“But if Gramps was the person I always thought he was,” he said, “he wouldn’t have been able to cheat the game like he did.”

“People change,” she said.

“You never do.”

“Everybody changes, honey. You change, your life changes. Look at mine. Your dad and me were going to live happily ever after.”

Just like that, a sad look came across her face, a shadow that appeared out of nowhere, and her smile was gone. It happened that way sometimes, even when she was sharing a happy memory about his dad. Lucas knew what a happy, positive person his mom was. But maybe she was right, what she’d just said about Gramps. Maybe everybody was the sum of everything that had ever happened to them. Good or bad.

He didn’t know what to say. She had told him once that you could never go wrong keeping your mouth shut when you didn’t have anything to say.

“Only the ‘ever after’ for the two of us became the two of us,” she said. “You and me.”

“I’m sorry I keep bringing this up,” Lucas said. “We start out talking about Gramps and then we end up talking about Dad.”

She took her right hand now and placed it on the table between them, palms up. Lucas put his hand inside it. As always, it fit like a glove.

“I’ve been telling you this in different ways your whole life,” she said. “All of us just have to remember how precious every day is. And not waste time trying to change things we can’t.”

“Like what?” Lucas said.

“Like the past,” she said. “Yours. Gramps’s. Mine. Everybody’s.”

“Mom,” he said. “I hear you. I know what you’re saying. But I know I’m still mad.”

She gave his hand a squeeze.

“Maybe that anger will end up in the past someday,” she said, “even if it doesn’t change the way you feel right now.”

When they were done cleaning the kitchen together, he went into the living room to watch the Celtics play the Bucks. He loved the kind of team ball the Celtics played. Gramps had always told him it was part of the Celtics tradition, in their own way-back machine, that they’d practically invented team ball in the NBA back in the fifties and sixties when they used to win the championship almost every year.

Funny, he thought.

Even when he was angry, and disappointed, and ashamed of what Gramps had done, he’d hear something inside his head that Gramps had said.

He loved talking about the way-back machine in basketball.

Just not, as it turned out, when the conversation was about him.

TWENTY-FIVE

It was about a half-hour’s drive from Claremont to Oakdale. Lucas had heard his mom talking to Gramps on her phone after breakfast, telling him that they could all drive together.