“Great job,” Larry said, when the story ended and the newscast went to a commercial break. “How on earth do you do that?”

  “It’s all thanks to you and Mrs. Clarke, Dad,” Ramon told him. “If you hadn’t sent me to her for art classes, none of this would have happened. Care for a beer?”

  “I wouldn’t say no,” Larry said.

  Ramon returned with two beers. After handing one to Larry, Ramon settled on the sofa with his, realizing as he did so that Larry was uncharacteristically somber.

  “Are you worried about tomorrow?” Ramon asked.

  Larry studied the beer bottle for a long moment before finally nodding. “I guess I am,” he admitted, “but don’t tell Mom. I’m not exactly what you’d call slim, you know, and no matter your age, there’s always a certain amount of risk with being put under anesthesia. So yes, I’m dreading the surgery, but I can’t live like this. My knees are so bad I can barely get around. I’m not getting any younger, and at your mother’s age, it’s not fair for her to be saddled with a crippled old man, so tomorrow’s a first step.”

  Ramon had always known there was an age difference between his mother and Larry, but it had never seemed to pose a problem between them. Now, however, for Larry at least, apparently it did.

  “Sounds to me like you’re doing the right thing,” Ramon said after a pause, “and I’m sure you’ll be in good hands.”

  “True,” Larry agreed, “but I’m over sixty, overweight, borderline diabetic, and hypertensive, so if I don’t make it, promise me you’ll look after your mom. The girls are too caught up in their own lives to bother helping out. Don’t get me wrong. Sylvia’s not helpless by any means, but she could use a little backup from time to time. She’s still relatively young and good-looking. Once I’m gone, I don’t expect her to spend the rest of her life mourning over me, but please keep an eye out for her. I don’t want her hooking up with some worthless asshole.”

  “Because she did that once already?” Ramon suggested.

  Larry nodded. “And that guy was a doozy!”

  “So how about this?” Ramon asked. “How about dropping all this gloom-and-doom stuff and focusing on living instead of dying? How about if we plan on having you around and running the show for the next thirty years or so?”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Larry said, raising his bottle in a mock toast. “And you’re sure you don’t mind driving us back and forth to the hospital in the morning?”

  “Not at all,” Ramon replied. “That way Mom can concentrate on worrying about you instead of worrying about parking.”

  “What’s for dinner?” Larry asked after a pause.

  “Beats me,” Ramon said. “As she was leaving, Mom said that after spending the whole weekend cooking, she was bringing home takeout.”

  An even longer pause ensued. “Still,” Larry said at last, “I’m surprised neither of the girls offered to hang around for a day or so longer to help out.”

  That reality about his sisters hadn’t surprised Ramon a bit, but this was the first time he’d ever heard Larry utter a word of criticism about Tina and Lucy.

  “I’m not,” Ramon replied. “They are what they are.”

  “Yup,” Larry agreed, “chips off their father’s old block.”

  Growing up, that was something Ramon had worried about, too—that someday he’d behave the same way his father had. Today, for the first time, he realized he hadn’t been wrong to be worried about that, but he’d always been focused on the wrong father. Now that he knew the truth, he understood that Sergio Gomez and Frank Muñoz were cut from the same cloth and both bad news, but if Ramon Muñoz turned out to be the kind of man Larry Rogers was, he’d be just fine.

  When Sylvia turned up half an hour later with a bag loaded with teriyaki chicken, the three of them shared a surprisingly lighthearted evening together. By the time it was over, Ramon was pretty sure that Larry didn’t know a thing about Sergio Gomez. And that night, when Ramon called Molly to wish her good night, he didn’t tell her, either.

  CHAPTER 26

  BEAVERTON, OREGON

  Friday, January 3, 2020, 5:30 a.m. (PST)

  AJ Wilson had three strikes against him on the day he was born. His mother, Mia, always claimed she had been at war with her parents by the time she was in junior high. At age fifteen, after her mother’s death, she had run away from home. She’d ended up in LA doing all the wrong things with all the wrong people. She’d married briefly and badly. When the marriage ended, Mia was left alone with a newborn baby to care for.

