In time, they’d all given up on him. Except Aunt Janet, who’d had her own struggles (brandy, night panics) but had never given up on Ricky, even after he was dead. She’d funded a little corner of the library, the Ricky Rodgers Memorial Reading Nook, and stocked it with books on substance abuse and Christianity and auto repair.

  At least Ricky had never pushed a kid down. Well, that she knew of. Although he had punched an usher after saying that racist thing at church. And had, at one point, toward the end of his life, impregnated a seventeen-year-old. And burned down the grocery store the gal’s father owned, after a cashier refused to let him go into the back room and pick through the stuff they were about to throw away. His plan was to take the stuff home for free, charge the store twenty bucks for his trouble.

  That was Ricky.

  Ah, Ricky, she thought. She’d been crazy about him when they were little. He was just a few years older than her. He’d been so fun. Not bad yet, not really, just energetic, tossing M-80s in the direction of the henhouse, putting spiders in Aunt Janet’s slippers.

  And now he was dead.

  A dead, arrogant, loudmouthed, thoughtless, quasi-pedophilic, racist idiot.

  Who, for a while, she’d thought was the greatest.

  All these years, in her mind, she’d been defending Ricky, feeling sympathy for Ricky, or trying to, but you know what? Fuck Ricky. She thought about that pregnant seventeen-year-old’s dad, that gut-punched usher, the owner of that sporting-goods store. Fuck Ricky. Someone should have dropped a rock on that idiot long ago.

  I mean, yes, okay—some rocks had definitely been dropped on Ricky. Jail, foreclosure on that little dump on Webster he’d somehow cobbled together the money to buy, jail again, the bikers, that dad who’d broken his ribs, the group of parishioners at the church who’d knocked out his front teeth in the narthex, because, it turned out, the usher he’d punched had cancer and was the nicest guy in the world and had given a kidney to the pastor a few years earlier and they all loved him.

  But it hadn’t been enough, none of it had been enough, to get Ricky to pull head out of ass.

  An image came into her mind: Ricky, in Hell, in those filthy coveralls he used to wear (which he’d stolen from the one auto shop where he’d managed to hold a job for more than a month), on fire, tears running down his face.

  And he was small. So small. She could fit him in the palm of her hand.

  Are you sorry? she said. For all that you did? Truly sorry?

  Ginnie, it’s so hot down here, he said.

  But are you sorry? she said.

  For what? he said.

  Still stupid, still stubborn. Of course, that’s why he was in Hell.

  He’d been born stupid and stubborn and stayed stubborn and stupid because he was so stupid and stubborn.

  Kind of unfair.

  She lifted him out of Hell and put him in Heaven. Everything was pure and white up there. Right away he started angrily pacing around, leaving greasy footprints all over the place. The angels looked at her like, You want to get this character out of here?

  She closed both hands around Ricky like he was a little mouse, and really focused, and burned all his greasiness away and was able to see, by reading his mind, that he was now, because of her loving focus, a different person. No trace of the old Ricky remained. No trace of the real, original Ricky.

  She put him back in Heaven and he stood there, stunned, whoever he was.

  She heard Keith galumph up onto the porch.

  So much for writing time.

  He burst in, flushed and sweaty, bandanna over one shoulder.

  Good run? she said.

  I didn’t go on a run, he said.

  True, weird, he was wearing khakis.

  He’d found the guy, the first guy, he said, the one averse to Jimmy Carter, and had given him one in the knee. With Derek’s autographed bat. It hadn’t—it hadn’t gone that well. The guy had nearly taken the bat away from him. He’d managed to nail him, but just that once. Sort of a, you know—glancing blow? And the thing was, during it? His bandanna had slipped down. And the guy had recognized him. Hey, you’re that dad dude, he’d said, in a tone of wonder, holding his knee. So. There was that. The plan was, had been, you know—take down both guys. Like in her essay? Teach them a lesson. About rules. About order. About “reverencing justice.” But after that first hit? The sound it made? The wind had sort of gone out of his sails. The bat was in the river. He’d dropped it off the bridge. They’d have to get Derek a new one. And get it signed. By who, though? Did she—did she remember who’d signed it?

  Then he collapsed on the couch, burst into tears. His face went all shriveled-apple and he started soundlessly, in slow motion, pounding his fist into the arm of the couch.

  Like in her essay?

  What the hell?

  Wait, she said. Which guy? Did you hit?

  The first one, he said. The one they brought in first.

  She told him about the confession. That the second one had confessed. That he’d essentially, uh, kneecapped the wrong guy.

  Oh, great, he said, as if the unfair thing had been done to him.

  Derek came down.

  Why is Dad crying? he said.

  His aunt died, she said.

  Which aunt? Derek said.

  One you don’t know, she said.

  How would I not know an aunt of Dad’s? he said.

  Keith got up, went into the basement. What was he going to do down there? There was nothing down there but the washer and the dryer and a broken treadmill. Was he planning to do laundry? Probably. Sometimes he did that. When upset.

  Pretty soon, she heard both washer and dryer going.

  God.

