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  He estimates that he passed that mailbox 7,000 times the first 18 years of his life. Sometimes, Jerry Prince would walk to school with him, although it was pretty clear that Arlene Prince did not approve of her son keeping such company.

  The Princes lived in a well-kept brick colonial, four rooms up and four down. It was built two years before McCauley Prince left his wife and son one day, as preamble to marrying his secretary. He was a third-generation lawyer from an old family that had lived in or near Speakeasy almost forever, and he provided for his abandoned family well enough, most thought, although Arlene did have to go to work as a secretary herself.

  Jerry was 5 when his father left. Ken and Ellen Stone encouraged their youngest child to befriend the shy little boy who lived just three houses up the road. They would invite Jerry to come play with Jack, but the invitations were seldom reciprocated.

  By the time they were very far along in elementary school, Jack Stone and Jerry Prince were in different orbits. Jerry was the smartest boy in every grade, without the brass or the athletic ability to keep him within the realm of normalcy and acceptance.

  Jack thinks he sees Arlene Prince in the backyard as he drives past, sitting in a lawn chair under the weeping willow, but he can’t be sure, and he sure as hell isn’t going to slow down and find out.

  His late mother’s house looms ahead. The For Sale sign is still up, as it has been since early May. If they don’t sell it soon, he’ll have to talk Mike and Sandy into going thirds on a paint job. It’s been five years since the last one, and the old wood really drinks it up. He’s not unhappy that his son is living there now, even if it is more or less from necessity.

  Brady’s dirty red pickup is out front, which means he’s either taking a long lunch break or his latest career, as an apprentice bricklayer, is just one more line on a long, discouraging résumé.

  He knows he should stop by and speak to his son. He knows he’s lying when he tells himself he absolutely has to keep moving, that he can’t afford to dawdle, that the online-ordered bounty in the back of his truck must go through. But he keeps driving anyhow.

  By the time he’s finished his oblong loop, it’s after 4. He crosses back into town from the south, over Speakeasy Creek, where half a dozen more kids are lying mostly submerged in the cool, shady water, hands and feet hanging on to inner tubes. The kids at Sycamore Creek were white; these are brown. The schools have been integrated since before Jack started ninth grade, but the creeks are still Jim Crow. The funniest thing is that sometimes, it’s the African-American kids who float about in Sycamore Creek and the whites in Speakeasy. Somehow, both races seem to know whose creek is whose, according to the day or the season. He sees them interacting sometimes at the McDonald’s, or hanging out in the Food Lion parking lot, but at the creeks, it might as well be 1955.

  He turns left just past the bridge, onto Larkmeadow Lane. To the right, it’s Eighth Street. It used to be Eighth Street the other way, too, before Cully Dane and his partners who built Speakeasy Glen persuaded the town council to change it to something “more poetic.”

  Jack passes two shady side streets with faux-aged wooden signs, then turns onto Woodpecker Way. He parks on the street, taking up most of the curb fronting their cul-de-sac contemporary. He enjoys the new house, barely three years old. It’s just that it’s so different. He spent all those years living in the farmhouse, with low ceilings and no more windows than an early 20th-century country home should have, and the space and light here sometimes overwhelm him.

  The ceilings are so tall he needs a stepladder to change light bulbs, and there are so many skylights that he’s told Gina he’s thinking about wearing sun block inside the house. The spiral staircase still seems strange, with its wedges of metal and carpet surrounded by air. Wesley, the terrier, has to be carried down them at least twice a week after following Jack or Gina or Shannon upstairs and then whimpering at the abyss, as helpless as a cat up a tree.

  Jack is happy enough with it, though, or would be if the mortgage payments were more appropriate to his and Gina’s present salaries.

  He gets a Coke from the refrigerator and climbs the steps, calling to Shannon to keep Wesley from following him.

  He goes into the back room and shuts the door.

  They have a routine. He will write for an hour and a half, then come down to help prepare dinner. Gina gets home at 6, and by 8, he’s back upstairs.

