I adopted my best friend’s son after he abandoned him — years later, the boy invited him to a championship game and gave a speech that made me break down.
Grady Wolcott called me at ten past two in the morning on the twentieth of March, 2012.
I knew before I picked up. Nobody calls at two.
His wife Simone had died that evening. An aneurysm. She was thirty-one years old and she had been standing at their kitchen counter cutting up a pineapple.
There was no warning. There is never any warning; that’s the entire nature of the thing.
Grady was not making sense on that phone. He said the same sentence maybe eleven times.
“I can’t do this, Rory. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.”
I said, “I’ll be there at seven. Go to sleep. I’ll be there at seven.”
Amari was four years old and asleep in the next room. He’d turned four on the sixth of that month. There was still a paper banner up in their front room.
I got there at 6:50 in the morning.
The front door was unlocked. Every light in the house was on.
Amari was in his bed in a dinosaur shirt, asleep, with the door open.
