And Gramps, at least for now, had stopped coming over to the house for dinner. Lucas wanted to talk with Ryan or Maria about what was really going on. But he couldn’t do that without telling them who Gramps really was, and what he’d done.

So the only person to talk about it with was his mom, though Lucas was starting to worry that she must feel she was having the same conversation with him, over and over and over again.

“When is this going to get better?” Lucas said. “You keep telling me this is going to get better.”

He told her about the feeling he had that there was this big distance now between him and Gramps.

“Maybe not until the season is over,” she said. “And the two of you can put some real distance between yourselves. Maybe then you can find your way back to each other.”

It was the night before the Owls game, to be played at the Oakdale YMCA. Lucas’s mom had cooked up homemade pizza for them. He didn’t know how she did it, but her pizza tasted even better to him than Gus’s, not that he would ever tell Gus something like that.

“Or maybe it won’t ever get any better than it is right now,” Lucas’s mom added. “Maybe this is what people like to call a new normal.”

“Doesn’t feel normal to me,” he said.

“Or me,” she said.

“I hate this,” Lucas said.

“Just remember that you don’t hate him,” Julia said.

“I can still hate what he did,” Lucas said.

“There’s a difference,” she said. “And a distinction.”

“I just don’t see either one sometimes,” he said.

She tented her fingers and put them under her chin and smiled at him.

“You are a spectacular twelve-year-old boy,” she said, “as prejudiced as I might be on this particular subject. But I have to remind myself sometimes that you are still twelve years old.”

Lucas was already working on his third piece of pizza. He noticed his mom was still working on her first. He had never understood how she could control herself like that.

“What does that mean?” Lucas said.

“It means that just because you’re not ready to forgive your grandfather now, one of these days you’re going to be,” she said.

“For what he and his teammates did?” Lucas said. “Or for him pretending to be somebody he wasn’t my whole life?”

“But that’s the thing,” she said. “He hasn’t been pretending. Gramps is who he is. He’s the sum of everything that ever happened to him, the way we all are, whether he shared all of it with us or not.”

“I’m gonna get another slice,” he said. “Okay?”

“I’d be insulted if you didn’t,” his mom said.

He got one from the counter and sat back down.