Stefan was no fool. His dad’s visits and calls numbered two to my ten. But he must have wanted badly to assume that Jep’s lapses owed more to scheduling and his personal pain than anything larger. He longed for his father. If the relationship of fathers and sons is always turbid, how much more was theirs? Rightly or wrongly, though he loved him truly, Jep considered Stefan more “my” child, a mama’s baby, not the rough-and-ready little man’s man that he’d always dreamed a son would be. I would see Jep’s involuntary grimace when Stefan worked harder on his dance floor moves than his field moves, when Stefan nodded off in front of the TV during sacred Sunday Green Bay Packer games. Stefan was physically talented but lacked the interest. A man who could not take solace in athletic passion was an alien life-form to Jep. Unspoken was the vapor of a suggestion that none of this might have happened to a boy who had given himself fully to the integrated life of body and mind. When Jep said he was a simple man, he usually meant only to disarm. Sometimes, though, he meant to reproach. To be fair, he would have been surprised to learn that anybody thought that.

Stefan and I briefly looked at each other. For the past few hours we had been slouched like passengers on a cross-country bus. Now both of us sat up straighter, as if to make ready for battle.

We turned onto Washtenaw Street. A last curve, and we were there.

“My tree!” Stefan said, looking down the road. “It’s taller. Is anything else different?”

We’d planted an apple tree in the yard when Stefan was born. As an intrepid eight-year-old, he used to open his second-floor window, hang by his fingertips from the sill, drop into its branches and climb down. Once we thought that there might be a little grove—another apple, perhaps, or maybe a pear tree for a little girl. But Jep found himself overwhelmed by the day-to-day reality of fatherhood and the ways it changed me, changed us, changed all our priorities. I was barely twenty-one when Stefan was born, twenty-three when I lost my next pregnancy. Plenty of times, even very recently, I brought up us having another child. Jep never quite said no, and he never quite said yes. The time for a pear tree came and went. Our family tree remained tiny, all our hopes on one branch.

But...wait...was someone sick? I expected the protestors. But why was there also an ambulance in front of the house? I thought immediately of our neighbor next door, Miss Hennessey, easily eighty now. Stefan’s childhood babysitter, she’d mailed him pound cakes that the authorities at Belle Colline confiscated (although Stefan wrote to her praising their delicate lemon flavor). Lights were spinning; trucks and cars were angled up on the curb.

No one was sick.