  At that point she wound up working the streets and doing drugs. She and her son lived in a ramshackle house with several other women, some of whom also had children. The landlord happened to be their pimp, and rent for their rooms came out of their take, not his. The women took turns looking after each other’s kids.

  As the children grew older, and with their mothers working nights, the kids banded together. Their school attendance was intermittent at best. When money and food were scarce, they looked out for one another. On days when AJ did go to school, his mother was often still asleep when he got home, and he was careful not to disturb her.

  One night, however, when it was well after dark and she was still asleep, he tried to wake her, but it didn’t work. As soon as he touched her hand and felt how cold it was, AJ knew his mother was dead. He was only in the sixth grade, but he knew enough to suspect this was probably an overdose. He dialed 911. The EMTs showed up first, and the cops came next, followed by people from Child Protective Services. A social worker named Ms. Bonham helped AJ gather up a grocery bag of belongings to take with him, and off he went to a temporary foster home—“emergency fostering,” she told him.

  AJ had met kids at school who were in the system. From the stories he’d heard, he knew that some foster homes were okay while others were terrible. It was almost midnight on Thursday night when the social worker dropped him off. For the next three days, he stayed with a family that was fostering three other kids, two of them older and tougher than he was, so at night AJ lay in bed, barely sleeping and clutching his bag of goods for fear someone would steal it.

  Then on Sunday afternoon, there came a knock on the front door. When the woman of the house opened it, AJ saw two people standing on the porch—the same social worker who had dropped him off earlier in the week and a tall, thin Black man with grizzled gray hair and gold-framed glasses. AJ was sent to his room while the newcomers were ushered into the living room. Sometime later they asked AJ to join them. And that was the moment when AJ’s life changed for the better—when Ms. Bonham introduced him to the old man.

  “I’m not sure if you’ve ever met Mr. Hiram Jones before,” she said, “but he’s your grandfather, your mother’s father.”

  “Glad to meet you,” the stranger said gravely, holding out an immense hand. “You can call me Gramps.”

  It took AJ a moment to figure out what was expected. Finally, at his foster mother’s urging, he stepped forward and shook hands.

  “When officers were going through your mother’s things,” Ms. Bonham explained, “they found a note saying that if anything happened to her, Mr. Jones should be contacted and asked to take charge of you.”

  “I came to get you as soon as I heard,” Hiram said. “Those were your mother’s last wishes, and I’m willing if you are.”

  AJ stared at this man who was a total stranger to him. According to his mother, her father had disowned her, and yet here he was, standing there offering AJ a future where he might not need to spend another sleepless night clutching his possessions.

  “Where’s that?” AJ asked. “Where’s home?”

  “Aloha, Oregon,” Gramps said. “It’s near Portland.”

  “Aloha,” AJ repeated. “Is it like Hawaii?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Even though Mia had been estranged from her father for years, on the day her son was born, even though she was married at the time and before she’d even left the hospital, she’d written the note and signed it in front of witnesses. She had kept the original and mailed a copy home to Hiram in Oregon. Never expecting anything would come of it, he had nonetheless kept the note.

  Hiram was a man who believed in doing his duty—from the time he enlisted in the navy at age eighteen until now, in his sixties driving a mail truck for the US Postal Service. When cops finally got around to doing their next-of-kin notification, he’d understood that his duty now was to care for his orphaned grandson. He had boarded the next available flight from Portland to LAX.

  He had arrived in LA with his copy of Mia’s note in hand, and learned that the cops had located the faded but brittle original in Mia’s underwear drawer. Together those two pieces of paper provided compelling evidence about Mia’s final wishes.

  AJ cut straight to the heart of the matter. “When would we go?” he asked.

  “Tonight, if possible,” Gramps said. “I want to get you enrolled in school as soon as I can.”

  “Okay,” AJ agreed, “sounds good.”

  At the time, California’s foster-care system was already stretched to the breaking point, and AJ wasn’t the only one concerned about those tough older boys in the foster home—so was Ms. Bonham.

