You have not been a good friend to me lately, and I want you to know that. You walked away from me when I was telling you how sorry I was about your father, and you yelled at me and Kyle when all we wanted was for you to come outside and be our friend.
Friends don’t do that, Edward. Friends talk to each other, and friends try not to be rude, even if they don’t want to come outside. If you’re going to be my friend, you can tell me that you don’t want to do something, and I will understand. That’s what friends do. If I’m going to be your friend, I will tell you if I don’t want to do something.
I have wrestled with myself over whether to write this letter. Our life has been hard lately, and I don’t need to waste time with someone who isn’t going to be a good friend to me. Your track record as my friend is unclear. I’m trying to figure out if you’re the Edward who argues with a little boy or if you’re the Edward who stood by me in court that day and brought me back here and made me feel good about myself again. Sometimes, I think you could be a really good friend for us. Sometimes, I don’t.
You might be interested to know that Mike won’t have a trial. After that scene in the courtroom, his lawyer advised him to accept a deal from the prosecutor. He will be going to prison for a while. Not forever, but hopefully long enough that he’ll leave us alone when he gets out. I think he will. The prosecutor told me that Mike gets just how much trouble he is in.
Edward, I want you to think about a few things:
If you’re going to be our friend, you have to be our friend all the time. That doesn’t mean we can’t disagree or want some time apart or even get mad at each other. But you can’t shut us out. I don’t have time for friends like that, and I can’t let Kyle rely on a friend who will ultimately let him down. He’s just a little boy, and he’s had enough disappointment.
Also, friends share. You have never been to our house, though we have asked you over. You have never even come to our side of the street. Your house is fine, and we will hang out there sometimes, but you have to come over to our house, too. It’s only fair.
What I’m saying is that our hearts and our door are open to your friendship. But you have to come over here and knock to get in.
We hope you do.
Kyle appears to have signed the letter. Like his mother, he has excellent penmanship.
I fold the letter and put it back in the envelope, and then I turn around and look across the street to Donna’s house.
Her car is there.
The curtains are pulled back.
She is home.
Nothing is moving on Clark Avenue except for the tree branches in the breeze and the leaves pushed down the street by the wind.
All I have to do is look both ways and cross.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So many people helped shape this book, but a few deserve special mention: my wife, Angela, for her encouragement and her guidance on plotting out Edward’s interactions with Dr. Buckley; Greg Tuttle, my colleague, for expertly guiding me through the workings of the Yellowstone County court system; Janelle Eklund, my high school English teacher, for igniting my love of literature and cheerleading this book; and Matt Hagengruber, Craig Hashbarger, and Stephen Benoit for being good sports and lending their names to the cause.
Edward would never have been on this ride if not for the original endorsement and hard work of Chris Cauble, Linda Cauble, and Janet Spencer at Riverbend Publishing, who believed in his story and were good shepherds, indeed. Alex Carr and the amazing crew at Amazon Publishing have been a joy to work with, and I look forward to seeing where Edward’s story goes from here.
Finally, I’ll just say this: With the exceptions of those who are (or were) obviously real—Jack Webb and the Dragnet ensemble, Matthew Sweet, the members of R.E.M., Garth Brooks, and the like—the characters in this work of fiction are just that, fictional. That said, some passages of the book were based on real events. Barack Obama was really elected president. Veteran character actor Clark Howat (may he rest in peace) really did answer a letter from a fan (me) and describe how Dragnet was filmed, and he could not have been more of a gentleman. I don’t know if Garth Brooks’s lawyer ever wrote anybody a cease-and-desist letter, but in this case, it’s immaterial. He/she certainly didn’t write one to Edward Stanton, who is fictional.
Oh, and the 2008 Dallas Cowboys? Sadly, they were all too real.
EXCERPT FROM EDWARD ADRIFT
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2011
I look at my watch at 3:37 p.m.—3:37 and 17 seconds, because I have the kind of watch with an LED digital display for precision—and stop in the kitchen. I have another fifty-three seconds and could easily make it to the couch, but I stand still and watch the seconds tick off. The seven morphs (I love the word “morphs”) into an eight and then a nine and then the one becomes a two and the nine becomes a zero, and I keep watching. Finally, at 3:38 and 10 seconds, I draw in my breath and hold it. Time keeps going, and I exhale. I look down again and notice that I am standing on top of dried marinara sauce that sloshed out of the saucepan yesterday. And just like yesterday, I don’t have the energy to clean it up, even though it bothers me.
At 3:38 p.m. and 10 seconds, twenty-one days ago, on Wednesday, November 16, 2011, Mr. Withers fired me from my job at the Billings Herald-Gleaner. I know it happened at that time because as Mr. Withers said, “I hate like hell to have to tell you this, Edward,” I looked directly at my Timex watch on my left wrist, where I always keep it. Its display read 3:38:10, and I made a mental note to write it down as soon as possible, which I did exactly 56 minutes and 14 seconds later, as I sat in my car. A phrase like “I hate like hell to have to tell you this” is a precursor to bad news, and I think the fact that I recognized this is what caused me to look at my watch. I was right about the news. Mr. Withers finished by saying, “but we’re going to have to let you go.” He said a lot of other things, too, but none of them are as important. I couldn’t listen very closely, because I needed to concentrate on remembering the time. The time is now logged, but that’s purely academic. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, although I hesitate to say that definitively. I can think whatever I want. It doesn’t mean things will happen that way. It’s easier to stick to incontrovertible (I love the word “incontrovertible”) facts.
That I needed 56 minutes and 14 seconds to get to the car can be attributed to the fact that getting fired is no simple thing. In the movies and on TV, getting fired never seems complicated. Some boss, generally played by someone like Ed Asner, comes out of an office and says, “You’re fired,” and the fired person leaves. But Mr. Withers doesn’t look like or sound like Ed Asner, and he made me sign a lot of papers—things like the extension of my health care benefits through something called COBRA and the receipt of my final paycheck, which included the hours I had worked in that pay period and what Mr. Withers called “a severance,” which was two weeks’ pay, or 80 hours at $15 an hour, minus taxes. The severance check came to $951.01. When I asked Mr. Withers why I was being fired, he said that I wasn’t being fired per se (I love the Latin phrase “per se,” which means “in itself”) but rather that it was what the company liked to call “an involuntary separation.” He said that often happens when a company needs to cut its costs. Labor, which is to say people, is the biggest cost any company has. Mr. Withers said it was an unfortunate reality of business that people sometimes have to endure involuntary separations.