  It’s been two years now. When he started, he had no idea how long it would take, only that he had to do it.

  It wasn’t easy to give up the long-distance job, driving his own rig, making more than many of the college graduates around them. The money he got from selling his rig carried them for a while, and he’s invested some. Mack McLamb is a broker, and the tech stock he talked Jack into buying in 1998 is soaring.

  But even he knows they can’t go on like this forever.

  He can’t fault Gina. She deserves some kind of medal for not just packing up and leaving, or at least trying to have him committed.

  It should help that he is actually in the same house with his wife and daughter much of the time now. He wonders, though, if it isn’t worse, knowing he’s a closed door away, but that he might as well be in California, and that his mind is farther away than that sometimes.

  He’s tried to explain it to Gina, and she at least pretends to understand, although he knows she worries about money. He does, too.

  “This is what I’m supposed to do,” he told her that first night, after he’d spent the rest of the trip out west and back again thinking about the old man and his story. “I’m as sure of that as I am of the sun rising. We’ll all be glad if I do this. Believe in me.”

  He’d gotten on his knees when he said that, like a suitor proposing.

  “Well,” Gina had said, shaking her head and smiling slightly, “it could be worse, I suppose. You could have gotten the call to forsake your earthly belongings, like Jimmy Tucker.”

  Jimmy Tucker had been one of their neighbors before he went to a revival at his Baptist church and heeded a call nobody else heard. According to the Bledsoes, three doors down, he and his family have moved somewhere in Southwest Virginia, where he is starting his own congregation.

  Jack hasn’t felt much magic in his life, and he is somewhat shocked himself at how self-indulgent he’s been lately, how un-Jack-like, as Milo Wainwright put it. And if people want to think it’s a mid-life crisis, well, it’s probably easier to explain it that way.

  But he knows he’s right. He doesn’t even know exactly why he’s so sure, but he is. Something in the old man’s voice maybe, something in the look he had right before he disappeared.

  Lovelady is more than 400 pages long now. Jack has rewritten it three times, aided by the computer he bought with some of the money he got for the rig.

  He hasn’t told too many people about what he’s doing, although most know it has something to do with a book. The ones who don’t subscribe to the concept of mid-life crises just think he’s had some kind of breakdown.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The three of them rarely have breakfast together. Usually, Jack’s either already gone or upstairs writing when Gina comes tearing through, late for work. He and Shannon sometimes overlap, during the school year, but in the summer, Shannon sleeps as late as they’ll let her.

  This morning, though, Jack doesn’t have to leave just yet, Gina has the day off, and Shannon is going to Speakeasy Creek with two friends from the next cul-de-sac.

  Jack is sipping a cup of coffee and eating a bagel, Shannon is slurping cold cereal, and Gina is washing down a doughnut with a glass of orange juice. Jack regrets not anticipating this rare convergence. He could’ve made pancakes, fried up some sausage, had what his mother would have called a real breakfast.

  “So what’re you doing today?” he asks his wife.

  Gina is wearing Levi’s and a sleeveless top. To Jack, she is approximately as attractive as she was 17 years ago, when they began dating. He looks at
her as she concentrates on tearing out grocery coupons from the newspaper insert, and he wishes he didn’t have to go to work, either.

  Gina thinks of herself as tall, although she knows that she might be a guard instead of a center if she played high school basketball now. Even Shannon, at 13, has an inch on her. Gina weighs 20 pounds more than when she and Jack met, but she was too thin back then for his liking. Her hair is almost black, and she has lately begun hiding what little gray has crept in. She is, anyone in Speakeasy would tell you, a fine-looking woman, and hardly anyone adds “for her age” yet.

  Her eyes were what first hooked him. They seem to range in hue from emerald to forest green according to the mood and the illumination. They have a catlike quality to them. When she is aroused, they seem to create light rather than merely reflect it. Jack always implores her not to close them when she’s coming.“Oh,” she says to her husband’s question, pushing a loose strand of hair out of her eyes, not looking up from her clipping, “nothing exciting. Buy groceries. Pay bills. Win the lottery. Maybe go swimming later.”