  When Hiram Jones showed up with Mia’s letter in hand, she instantly recognized that he would be able to offer the boy far more than Child Protective Services could. And as far as her caseload went, having AJ become someone else’s problem with no muss or fuss seemed like a good idea. In the end, i’s may not have been properly dotted and a few t’s left uncrossed, but somehow Ms. Bonham managed to streamline the process. Hiram and AJ had flown from LA to Portland that very night.

  Of course, it hadn’t all been smooth sailing. For a kid who had grown up in Southern California, ending up in cold, damp Oregon was almost like landing on another planet. The skies were always gray and dreary. It rained—all the time. It was only October, but if AJ had happened to own a winter coat, he would have put it on the minute they left the airport terminal.

  Gramps had taken the next day off work and gone through the long, drawn-out ordeal of enrolling AJ in school, but once he got there, he hated it. Most of the kids in his previous school had been African American or Hispanic. That wasn’t the case in the Aloha/Beaverton school district, where AJ’s face turned out to be the only Black one in his sixth-grade classroom. Everyone else was white or Asian or Hispanic. Not only that, but it soon became apparent that what had passed for sixth-grade achievement levels back home in LA didn’t work in Aloha—which definitely didn’t resemble Hawaii at all! Before the end of that first week, while they were out at recess, one of the other kids had asked AJ if he was dumb or what. Naturally, AJ had lit into the kid in what, to the adults involved, had all the appearances of an unprovoked attack.

  Summoned to the school to retrieve AJ from the principal’s office, the boy had expected Hiram to raise hell with him on the way home. That wasn’t the case.

  “What happened?” Gramps had asked mildly.

  “The other kid called me stupid.”

  “So what?” Gramps had replied. “You can either use that as an excuse, or we can choose to do something about it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like getting you a tutor to help bring you up to grade level,” Gramps said. “We’re also going to start playing catch every day after I come home from work because, come next spring, I’m signing you up for Little League.”

  “Why?” AJ had asked. “I don’t even like baseball.”

  “You’ll like baseball a hell of a lot more than you like fighting, and so will I.”

  “But I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Trust me,” Gramps said. “You’ll learn.”

  As promised, Gramps hired a tutor whose focused attention worked wonders as far as AJ’s schoolwork was concerned, but the real magic sauce that transformed the boy’s life was Little League. Gramps turned the backyard of his small bungalow into a mini baseball camp. He put up a collection of nets to keep balls from straying into the neighbors’ yards and windows. He found a used pitching machine online and bought it so AJ could practice hitting the ball. And rain or shine, they played catch for hours on end after school and on weekends.

  Some kids might have balked at Hiram Jones’s version of fair-minded tough love, but AJ thrived on it. By the time he walked onto a baseball diamond some six months later, AJ was reasonably confident about his skill level. Looking around, he quickly realized that the guy everyone looked up to—the one who called the shots on the team—was the pitcher. From that moment on, that’s what he wanted to be, and now, six years later, he was.

  He’d won a spot on Beaverton High’s varsity baseball team as a sophomore. His junior year, with him as the star pitcher, the Beavers had walked away with the state championship. This year he hoped to do so again, not that he needed another championship under his belt. AJ had already been promised two full-ride athletic scholarships, one to the University of Oregon and the other to the University of Washington, but he was holding out, hoping for one from Arizona State University. If he was playing ball for the Sun Devils during spring training, maybe a Major League scout would spot him and make him an offer.

  It wasn’t easy for AJ to keep his pitching arm in shape during the off season, so his paper route had become a big part of his practice routine. Delivering papers had been Gramps’s idea. He’d had a bicycle route when he was a kid, and he wanted AJ to have one, too. A morning paper route was a responsibility that made it impossible for a kid to be out running the streets late at night when getting into trouble was all too easy. It was also a way for AJ to earn some spending money. Except bicycle paper routes weren’t exactly a thing anymore.

  When AJ was fourteen, Gramps signed up for an auto-route, delivering both the Oregonian and the Wall Street Journal to houses in the Aloha/Beaverton area. They delivered eighty-five to ninety daily copies of the Oregonian, and fifty or so of the Wall Street Journal. The Sunday-only Oregonian subscribers numbered 135. For two years, they did the route together every day with Gramps doing the driving and AJ doing the throwing.

