Chapter 13: The Man Who Didn't Pick Up

Colby reached the foot of the porch steps in his socks, with his shirt buttoned one hole off.

"Dad. You said the fourth."

"The plane got in early," his father said, to the swing.

The passenger door opened, and a small woman climbed out holding a casserole dish wrapped in a bath towel.

She had short gray hair and a sweatshirt that said Sun City, and she walked past her husband and her son and straight up the steps to me.

"You're Casey."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Don't you ma'am me. I'm going to hug you now, and you can tell me to quit."

I did not tell her to quit.

She smelled like car heater and cold cream, and she held on a good deal longer than a stranger has any right to.

"Tuna noodle," she said into my hair. "It's what I make when I don't know what to say."

"It's six in the morning."

"It's been in a cooler since Phoenix. It's very sorry."

She let go and wiped under one eye with her wrist.

Behind her, Colby's father had climbed the steps with his cap in both hands.

He walked past me without looking, and he sat down on my grandfather's porch swing.

He sat on the very edge.

The chains creaked, and the swing rocked once and settled.

"Walt," he said. "It's me."

His wife put a hand on my arm.

"Leave him be, sweetheart," she whispered. "He's been practicing that since Kingman, and it's not for you."

So Colby and I sat on the porch rail and listened to a sixty-three-year-old man talk to a wooden swing.

"I heard it every year," he said.

"Eight o'clock on Christmas Eve, the phone would ring in my mother's kitchen."

"My father had a rule that nobody touched it."