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letter?” Beth asks. “No. That was between your father and you.”
    â€œHe said in the letter that when I turned twenty-one, you’re supposed to start giving me a weekly allowance of two hundred dollars.”
    â€œOh really?”
    â€œYeah, totally,” Emily says with an amused look on her face.
    â€œThat’s funny, because in my letter he said not to believe a word you say until you’re twenty-five.”
    â€œTwenty-five?”
    â€œYes. So you have four more years.”
    â€œI wonder what he said to James,” Emily says.
    â€œProbably that he was going to pray for him, now that he was outnumbered by the females in the house.”

James

    AUGUST 17, 2000
    The cap was a faded and ugly shade of orange, but James believed it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. He’d found it an hour earlier in the garage on the neatly organized shelf. It belonged to his father. James could confidently say the Vols cap belonged to him now.
    It felt heavy in his hands as he studied it. Even though his father had worn it to dozens of games over the years, James had a hard time picturing him in it. He didn’t know why. Even with the big framed photo of his father back at the church, James kept forgetting what his father looked like.
Sometimes,
he thought,
you neglect to really look at someone when you see them every day.
    The room was quiet. Mom and Emily were somewhere downstairs, which was good. He didn’t wantto be bothered. He didn’t want to be asked how he was feeling. He wasn’t exactly sure how he was feeling, and even if he was, he wouldn’t have told the person asking. The only person he’d have told was the one person he couldn’t.
    The last Tennessee game they’d gone to was the last home game of the year, Vols versus Vanderbilt. Even though they didn’t end up winning a championship as they had the year before, the Vols still had a good team and beat Vandy by twenty-eight. James and his father had kept their father-son outings intact, even though his dad had started showing definite signs that he was sick.
    Grandpa gave Dad this cap.
    James could picture his grandfather’s face at the funeral. A blank sheet of white. Nothing there, like some ghost passing in broad daylight. The image shook James even more than seeing his father in the casket. Grandpa knew what James did. That body—the one that failed him so early in life—
that
wasn’t Dad.
    He’s somewhere else and he happened to forget to give me this cap so he reminded me when I was in the garage. He reminded me by causing the light to shine right on what first looked like a big tangerine with a white T on it.
    James was going to try on the cap but then heard knocking. He felt caught, as if he were holding a can of beer or a cigarette in his hand. He managed to fling thehat across the room to his desk and miss it by an inch when the door opened.
    â€œJames? You in there?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œCan I come in?”
    â€œYeah.”
    His mother looked strange in black since she never wore it. Her blond hair stood out against the shoulders of the dress.
    â€œHow are you doing?”
    â€œI’m okay,” he said.
    â€œWhat were you looking for in the garage?”
    â€œJust looking around.”
    His mother glanced around the room, then noticed the cap. She picked it up and placed it on his desk, then sat down on the bed next to him.
    â€œIf it were up to your father, he would’ve been buried in that cap and his jersey.”
    James forced a smile and glanced at the carpet. His mother moved to face him.
    â€œDo you know that when I told Richard for the first time I was pregnant, for the longest time he didn’t want to hope for a son? I’d bring it up and he kept saying that we were going to have a girl, he was sure of it. We didn’t find out, you know. So when you were born, your father just had this look—this