CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

JUNE 11

Betsy nudges me awake, deleting my dream.

She leans down and kisses my cheek.

“Better get up,” she says. “They’re going to be here in less than an hour.”

I rise from my nap and try to shake out the cobwebs. Already the dream has receded almost out of sight. There’s no sense telling Betsy what it was about.

Annie Lineberger has long since ceased to be a real person to me. What remains is something I can’t quite explain. I don’t go to church, but what I feel makes me think there is something out there, something beyond what you can see and touch and rationalize.

I have been more open with Betsy than I ever had been before about Annie. It was so long ago, I told her, when I told her most of the whole story. I lied that I didn’t think it was worth mentioning.

But, with my second wedding on the horizon, it seemed like full disclosure was appropriate.

“Well,” she said, “just as long as I’m not competing with a ghost. Ghosts are hard things to beat.”

I assured her that there was no competition, that she had won the dubious booby prize of James Grayson Melvin.

The dean of the community college from which I was so recently divorced called and said I was welcome to come back for the fall semester. I am forgiven, it seems, for being a murder suspect. I didn’t tell my erstwhile friend to go fuck himself, only silently gave him the finger while telling him that I was pursuing other options.

I haven’t heard from Hayden Tremain Lineberger III and don’t expect to. He is not, in my experience, a man to own up to his mistakes. Plus it has to be hard to get out of the habit of hating me.

Kaycee phoned the day after I got the news from Byrd County. I should have called her, she admonished me. She said her daughter had come home from out west, and we soon were off on the next chapter of her and Krystal’s mother-daughter Texas death match. Frankly I was glad to turn the subject away from me.

Before she hung up, she told me that everybody in East Geddie was happy that everything had turned out so well for me, and that they knew I never could have done such a terrible thing.

I told her it was good to know I’d had their confidence all along.

THE BIG event from which Betsy disturbed my afternoon nap is what you might call a homecoming party. I haven’t been gone that long, but I guess part of the impetus for this shindig is the knowledge that most of the folks coming today probably thought they might never see me again unless they visited me in prison, which I surmise most of them were unlikely to do.

I guess you’d have to call it a not-going-away party.

The guests start arriving, solo or in couples. They, like most of the people who have conversed with me lately, seem not to know what to say.

“Welcome back.” “We’re so glad it all worked out.” About as far as anybody goes toward acknowledging what just happened is, “We knew you’d be exonerated.”

Willie and Cindy Black come, as does Marcus Green. I am surprised that his partner, Kate Ellis, Willie’s third wife, accompanies him. She and Cindy seem to get along fine, and when I mention this to Cindy, she whispers, “She’s still our landlady. I have to be nice to her.”

A gaggle of friends of mine and Betsy come, although a good half of the invitees didn’t. I think that half has been marked off Betsy’s Christmas card list. Some of the neighbors drop by. One old gentleman, must be in his eighties, takes me aside and says, wheezily conspiratorial, “I heard you’re going to make her an honest woman.”

I told him I couldn’t make her more honest or better than she is already, that maybe she would make me an honest man.

At some point, I am able to slip away into the den, where, mercifully, no one is present except Josh. He’s watching a baseball game on Fox. There is nobody within thirty years of his age at this party. He’s sitting on the ottoman and scoots over when I drop down beside him.

We watch for a few minutes, and when the inning ends, I ask him if he doesn’t think baseball is a little boring.

He looks at me like I’m crazy.

“No!” he says, looking up at me. “Baseball’s great. Soccer’s boring.”

He’s at that marvelous age, before he gets too cool, too testosterone-distracted, to think baseball’s a drag. I could tell him, but don’t, that he probably will abandon baseball for a time, but that he will come back to it later, when he learns patience and starts finding gray hair in his comb, and that baseball will forgive him for his temporary abandonment.

I’ve been helping coach his Little League team, mostly hitting grounders to the infielders and fly balls to the outfielders and helping pay for the pizza afterward. This is my second year, and although I did have a prolonged absence from the Tigers’ bench this season, all the boys seem happy to have me back. Unlike the adults, they don’t dance around the big issues.

“My dad said you killed somebody,” one red-haired eleven-year-old said to me the first game I came back, “but then he said you didn’t.”

I tell the kid that’s about right.

After a while, I figure I’d better get back to my guests, although I’d be just as happy if they threw a really nice party for me in my absence, like a good Irish wake.

“Come back and watch the rest of it with me,” Josh says. I promise that I will, as soon as the guests leave.

The thing is, I’ve got it good. Unlike Annie, I have had forty-eight good years to walk the Earth, breathe the spring air, smell steaks on the grill, sit and watch a baseball game with a boy who seems to enjoy my company.

I have no legitimate complaints. I have told Marcus Green that he is free to sue the pants, or at least the socks, off Towson Grimes and the county he represents at least until Election Day. But he’s only allowed to sue for enough to pay his expenses. I want the same thing Annie got: nothing. And Betsy, to her credit, is not even hinting that she might like to be the recipient of some of the court’s largesse.

“We’re happy,” she told me. “A few million isn’t going to make us more happy.”

But I do think of Annie. I’m glad they found her sad remains. That dream, the one Betsy woke me from, was about Annie. I didn’t tell her, the same way I didn’t tell her about the future child Annie was carrying.

I reach in my back pocket as I leave Josh to his game, before heading back to my party. In the rear of one of the compartments of my wallet, I pull out that worn photograph, as ravaged by age as Annie herself would have been by now. I showed it to Betsy in my full-disclosure mode. She said Annie was certainly a pretty girl. She didn’t say anything else when I put it back in my wallet.

I should throw it away, dispense with it as cavalierly as Winston Keppler was willing to give up his copy.

Maybe I will.

But not just yet.