  Unusual man.

  Can I send a note to Dad’s uncle? Derek said.

  She could tell he knew she was lying.

  He’s dead, too, she said. He died in a tragic hot-air-balloon accident.

  Oh, that uncle, Derek said.

  Look, she said. How about go up to your room?

  Did Dad hit someone with a bat? Derek said.

  Well, she said.

  The guy who pushed me down? he said.

  She thought about it a second.

  Yes, she said.

  He seemed pleased, slid across the floor in his socks, mimed a baseball swing.

  Over on the Target desk was her essay.

  Sitting there all proud of itself.

  She sat down, started reading. It was—God. It was so bad. So harsh. It made no sense. Today. She was good—she was a good writer and all that, so, yes, it sort of flowed, but when you really broke it down, saw what it was actually saying—

  Wow, Jesus.

  She tore the pages in half, dropped them into the garbage, took the bag out of the can, took the bag to the can around the side of the house.

  No more essays.

  No more writing at all.

  She could do more good in the world by, like, baking.

  She sat on the porch swing. Imagined the guy Keith had hit, the innocent guy, jogging up the block, dropping down on the porch steps.

  Look, she said, it’s not that big a deal, right? You seem totally fine. It was, uh, a glancing blow. And wouldn’t you have done the same? If it was your kid?

  No, he said. I would not have hit a totally unrelated guy with a bat just because he looked like the guy who did it.

  Well, yes, she said. Very admirable. But it’s easy to say that, when you weren’t actually in that—

  That’s called character, he said.

  I didn’t do it, she said. Keith did it.

  The guy raised his eyebrows. Somehow he knew about that stupid essay.

  Words matter, he said.

  Oh, shut up, she said.

  Now the shit was going to hit the fan. The system was about to come crashing down on them. On the good people. Who’d always, up until now, done everything right. Or at least had tried to.

  From inside, her phone rang.

  Perfect.

  Same cop.

  Little issue, he said. Leo Dimini came in here just now. Said he got attacked. With a bat. By someone he claimed was your husband. Would you know anything about that?

  Attacked? she said. With a bat?

  The falseness in her voice hung there, being mutually considered by the two of them.

  I’m going to take that for a no, the cop said.

  Keith is a good guy, she said.

  He seemed like it, the cop said. But tell him—you know. No more baseball.

  No more baseball, she said.

  And if I could suggest something? he said.

  Okay, she said.

  Maybe we let it drop, he said. The, uh, pushing allegation. Might simplify things. The family’s been talking among themselves. The idea is, you drop it about the pushing, they drop it about the bat attack. And Babe Ruth over there can, you know, sleep. Easy. Easier. And you, too.

  In that instant, she saw it: God, she loved her life so much. The family of ducks that sometimes came waddling across the yard like they owned the place. The way Derek had recently started eating dinner with his winter hat on, elbows on the table, like a little trucker. Last week, Keith had arranged the plastic mini-animals on the windowsill (giraffe, cow, stork, penguin, elk) in a circle around a corn kernel and, in the elk’s antlers, had stuck a Post-it note: “Worshipping some mysterious object.”

  How do we do that? she said. Drop it?

  You just tell me to drop it, he said.

  Now? she said.

  Now works, he said.

  After she hung up, she went down to the basement. Keith was sitting in an old lawn chair. There was a big pile of clean laundry on the deck of the treadmill.

  So, asshole just walks, he said.

  Unless you buy a new bat and find him and hit him with it, she said.

  It was supposed to be funny, but she could see he wasn’t ready.

  She reached for his hand. He took it, gave it a squeeze.

  Give me a minute, he said.

  Sure, she said.

  In a way, they were lucky. Derek’s face would heal. It would. The scratches were light. That guy could have taken the bat away from Keith and nailed him with it. Keith could have swung at the guy’s head and killed him. Now, with this one concession, everything could go back to normal.

  And it did.

  * * *

  —

  A week passed, another week, a month.

  Then, just before Christmas, she found herself stopped at a light downtown.

  Over on the sidewalk, near the war monument, was the guy. One of the guys. She couldn’t tell which.

  Those two fuckers really were pretty much identical.

  Then the other one came out from behind a maintenance shed, yapping away, dragging, on a leash of Christmas lights, a plastic reindeer he’d likely nabbed off somebody’s lawn.

  That was—wow. That was quite a limp. Quite a limp he had.

  Quite a limp he had somehow gotten.

  The two of them went off into the woods, having a good old time, arms around each other’s shoulders, the two-person unit itself now seeming to have a limp, reindeer bouncing along in pursuit.

  Someone behind her blasted his horn. She hit the gas, surged across the bridge.

  Her face was suddenly hot. With shame. Oh God, oh shit. She’d done that. They had. Crippled an old fellow. Innocent old fellow. She’d made—well, she’d made an already unfortunate person’s crappy life that much harder.

  She had.

  For real.

