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distinction.
    I’d arranged to drop off my grocery bag—two whole weeks earlier than usual—at Jeff’s house so I could piggyback a visit with his kids. My grandsons. Tyler was seven; Walker was five; both were rambunctious and confident little boys, unscathed enough to fling themselves at life unreservedly, certain that life stood ready to catch them with unfailing arms.
    Tyler flung open the door for me. “Grandpa Bill! Grandpa Bill! Mom, Grandpa Bill’s here!” I set my paper bag down and scooped him up, and he hugged me hard. He felt warm and moist and smelled slightly nutty and pungent—that mix of clean sweat and fresh dirt little kids exude when they’ve been playing hard. Walker came tearing around the corner from the den and grabbed my legs, pinning me in place. He, too, felt and smelt like a busy boy. Both boys were wearing soccer uniforms, which explained the sweat and the dirt.
    “Grandpa Bill, Grandpa Bill, I was playing Sonic and I got three more lives,” Walker said.
    “Three more? Three is three-mendous,” I said. I had no idea what he meant, but if he was pleased, I was pleased.
    He giggled. “Tree-mendous, silly.”
    “Three is nothin’,” said Tyler. “I got seven.”
    “Oh yeah? I got…I got seventy-seventy-seven,” said Walker.
    “Did not. Besides, there ain’t no such number, poopy-breath.”
    “Tyler Brockton,” came a warning voice from the kitchen. “Isn’t any such number. And no name-calling, or no computer.” Jeff’s wife Jenny appeared in the doorway holding a pizza box in one hand and a Diet Coke in the other. “Hey there,” she said. “We got in from a soccer match in Oak Ridge about two minutes ago. Will you eat some Big Ed’s with us?”
    “Sure,” I said, “if there’s enough.”
    “More than enough,” she said. “Jeff just called; he’s bogged down in some surgeon’s huge tax return—big surprise, huh?—so he probably won’t be home for a couple more hours. You can have his share. Walker, let go of Grandpa Bill’s legs so he can move. Tyler, you come help me set the table.”
    I set Tyler down, and he staggered into the kitchen as if it required his last ounce of strength. Actually, considering the way boys tend to run hard until the moment they give out completely, that might have been the case.
    Jenny moved around the kitchen with an easy, athletic grace. She had played soccer in both high school and college; she, not Jeff, was the parent who helped coach the kids’ teams. By training and trade, she was a graphic designer; she worked part-time, freelance, from an office over the garage. I’d seen some of her pieces—mostly corporate brochures, but some magazine ads and even a few album covers—and liked them. From a distance, they looked like thousands of other pieces of commercial art: children and dogs, perfect couples, rolling farmland in buttery light. But when you actually looked at them, something small and quirky always caught the eye and prompted a smile: a doggie treat in a kid’s mouth, a piece of corn wedged in a husband’s smile, a cow squirting out a fresh pie in one corner of the pasture. The deadpan humor was Jenny’s approach to life and marriage and motherhood, as best I could tell, and I knew it had been good for Jeff. Jenny loosened up the tidy, stuffy streak that allowed Jeff to spend two thousand hours a year happily adding and subtracting digits that represented other people’s money.
    The pizza—extra cheese, extra pepperoni—had a thin but yeasty crust, dusted underneath with cornmeal. Big Ed’s Pizza had been an institution in the nearby town of Oak Ridge for as long as I’d been in Knoxville. It was housed in a cavernous, high-ceilinged building that dated back to the town’s Manhattan Project days, and it looked like the floors hadn’t been refinished, and possibly hadn’t been swept, since the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. Big Ed himself had died a few years back, but his blocky caricature and his