Someone mentions Eddie Brewer, and they speak about it for a moment, but a brief one, and I sense they don’t want it to spoil their festive mood. But, oh, they say, what a sick, crazy world. Crazy is the word, they say, crazy, crazy, crazy.

I spend most of my time sitting out here lately. From the porch, I can see people, and even though it’s often cool out here, their voices keep me here as my bad hand stiffens with cold and my teeth begin to chatter.

In the mornings, I carry my coffee out, sit in the brisk air and look across the avenue to the schoolyard and watch the small boys in their blue ties and matching blue pants and the small girls with their plaid skirts and glinting barrettes run around the yard. Their sudden shrieks and darting movements, their seemingly bottomless supply of frenetic energy, can be wearying or invigorating depending on my mood. When it’s a bad day, those shrieks ride my spinal column like chips of broken glass. On good days, though, I get a flush of something that may be a memory of what it was like to feel whole, when the simple act of breathing didn’t ache.

The issue, he wrote, is pain. How much I feel, how much I parcel out.

He came during the warmest, most erratic autumn on record, when the weather seemed to have flipped completely off its usual course, when everything seemed upside down, as if you’d look at a hole in the ground and see stars and constellations floating at the bottom, turn your head to the sky and see dirt and trees hanging suspended. As if he had his fingers on the globe, and he slapped it, and the world—or at least my portion of it—spun.

Sometimes Bubba or Richie or Devin and Oscar drop by, sit out here with me and we talk about the NFL playoffs or the college bowls or the latest movies in town. We don’t talk about this past autumn or Grace and Mae. We don’t talk about Angie. And we never talk about him. He’s done his damage, and there’s nothing left to say.

The issue, he wrote, is pain.

Those words—written on a piece of white, 8X11 copy paper—haunt me. Those words, so simple, sometimes seem as if they were written in stone.

1

Angie and I were up in our belfry office trying to fix the air conditioner when Eric Gault called.

Usually in the middle of a New England October, a broken air conditioner wouldn’t be a problem. A broken heater would. But it wasn’t turning out to be a normal autumn. At two in the afternoon, the temperature hung in the mid-seventies and the window screens still carried the damp, baked odor of summer.

“Maybe we should call someone,” Angie said.

I thumped the window unit on the side with my palm, turned it on again. Nothing.

“I bet it’s the belt,” I said.