  “Not at the creek?” Shannon says, looking up in alarm.

  “Yes, the creek would be nice,” her mother says, her mouth twisting into a half-smile. “I’d like to come over and meet all your friends. Maybe I’ll wear that little thong bikini Daddy bought me.”

  Shannon puts her finger down her throat and makes a gagging noise.

  “I’m going to get your daddy to take a picture of me,” Gina tells her. “I’m going to put on it: Regina Gay Stone at 41. And I’m going to store it away. Then, when you’re 41, I’m going to show it to you, and we’ll see who held up better, little girl.”

  “You’ll be so old by then,” her daughter tells her, rising as a car pulls up outside and a horn sounds, “you won’t even remember where you put the picture.”

  Gina swats at the daughter’s backside as she runs past.

  “Be back by 5 now,” Jack says to the closing door.

  “She’s going to be pretty like her mother,” he says, but Gina is concentrating on the grocery list.

  “You need any toothpaste, mouthwash, anything?”

  “I could go for a blow job.”

  Gina shakes her head and tears a sheet of paper from the pad on which she’s been writing.

  “Well,” she says, “it’s been two years now.”

  He realizes, after a pause, that they’ve changed topics.

  “Yeah, it has. Two years last week, I think.”

  She looks across the table at him. Her eyes are a darker green now, and in them he can see all the unspoken questions. “How much longer? What’s going to happen when we run out of money? How are we going to keep making the mortgage payments? Who’s going to take care of Shannon’s college tuition?”

  “I think it’s ready,” he tells her. “The next thing is to get somebody to publish it.”

  “That’s great, sweetie,” Gina says. “Are you going to let me take a look at it, then?”

  “Ah … yeah, but let me just do a couple of things to it first.”

  “I thought you said it was ready.”

  “Just give me a week or so.”

  Jack doesn’t want to admit that he’s a little scared. Somebody at a meeting of his writers’ group said showing someone else your novel is like taking your clothes off in public. Jack hasn’t given anyone a peek so far, even though this has caused some huffiness among the group. Gina knows only the basic story.

  “You know I believe in you,” she tells him. “I wouldn’t have signed off on this if I hadn’t believed in you. Would I?”

  That’s the problem, he thinks. He’s still sure she does, or mostly sure. What if he’s wrong, though? How could he ever make up for all that squandered faith, if it turns out he was wrong?

  “Soon,” he says, and then changes the subject.

  “Have you decided yet about the reunion?” he asks.

  “It’s what, Saturday week?”

  “Yeah. The fourth.”

  Gina looks at him and shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so, Jack. Is it OK with you if I don’t? I just think it’d be boring, you know? Those people weren’t my school friends. You all were almost out of high school when we moved here, remember? And I’m so much younger.” She grins.

  “No, that’s fine,” he tells her. “You know Milo and Cully and Mack, though.”

  She shakes her head again. “I just don’t think so. Is that OK?”

  He says it is.

  He hasn’t told her yet about Jerry Prince.

  He’s now Gerald Prince, and he works for Mayfair Publishing. Kenny looked it up on the Internet. Gerald Prince is vice-president and senior editor, and he has his own imprint, a term Jack had to find in his dictionary. There are novels being published as Gerald Prince Books.

  Everyone in the writers’ group tells him he should have been trying to get an agent, although the ones he hears about from the retirees and rich wives who meet every other week seem to be less than satisfactory. He’s become second-hand familiar with what one woman calls with great scorn “vanity agents,” who apparently get writers to send them money in advance to try to sell their books, and then do a piss-poor job of it. You wouldn’t pay a plumber before he unclogged the sink, Jack said at one meeting, so why would you pay somebody you’ve never even met to sell your book before he’s even lifted a finger? That was before he found out that three members had already employed vanity agents.

