“My name’s George Amberson, ma’am.” I tipped my hat to her. “I wonder if I could speak to your husband.”

Sure I could. He’d already come up behind her and put an arm around her shoulders. A young guy, not yet thirty, now wearing an expression of pleasant inquiry. His baby reached for his face, and when Cullum kissed the kid’s fingers, she laughed. Cullum extended his hand to me, and I shook it.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Amberson?”

I held up the cribbage board. “I noticed at Brownie’s that you’re quite the player. So I have a proposal for you.”

Mrs. Cullum looked alarmed. “My husband and I are Methodists, Mr. Amberson. The tournaments are just for fun. He won a trophy, and I’m happy to polish it for him so it looks good on the mantel, but if you want to play cards for money, you’ve come to the wrong household.” She smiled. I could see it cost her an effort, but it was still a good one. I liked her. I liked both of them.

“She’s right.” Cullum sounded regretful but firm. “I used to play penny-a-peg back when I was working in the woods, but that was before I met Marnie.”

“I’d be crazy to play you for money,” I said, “because I don’t play at all. But I want to learn.”

“In that case, come on in,” he said. “I’ll be happy to teach you. Won’t take but fifteen minutes, and it’s an hour yet before we eat our dinner. Shoot a pickle, if you can add to fifteen and count to thirty-one, you can play cribbage.”

“I’m sure there’s more to it than a little counting and adding, or you wouldn’t have placed third in the Androscoggin Tournament,” I said. “And I actually want a little more than to just learn the rules. I want to buy a day of your time. November the fifteenth, to be exact. From ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, let’s say.”

Now his wife began to look scared. She was holding the baby close to her chest.

“For those six hours of your time, I’ll pay you two hundred dollars.” Cullum frowned. “What’s your game, mister?”

“I’m hoping to make it cribbage.” That, however, wasn’t going to be enough. I saw it on their faces. “Look, I’m not going to try and kid you that there isn’t more to it, but if I tried to explain, you’d think I was crazy.”

“I think that already,” Marnie Cullum said. “Send him on his way, Andy.” I turned to her. “It’s nothing bad, it’s nothing illegal, it’s not a scam, and it’s not dangerous. I take my oath on it.” But I was starting to think it wasn’t going to work, oath or no oath. It had been a bad idea. Cullum would be doubly suspicious when he met me near the Friends’ Meeting House on the afternoon of the fifteenth.

But I kept pushing. It was a thing I’d learned to do in Derry.

“It’s just cribbage, ” I said. “You teach me the game, we play for a few hours, I give you two hundred bucks, and we all part friends. What do you say?”

“Where are you from, Mr. Amberson?”

“Upstate in Derry, most recently. I’m in commercial real estate. Right now I’m vacationing on Sebago Lake before heading back down south. Do you want some names? References, so to speak?” I smiled. “People who’ll tell you I’m not nuts?”

“He goes out in the woods on Saturdays during hunting season,” Mrs. Cullum said. “It’s the only chance he gets, because he works all week and when he gets home it’s so close to dark it doesn’t even pay to load a gun.”

She still looked mistrustful, but now I saw something else on her face that gave me hope.

When you’re young and have a kid, when your husband works manual labor—which his chapped, callused hands said he did—two hundred bucks can mean a lot of groceries. Or, in 1958, two and a half house payments.

“I could miss an afternoon in the woods,” Cullum said. “Town’s pretty well hunted out, anyway. The only place left where you can get a damn deer is Bowie Hill.”

“Watch your language around the baby, Mr. Cullum,” she said. Her tone was sharp, but she smiled when he kissed her cheek.

“Mr. Amberson, I need to talk to m’wife,” Cullum said. “Do you mind standing on the stoop for a minute or two?”

“I’ll do better than that,” I said. “I’ll go down to Brownie’s and get myself a dope.” That was what most Derryites called sodas. “Can I bring either of you back a cold drink?” They declined with thanks, and then Marnie Cullum closed the door in my face. I drove to Brownie’s, where I bought an Orange Crush for myself and a licorice whip I thought the baby might like, if she was old enough to have such things. The Cullums were going to turn me down, I thought.

With thanks, but firmly. I was a strange man with a strange proposal. I had hoped that changing the past might be easier this time, because Al had already changed it twice. Apparently that wasn’t going to be the case.

But I got a surprise. Cullum said yes, and his wife allowed me to give the licorice to the little girl, who received it with a gleeful chortle, sucked on it, then ran it through her hair like a comb.

They even invited me to stay for the evening meal, which I declined. I offered Andy Cullum a fifty-dollar retainer, which he declined . . . until his wife insisted that he take it.

I went back to Sebago feeling exultant, but as I drove back to Durham on the morning of November fifteenth (the fields white with a frost so thick that the orange-clad hunters, who were already out in force, left tracks), my mood had changed. He will have called the State Police or the local constable, I thought. And while they’re questioning me in the nearest police station, trying to find out what kind of loony I am, Cullum will be off hunting in the Bowie Hill woods.

But there was no police car in the driveway, just Andy Cullum’s Ford woody. I took my new cribbage board and went to the door. He opened it and said, “Ready for your lesson, Mr.

Amberson?”

I smiled. “Yes, sir, I am.”

He took me out to the back porch; I don’t think the missus wanted me in the house with her and the baby. The rules were simple. Pegs were points, and a game was two laps around the board. I learned about the right jack, double runs, being stuck in the mudhole, and what Andy called “mystic nineteen”—the so-called impossible hand. Then we played. I kept track of the score to begin with, but quit once Cullum pulled four hundred points ahead. Every now and then some hunter would bang off a distant round, and Cullum would look toward the woods beyond his small backyard.

“Next Saturday,” I said on one of these occasions. “You’ll be out there next Saturday, for sure.”

“It’ll probably rain,” he said, then laughed. “I should complain, huh? I’m having fun and making money. And you’re getting better, George.”

Marnie gave us lunch at noon—big tuna sandwiches and bowls of homemade tomato soup.

We ate in the kitchen, and when we were done, she suggested we bring our game inside. She had decided I wasn’t dangerous, after all. That made me happy. They were nice people, the Cullums. A nice couple with a nice baby. I thought of them sometimes when I heard Lee and Marina Oswald screaming at each other in their low-end apartments . . . or saw them, on at least one occasion, carry their animus out onto the street. The past harmonizes; it also tries to balance, and mostly succeeds.