I adopted my best friend’s son after he abandoned him — years later, the boy invited him to a championship game and gave a speech that made me break down.
Grady Wolcott called me at ten past two in the morning on the twentieth of March, 2012.
I knew before I picked up. Nobody calls at two.
His wife Simone had died that evening. An aneurysm. She was thirty-one years old and she had been standing at their kitchen counter cutting up a pineapple.
There was no warning. There is never any warning; that’s the entire nature of the thing.
Grady was not making sense on that phone. He said the same sentence maybe eleven times.
“I can’t do this, Rory. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.”
I said, “I’ll be there at seven. Go to sleep. I’ll be there at seven.”
Amari was four years old and asleep