  God, the hours of her life she’d spent trying to be good. Standing at the sink, deciding if some plastic tofu tub was recyclable. That time she’d hit a squirrel and circled back to see if she could rush it to the vet. No squirrel. But that didn’t prove anything. It might have crawled off to die under a bush. She’d parked the car and looked under bush after bush until a lady came out of a hair salon to ask if she was okay.

  Walking through the mall, trying to offer a little positive vibe to everyone she passed. Refilling the dog’s water because there were floaters in it. As if he cared. But maybe, on some level, he did. Maybe clean water made his life better? Incrementally? Sometimes she’d refold Derek’s little shirts two or three times, wondering which way he’d find easiest to unfold. It mattered. Didn’t it? When a shirt unfolded nicely and went right on, didn’t that maybe give a kid an extra little burst of confidence?

  How many shirts did you have to thoughtfully refold and how many staples did you have to pick up off the floor so nobody would get a staple in the foot and how many hours did you have to spend in the store trying to decide which fruit punch had the least high-fructose corn syrup and how many frazzled young moms with babies did you have to let cut in front of you at the post office and how many rude rejection letters did you have to decline to respond to just as rudely and how many nice familial meals did you have to put together while a great story idea sat dying in your mind, to offset one case of hobbling a hapless old—

  The world was harsh. Too harsh. Make one mistake, pay for it the rest of your life. She thought of Mary Tillis, who’d rear-ended that minivan and two kids had died. Of Mr. Somers, who’d done something weird with the heater and gassed his elderly parents. Of that guy with the eye patch at Boy Scouts, who’d sloppily secured a load of firewood and then a chunk flew through this lady’s windshield and she’d driven off the bridge into the river and drowned while trapped in her car.

  What was that guy’s sin, the sin that had ruined his life, so that now, at Scouts, he was nearly always drunk and during Pinewood Derby he’d gone charging out the exit door when one of the little cars flipped, leaving his kid, Maury, standing there like, That’s just my dad, sorry, he once killed a lady?

  One bad knot.

  Nine stupid pages.

  Fuck.

  She hated this feeling. This guilty feeling. She couldn’t live with it.

  The parkway was curving west, looping her away from the river into a region of failing strip malls and three lavish megachurches in a row.

  That time with the squirrel, she’d gone home, confessed to Keith. They had a habit of mutual confession. Keith always forgave her, then contextualized her sin. Squirrels died all the time, he’d said. We’re constantly killing thousands of living things (bugs), every time we drive. But what are we supposed to do? Not drive? Once Keith forgave her, it was only a matter of time before her guilt would start to fade. Even when she’d been crushing so bad on Ed Temley from church, she’d confessed to Keith. Well, Ed’s hot, Keith had said, even I can see that, and the day we stop noticing hot people we’re pretty much corpses, right?

  She imagined sitting across from Keith at the kitchen table.

  Oh, hon, by the way? she’d say. Turns out? We gave that innocent old guy a limp. Which he’ll take to his grave. So.

  Keith would just sit there, stunned.

  Maybe we offer to pay his hospital bill, he’d finally say. Or set him up with, you know, an orthopedic surgeon? Something like that?

  Well, that opened some doors you didn’t want opened. This was not a hippie with insurance. They’d be paying out of pocket. For his surgery. And there would go Derek’s college money. That they’d worked so hard to save. And which wasn’t going to be enough, anyway. If they kept saving at the current rate, they’d be good for freshman year, maybe. If the school wasn’t great. There were limits. To what one could do. She’d fucked up, they’d fucked up, but they weren’t gods, they were people, limited, emotional people who sometimes made ill-advised—

  That guy was—you know what?

  He was not getting their money.

  That was one step too far. That was unreasonable. Kind of weird.

  Neurotic.

  Overinvolved.

  She pulled up to the house. It looked crisp. Clean. All the work they’d done really had made it nicer.

  A flock of geese came out of a low cloud, emitting this weird, non-goose sound. A second group joined from the left and a third from the right and the greater flock flew off imperfectly in the direction of the high school.

  She imagined a beam of white light shooting out of her forehead, an apology beam, charged with the notion I am so sorry, that traveled across town and crossed the river and roamed through the woods until it found the two guys and, having briefly paused above them because they looked so damned similar, entered the innocent one. Instantly he knew her. Knew her pain. Knew about Derek’s lung thing and how out of step he was with his classmates, how he sometimes went to school with a stuffed bear in his shirt pocket, as if he thought that was a good look, poor dear, and the thing was, knowing her this completely, it all made sense to the guy. And there it was: forgiveness. That’s what forgiveness was. He was her. Being her, he got it all, saw just how the whole thing had happened.

  How could he be mad at her when he was her?

  A green forgiveness beam shot out of his forehead and flew back over the town, charged with the notion To tell the truth, I never expected much from life anyway, and, given all the crap that’s happened to me, most of which I caused, a slight limp is, believe me, the least of my worries. Plus, the pain is making me really attentive to every moment.

  The beam entered the car, hung there near the glove compartment.

  Although I do have one request, it said.

  Go ahead, she thought kindly.

  Forgive my cousin, the beam said. As I have forgiven you.

  Oh, brother. In a pig’s ass.