She had reminded him that no invitation was required, now or ever, and that she was going to let him surprise Lucas.

“He’s been worried about you,” Lucas’s mom told him.

“In the whole crazy scheme of things,” he’d said, “I think that might actually be a good thing for me, if not for him.”

Julia told him she agreed.

Lucas asked him where he’d been.

“I went out to California to sit with Tommy Angelo before he died,” Gramps said.

“So he’s gone?” Lucas’s mom said.

“He is,” Gramps said. “You know how sometimes they say it’s a blessing when somebody passes? In his case, I believe it was, just because there wasn’t a whole lot of Tommy left by the time I got with him.”

The two of them hadn’t exchanged a single word or correspondence, he said, since Gramps had changed his name and left California for the East Coast.

“In that story in the paper, he talked about how we never forgave him,” Gramps said now. “Well, I never knew he wanted forgiving. He was just part of the life I’d left behind me.”

“Did he recognize you?” Lucas said.

“I’m not sure he would have on his own,” Gramps said. “But the first day when his wife brought me into his room, she said, ‘An old friend is here to see you.’ Then I pulled up a chair next to him and took his hand in mine and said, ‘It’s me. It’s Joe.’ I hadn’t called myself that in sixty years.”

Lucas’s mom said, “In the newspaper it sounded like his memory wasn’t very good.”

“Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn’t,” Gramps said. “He’d fade in and out. But the gaps he had, and some of them were pretty big ones, I’d try to fill in for him. I told him we didn’t need to talk about all that happened. But he wanted to, with me helping him along. It was important to him that I know how sorry he was about what happened.”

Gramps sighed. “But you know what ended up happening? We ended up talking more about the good times we had before those bad ones.”

Lucas’s mom smiled. “You’re the one who’s always said that one good memory in sports wipes out a whole boatload of bad ones.”