DAY LIKE THIS, A DAY WHEN you wouldn’t think it is possible, there was a moment for unexpected laughter.
It came after the services, as everyone was milling around.
Dan was standing there, and he and I were about to go out to his car. People we hadn’t seen in years—people with whom we’d gone to school—were coming up to each other and reintroducing themselves, catching up. Two of them walked up to Dan.
“Dan, what have you been doing?” one of them asked him. The standard what’s-your-occupation question.
Dan said:
“I’m the safety director of the Millersport Corn Festival.”
I actually felt my eyes widen. I could feel my mouth making the word: What?
Dan was nodding his head seriously toward the person who had asked him the question.
“You’re the safety director of Millersport?” the person said.
“Not Millersport,” Dan said, as if stating the beyond-the-obvious. “The Millersport Corn Festival.”
I had no idea where this was coming from—whether it was a Reedeep Reeves deal, or what. I had expected, of course, that when Dan had been asked the question, he would say that he was running the cold storage company.
The Millersport Corn Festival? The safety director?
“How did you get elected to that?” the person asked him.
“It’s not an elected position,” Dan said, slowly. “It’s an appointed position.”
“Dan,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”
We walked over the icy parking lot to his car.
“What was that about?” I said to him. “Were you making it up?”
“No, I wasn’t making it up,” he said. “I’m the safety director of the Millersport Corn Festival.”
“Then why did I never know anything about it?” I asked.
He shot me that grin and that look.
“Greene, I don’t tell you everything,” he said.
How I wanted to tell Jack. How I wanted to pick up the phone and tell him the story, a new one, Dan being Dan all these years down the line. He would have loved it. It would have lit him up—he would have laughed and the chipped tooth would have shown and he would have shaken his head in delight, the way he’d been doing all his life.
And I knew: There would be moments like this—moments when I wanted to tell him something, something that would make him smile—for the rest of my own life.
AND THAT IS THE MOMENT WHEN I REALIZED that I probably would—that I probably would be telling him those stories every time something happened that he would love, every time something happened that would make him nod his head, every time something happened that I knew he would want to hear.
This doesn’t die—this is the only thing that lasts forever. Friendship is all that is eternal; buildings rise and fall, public men and women come in and out of fame’s glare, the years arrive and then silently drift away. But this—this thing that costs nothing, this thing priceless beyond measuring—never ends. No one can take it from you.
The snow and the ice on this day covered the ABCDJ brick, covered Audie Murphy Hill. That’s all you could see, if you looked: the new snow, making it appear as if nothing was beneath.
In all the houses on all the streets, it was starting all over again. Friendships forming, some to evaporate, a precious few to endure. They couldn’t know it now, the new friends; no one does, when friendship begins. They couldn’t know, not at the outset. Miracles don’t announce themselves; magic does not arrive with a timetable in its hand.
But it was happening, as it always has, as it always will. This one immortal thing; this one thing you can hold in your heart. The snow blew across Audie Murphy Hill, hiding it from sight, but soon enough the snow and the ice would melt. On a day like this it was hard to keep that in mind, hard to see it, but spring would be here, and then summer, with crickets in the nights. Nights for friends, new and old, to sit outside, letting memories be born.