Who was the man in the brown sportcoat?

“Pat was in the hospital, sure. Dr. Alpert said he was doing fine, but when the phone rang I jumped for it—I half-expected it to be him, Alpert, saying Pat had had a relapse or something.”

“Where in God’s name did you get this sense of impending doom, Sid?”

“I dunno, buddy, but it’s there. Anyway, it’s not Alpert, it’s Johanna. She wants to know if we had any ancestors—three, maybe even four generations back who lived there where you are, or in one of the surrounding towns. I told her I didn’t know, but you might. Know, I mean. She said she didn’t want to ask you because it was a surprise. Was it a surprise?”

“A big one,” I said. “Daddy was a lobsterman—”

“Bite your tongue, he was an artist—’a seacoast primitive.” Ma still calls him that.” Siddy wasn’t quite laughing.

“Shit, he sold lobster-pot coffee-tables and lawn-puffins to the tourists when he got too rheumatic to go out on the bay and haul traps.”

“I know that, but Ma’s got her marriage edited like a movie for television.’’

How true. Our own version of Blanche Du Bois. “Dad was a lobster-man in Prout’s Neck. He—”

Siddy interrupted, singing the first verse of “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone”

in a horrible offkey tenor.

“Come on, this is serious. He had his first boat from his father, right?”

“That’s the story,” Sid agreed. “Jack Noonan’s Lazy Betty, original owner Paul Noonan. Also of Prout’s. Boat took a hell of a pasting in Hurricane Donna, back in 1960. I think it was Donna.”

Two years after I was born. “And Daddy put it up for sale in ’63.”

“Yep.

I don’t know whatever became of it, but it was Grampy Paul’s to begin with, all right. Do you remember all the lobster stew we ate when we were kids, Mikey?”

“Seacoast meatloaf,” I said, hardly thinking about it. Like most kids raised on the coast of Maine, I can’t imagine ordering lobster in a restau-rant-that’s for fiatlanders. I was thinking about Grampy Paul, who had been born in the 1890s. Paul Noonan begat Jack Noonan, Jack Noonan begat Mike and Sid Noonan, and that was really all I knew, except the Noonans had all grown up a long way from where I now stood sweating my brains out.

They shit in the same pit.

Devore had gotten it wrong, that was all—when we Noonans weren’t wearing polo shirts and being Memphis quality, we were Prout’s Neckers.

It was unlikely that Devore’s great-grandfather and my own would have had anything to do with each other in any case; the old rip had been twice my age, and that meant the generations didn’t match up.

But if he had been totally wrong, what had Jo been on about? “Mike?” Sid asked. “Are you there?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay? You don’t sound so great, I have to tell you.”

“It’s the heat,” I said. “Not to mention your sense of impending doom.

Thanks for calling, Siddy.”

“Thanks for being there, brother.”

“Kickin,” I said.

I went out to the kitchen to get a glass of cold water. As I was filling it, I heard the magnets on the fridge begin sliding around. I whirled, spilling some of the water on my bare feet and hardly noticing. I was as excited as a kid who thinks he may glimpse Santa Claus before he shoots back up the chimney.

I was barely in time to see nine plastic letters drawn into the circle from all points of the compass. CARLADEAN, they spelled. . but only for a second. Some presence, tremendous but unseen, shot past me. Not a hair on my head stirred, but there was still a strong sense of being buffeted, the way you’re buffeted by the air of a passing express train if you’re standing near the platform yellow-line when the train bolts through. I cried out in surprise and groped my glass of water back onto the counter, spilling it. I no longer felt in need of cold water, because the temperature in the kitchen of Sara Laughs had dropped off the table.

I blew out my breath and saw vapor, as you do on a cold day in January.

One puff, maybe two, and it was gone—but it had been there, all right, and for perhaps five seconds the film of sweat on my body turned to what felt like a slime of ice.

CARLADEAN exploded outward in all directions—it was like watching an atom being smashed in a cartoon. Magnetized letters, fruits, and vegetables flew off the front of the refrigerator and scattered across the kitchen. For a moment the fury which fuelled that scattering was something I could almost taste, like gunpowder.

And something gave way before it, going with a sighing, rueful whisper I had heard before: “Oh Mike. Oh Mike.” It was the voice I’d caught on the Memo-Scriber tape, and although I hadn’t been sure then, I was now—it was Jo’s voice.

But who was the other one? Why had it scattered the letters?

Carla Dean. Not Bill’s wife; that was Yvette. His mother? His grandmother?

I walked slowly through the kitchen, collecting fridge-magnets like prizes in a scavenger hunt and sticking them back on the Kenmore by the handful. Nothing snatched them out of my hands; nothing froze the sweat on the back of my neck; Bunter’s bell didn’t ring. Still, I wasn’t alone, and I knew it.

CARLADEAN: Jo had wanted me to know.

Something else hadn’t. Something else had shot past me like the Wabash Cannonball, trying to scatter the letters before I could read them.

Jo was here; a boy who wept in the night was here, too.

And what else?

What else was sharing my house with me?

I didn’t see them at first, which wasn’t surprising; it seemed that half of Castle Rock was on the town common as that sultry Saturday afternoon edged on toward evening. The air was bright with hazy midsummer light, and in it kids swarmed over the playground equipment, a number of old men in bright red vests—some sort of club, I assumed—played chess, and a group of young people lay on the grass listening to a teenager in a headband playing the guitar and singing one I remembered from an old lan and Sylvia record, a cheery tune that went “Ella Speed was havin her. lovin fun, John Martin shot Ella with a Colt jrty-one…”

I saw no joggers, and no dogs chasing Frisbees. It was just too god-dam hot.

I was turning to look at the bandshell, where an eight-man combo called The Castle Rockers was setting up (I had an idea “In the Mood”

33o was about as close as they got to rock and roll), when a small person hit me from behind, grabbing me just above the knees and almost dumping me on the grass. “Gotcha!” the small person cried gleefully. “Kyra Devore!” Mattie called, sounding both amused and irritated. “You’ll knock him down!” I turned, dropped the grease-spotted Mcdonald’s bag I had been carrying, and lifted the kid up. It felt natural, and it felt wonderful. You don’t realize the weight of a healthy child until you hold one, nor do you fully comprehend the life that runs through them like a bright wire. I didn’t get choked up (“Don’t go all corny on me, Mike,” Siddy would sometimes whisper when we were kids at the movies and I got wet-eyed at a sad part), but I thought of Jo, yes. And the child she had been carrying when she fell down in that stupid parking lot, yes to that, too. Ki was squealing and laughing, her arms outspread and her hair hanging down in two amusing clumps accented by Raggedy Ann and Andy barrettes. “Don’t tackle your own quarterback!” I yelled, grinning, and to my delight she yelled it right back at me: “Don’t taggle yer own quarter-mack! Don’t taggle yer own quartermack!” I set her on her feet, both of us laughing. Ki took a step backward, tripped herself, and sat down on the grass, laughing harder than ever. I had a mean thought, then, brief but oh so clear: if only the old lizard could see how much he was missed. How sad we were at his passing. Mattie walked over, and tonight she looked as I’d half-imagined her when I first met her—like one of those lovely children of privilege you see at the country club, either goofing with their friends or sitting seriously at dinner with their parents. She was in a white sleeveless dress and low heels, her hair falling loose around her shoulders, a touch of lipstick on her mouth. Her eyes had a brilliance in them that hadn’t been there before.