  The two of them did a lot of talking on those long morning paper route drives, and it was during those that AJ finally learned the truth about his mother. Mia had been a difficult child from the beginning, but once her mother, Louisa, died in a car wreck, Mia was completely out of control.

  Once AJ turned sixteen and got his driver’s license, Gramps bought himself a new Prius and passed his elderly Civic on to AJ so he could drive the paper route by himself, unless Gramps, as he sometimes chose to do, went along for the ride. On those occasions, they reverted to their original roles with Gramps behind the wheel and AJ doing the throwing, because by then they had turned the whole paper route into a game of sorts.

  AJ would exit the car in the middle of the street in front of a customer’s house, wind up his arm, and then pitch the plastic bundled papers onto the porch. Papers that hit targeted doorknobs counted as strikes. A missed doorknob counted as a ball. So far AJ had never broken any windows, and only one customer had called to complain about the noise the papers made when hitting her door. (AJ no longer threw that customer’s paper. Instead he walked it up onto her porch and dropped it in front of her door.)

  On this cold January morning, AJ’s pitches were golden, and he was well on his way to a no-hitter. Larry Rogers’s home on NW Telshire Drive was more than halfway through AJ’s route. Mr. Rogers was one of his favorite customers. For one thing, he was always good for a sizable tip. For another, he kept his house lit up with a porch light that came on automatically at dusk and switched off at sunrise. Porch lights made it easier for AJ to spot doorknobs.

  AJ was out of the Civic, taking his stance and preparing to wind up when he saw a box sitting on the front porch. Obviously someone—Amazon, maybe—had made a delivery overnight. On a whim he decided to aim for the box instead of the doorknob, deciding on the fly that if he hit the box, it would count as a strike, too. So he did just that—he resumed his stance, took aim again, and threw.

  CHAPTER 27

  BEAVERTON, OREGON

  Friday, January 3, 2020, 5:45 a.m. (PST)

  Ramon had always been an early riser. Since he was the designated driver, and knowing Larry needed to arrive at Portland General at 6:30 a.m. for check-in, Ramon crawled out of bed even earlier that morning, showered, and was drinking coffee at his kitchen table while reading the online news when an explosion sent shock waves through the whole neighborhood. He raced out of the cottage to see what had happened as car alarms, including one he recognized as his own, went off up and down the street.

  His cottage was in the rear left-hand corner of his parents’ lot. As soon as he stepped outside, he smelled smoke and saw an ominous orange glow looming over the roofline of his parents’ house. Ramon charged forward. As he reached the front yard, he spotted a pair of headlights stopped in the middle of the street with a male figure silhouetted before them. Ramon fully expected the guy to take off running. Instead he rushed toward Ramon clutching a phone to his ear.

  “I’m calling nine-one-one,” he shouted.

  That’s when Ramon realized who it was—AJ Wilson, his parents’ paperboy. Ramon often crossed paths with AJ driving his aging Civic while Ramon was out doing early-morning runs.

  Glancing toward the front of the house, Ramon was horrified to see that the entire front porch was already engulfed in flames. With his parents still inside, he skidded to a stop and reversed course.

  “My folks are inside,” he yelled over his shoulder. “I’m going to get them.”

  Ramon sprinted to the back door. Unsurprisingly, it was locked. Ramon had his own key to the deadbolt, but it was on his key ring inside the cottage, and there was no time to go after it. Instead he delivered three hard kicks to the door. It didn’t open, but the lower panels finally gave way. He quickly scrambled through the opening and into the ear-splitting racket of a shrieking smoke alarm.

  The house was already filling with smoke, but amazingly the lights still worked. He switched them on as he ran through the house toward his parents’ bedroom. In the living room, flames had already penetrated the front wall. Glancing toward the hallway, Ramon saw his parents, still in nightclothes, hurrying toward him. On the far side of the living room they came to an inexplicable stop. While Larry tried to urge his wife forward, a panicked Sylvia suddenly seemed incapable of movement.