“What?” I said. “What did you say?” I was suddenly as sweaty as she was and felt maybe half as sick.

“Do I get to go out on a good note?” she said patiently. “Or not? Because you decide, mister. I can have the last days of my life the way I want them, with my son at my side, in his stories if not in the flesh. Are you going to be the guy who says no?”

I wasn’t going to be the guy who said no. I turned away, reached up onto the shelf, and lifted the whole stack down.

BRAD DOLAN DEDICATED HIS LAST BOOK to his mother, too. The dedication reads:

One more for my mother, without whom I would not ever have written a word

You could go crazy trying to figure out what that means. But I don’t have to. Because in June, five months after the last time I saw Lynn Dolan, I received a letter from a dead man, a letter from the past.

It had been mailed care of the Kingsward Public Library and addressed to “The Current Driver Of The Bookmobile.” A law firm that represented the estate of Brad Dolan had been sitting on it ever since Dolan’s suicide by handgun in 1997, shortly after the publication of his final book. His will had specified the date on which to place it in the post.

Dear Sir,

I have wondered about you for most of my adult life: who you are, how you managed to slip through time in the Kingsward Public Library’s Bookmobile, what your life has been like. I know nothing about you for certain except that you are kind. Maybe nothing else matters.

That said, I am sure we have met. I am careful to visit every eighth-grade class at Kingsward Junior High, and I think it highly likely that I have gaped at you through my bifocals and you have gaped back, probably while picking your nose, from across your desk, wondering when I’ll stop talking so you can go to lunch.

On the sunny fall morning on which I write this note—I can see fat chipmunks outside my window, frisking after one another, caught up in their torrid rodent romances—you are probably in your mid-teens. By the time you read it, however, you will be close to thirty. See, you are not the only one who can stretch the rubber band of time and shoot it in someone’s eye.