Grandfather wanted to rebuild the old stone wall that divided his property from the Demitroffs’. Shifting a couple hundred feet of fieldstone was no minor event. So they’d joined a gym and were working out.

Austin’s mind was a snow flurry of plans. He had a hard time falling asleep at night because his thoughts about the next day wouldn’t lie down and relax. When his parents called (which wasn’t often), he was startled. Oh, yeah, he would think. Parents.

And now, with spring here, plans had to be made for the summer.

He could not imagine telling his father—Dad, I’m busy. Can’t fit you in.

Or his mother—Mom, I like your parents. I’m staying here.

This was a problem he needed to move to the front of his planning, but he kept forgetting. After school, which would have been good thinking time, he rarely took the bus, but ran. It was three miles from the high school to his grandparents’. He loved to time himself.

The Fents finished dinner. Their meals were solid and predictable. The rib roast; the leftovers from the rib roast. The roast chicken; the leftovers from the chicken. That was four nights right there, and they’d go out the other three. Austin’s grandmother instructed him about the coat he must wear to keep off the evening chill, and said to her husband, “We’ve been having these bonfires how many years now, dear?”

“Half a century, I suppose,” said Grandfather.

Half a century! It seemed an impossible length of time, a stretch from here to a comet’s tail. Austin was fascinated by the comet of 1997. It shivered him that a comet nobody expected and nobody had predicted, captured by the minds and eyes of a man named Hale and a man named Bopp, had suddenly stained the night sky. On clear nights, he liked to walk out on the farthest tip of beach and examine the sky.

“Exactly what are the plans for Saturday Group?” asked his grandmother.

“We’re painting Sunday school rooms at Good Shepherd,” he told his grandparents. “We get eight hours’ credit. Two adults, ten kids.” One would be Macey Clare. Austin could not understand how he was living across the street from Macey’s second home and he never saw her and could not seem to get to know her. The church van held fifteen, and his theory was that he would manage to sit with her. (It wouldn’t happen. Macey would be escorted by her girlfriends Lindsay and Grace.)