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this as if he were weary of his sadness, as if grief were a Halloween costume he still had on after the holiday and wanted to take off but couldn’t, and suddenly I had a very clear vision of his life, which I had helped make for him just as surely as I had helped make my own. I could see him going from shrink to shrink, and except for those shrinks and his grief and his awful past, he was all alone in the world. I doubted he had his own wife and kids waiting for him at home, and then I thought of Anne Marie and the kids, out there on their normal Saturday errands and then picking apples at a self-pick apple orchard, or petting domesticated wild animals at a petting zoo, or being read to at some library’s reading hour, and it occurred to me that the world didn’t need to be so big for just the four of us. I missed them badly and would have gotten in my minivan — we had two of them — and joined them at the petting zoo, for instance, except the minivan was low on gas and I didn’t know where the petting zoo was.
    “Anyway,” Thomas said, shaking his head as if just waking up and trying to clear his head of a dream, “that’s why I’m here. My shrink said I should find you and ask you to apologize. For killing my parents.”
    “Oh, I do, I do apologize,” I said. “I’m so sorry.” And I really was sorry and at the same time so happy that there was something I could do for Thomas after all these years. It is a rare thing, to be allowed to apologize for something so horrible and final. It was like Abel coming back from the dead and giving his brother Cain the chance to apologize for killing him. “Oh, I’m so sorry for killing your parents,” I said, and I was so full of penitence that I got down on my knees in a begging position. “I truly am sorry — it was an awful thing and changed too many lives and I wish it had never happened.”
    Thomas had his head down as I gave him my apology. After I was done, he kept it down as if waiting for more or contemplating what he had already been given. Finally he raised his head and gave me a look that was grim and I knew meant trouble. “So that was your apology?” he asked. “That’s it?”
    “Yes,” I said, and then I said, “Sorry,” for good measure.
    “That was an awful apology,” Thomas said. His eyes looked about ready to pop out of his head and he clenched his fists: he was really steaming, there was no doubt about it. Thomas looked exactly like those people you see on TV, those people whose loved ones have been killed and who then get to speak to their killers in court, and who say the things to the killers that they think they need and want to say in order to get on with the rest of their lives and achieve some piece of mind, et cetera, only to find out that the words don’t mean anything and aren’t even theirs, really, and so end up feeling more desperate and grief stricken and angry after they’ve spoken than they had before. Thomas looked an awful lot like that. “You’re not sorry at all,” he said.
    “I am, I am,” I said, and I was but didn’t know what else I could do to convince him, because that’s the trouble with being sorry: it’s much easier to convince people you really aren’t than you really are.
    “You dick,” he said.
    “Hey, now,” I said. “No need for that.”
    “You fucking dick,” Thomas said. He moved forward a little, and for a second I thought he was going to jump me, but he didn’t, maybe because he saw or smelled the dried sweat from my lawn mowing, or maybe because I was bigger than he was and had about fifty pounds on him. Thomas didn’t know that he probably could have roughed me up, and without getting even a little bit dirty: I could feel the old passivity coming on, could hear my heart beating, Hit me, hit me, I deserve it and won’t fight back, so hit me . But Thomas couldn’t hear my heart, which is just one of the reasons I am happy to have one. Instead he took a step back, and his face