  The real agents, everyone agreed, were very hard to get. No one in the group has been published, although there are much-discussed near misses—the “interested” editor, the big-name agency that asks for the rest of the book, the friend-of-a-friend writer who promises to help and never delivers.

  He has known for some time the general pace of Gerald Prince’s progress in New York, through Gerald’s mother bragging to his mother about it during their rare visits over the years. He was glad for the little boy who always seemed to need a defender when they were growing up.

  Then, at some point, it hit him. Little Jerry Prince would publish his book.

  It seemed preordained. Jack Stone has come to believe his whole existence, from the time he picked the old man up alongside the interstate, has been scripted. When people in the writers’ group would talk about finding an agent, Jack was calm and quiet. He knew whence his salvation would come.

  To ensure that Gerald Prince was coming to the 30th reunion of the Buster Gladden class of 1970, he called Gerald’s mother and got his address. Jack’s letter urged him to attend, lying that everybody wanted to see him after all those years.

  Last month, long before Milo knew about it, Martha Sue Levins Bain, the reunion chairwoman, came up to Jack in the Food Lion, all excited, and told him that they were going to have a celebrity at the class reunion.

  “You mean, other than me?”

  “I don’t know if making all-region 30 years ago really qualifies you,” she’d said, and he’d pretended to be hurt.

  Jack looks up at the kitchen clock and sees that he’s going to be late. He bends to kiss Gina goodbye as he wheels around her, tasting the sweet doughnut crumbs on her face. He picks up a napkin and wipes a couple off her lower lip.

  “Mmm,” she says, “I love a man in uniform.”

  He grimaces and walks out the door.

  Jack Stone loves his family, and he’s happy that Gina and Shannon seem to love their still new-smelling house. And he knows he has no basis for bitching about anything. He’s the one who voluntarily cut his salary in half so he could do something about as sensible as drawing out their money, catching one of those gamblers’ specials to Atlantic City, going to the roulette table and putting it all on red.

  That was what Mike suggested when Jack first told his brother what he had in mind, noting that he had an almost 50-50 chance at the roulette wheel.

  It could have been worse, Gina overheard a neighbor say at the Christmas party last year. He could still be driving an 18-wheeler. Although Jack never, of
course, parked his rig on their cul-de-sac. It wouldn’t have fit, for one thing. When he was driving for himself, they had two good late-model cars, and he could park the truck out at his mother’s farm. Now, they have a 98 Honda Accord, a sometimes-ambulatory Chevy Cavalier that was Ellen’s for the last 12 years of her life, and a UPS truck.

  Jack thinks about the old man. He’s been thinking about him a lot lately, about how he’d said writing might cause a person to give up some things, but that they were things you sometimes found you didn’t need anyway.

  Jack has so far given up one late-model car and a very good salary. He pays the mortgage, and Gina pays the rest of the bills. He’s dipping a little deeper into the remainder of his cushion money, but he’s still not worried.

  They don’t go out to restaurants as often, and Christmas isn’t quite as lavish. They spent their last vacation at his brother-in-law’s place on the Chesapeake, a week of sandwiches and all the crabs they could catch and eat. It just about ruined blue crabs for all three of them.

  Still, Gina seems to be hanging in there, and Shannon complains less than many of her more well-appointed friends about any lack of material goods. Hell, they are living in a $200,000 house.

  If this is what the old man meant about giving up some things, Jack is proud that the Stones are up to the test.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In my so-called formative years, I had a lot of time to make stuff up.

  Mike and Sandy were so much older than me, and Mom and Dad were always working.

  Sandy says I was incapable of boredom. Maybe not incapable, but there is something to be said for having to make your own entertainment.

  There weren’t many other kids living along Humpback Road. I did play with Jerry Prince on occasion, but his mom didn’t want her boy’s best friend to be some truck-farmer’s son, even if we did live right down the road from them.

  We hadn’t even started first grade when Jerry’s father left them. One of my earliest memories was of Dad coming in one evening and telling Mom, “Well, the son of a bitch did it.”