I fumbled for my speech, which I realized was not only sticking out of my jacket but about to fall onto the floor. I buttoned my coat and noticed my fly had creased up like an accordion, plus my pants were hanging too low. I pulled them up by the belt, then bent over and tugged at my cuffs to stretch the pant legs straight. This eliminated some of the wrinkles and I felt ready to read. I began my speech with an “ahem,” a superficial throat clear that I thought showed a command of the room. I spoke the first few sentences confidently, though my voice surprised me with its soprano thinness. Then I noticed the rapt looks on the faces in the audience and felt myself become more impassioned. After all, I was scoring. I invested myself more and more in every word, and this was a mistake, because I began to realize that my speech made absolutely no sense. “I am average because the cry of individuality flows confidently through my blood”? I am average because I am unique? Well then, I thought, who’s not average, every average person? My tricky little phrases, meant to sound compelling, actually had no meaning. All my life an inner semanticist had tried to sniff out and purge my brain of these twisted constructions, yet here I was, center stage with one dangling off my lips like an uneaten noodle. The confusion of words and meanings swirled around my head in a vortex. So I bent down again and pulled at my cuffs. While I was inverted, I was able to think more clearly. I remembered that my speech was not meant to be a tract but more of a poem. More Romantic. And as a Romantic, I had much more linguistic leeway than, say, a mathematician at a blackboard. Still upside down, I reminded myself I was in front of an audience who wanted to be enthralled, not lectured. I decided to reach deep down, to the wellspring of my charisma, which had been too long undisturbed, and dip my fingers in it and flick it liturgically over the audience.

I unfolded from my jackknife bend. My voice deepened and my testicles lowered. I spoke with the voice of a Roman senator: “I am average,” I said, “because the cry of individuality flows through my blood as quietly as an old river… like the still power of an apple pie sitting in an open window to cool.” I folded my papers and sat down. There was a nice wave of applause that was hard to gauge, as I’d never received applause ever in my life. Gunther Frisk clapped with speedy little pops and leaned into the mike, “Let’s hope he means a Tepperton’s Apple Pie!” The applause continued over his interjection and I had to stand again. He waved me over and made a big show of giving me the check, then waved over all the other contestants and gave them the smaller checks. The auditorium lights came up and a few people approached the stage to ask for autographs, which bewildered me. After about four seconds my time as a rock star was over, and I was calmly ushered outside to a golf cart that had been secured by Brian and driven back to his car.

On the way home, Brian gave me several compliments that I discounted and denied. This tricked him into reiterating the compliments, and once he was enthusiastic enough, I accepted them. Then he segued into sports talk, mentioning Lakers and Pacers and Angels, teams I was so unfamiliar with that I couldn’t connect the team name with the game. But Brian had been so wholeheartedly on my side that I felt obliged to respond with ardent head nods and “yeahs,” though I might have misplaced a few, judging by Brian’s occasional puzzled looks.

Brian took me to my bank and we barely made it before closing time. I deposited the five-thousand-dollar check, keeping forty dollars in cash, offering Brian five for gas. Not having driven a car in ten years, I didn’t know how stratospherically the price of gas had risen. Now I know the amount was way low for what he must have spent, and I would like to make it up to him one day.

I heard about Granny’s suicide before it actually happened. She must have had second thoughts or been unable to pull together the paraphernalia, as her death date fell several hours past the day and minute of my reading of her note. This one lay for just a few hours on my kitchen table before I pulled myself up to it with a jam sandwich and cranberry juice. “Sweetest Daniel,” it began, and I suspected nothing. Her handwriting was always large and gay, filled with oversized loops and exuberant serifs. Only in the last few years had I noticed a shakiness starting to creep in. “I won’t trouble you with the state of my health, except to say I’m in a race to the finish. I can’t let my body drag me down like this without fighting back in some way. My heart is sad not to see you again, but on this page, in this ink, is all my love, held in the touch of the pen to the paper…” Then, in the next paragraph, “I can’t breathe, Daniel, I’m gasping for air. My lungs are filling up and I’m drowning.” She said, in the next few lines, that it was time to free herself, as well as the ones who care for her, of their burden. Granny had two Mexican senoras who attended to her, and one of them, Estrella, loved her so much she called her “Mother.” One last line: “Finally, we do become wise, but then it’s too late.” Granny, dead at eighty-eight of self-inflicted vodka, pills, and one transparent plastic bag.

The news of her death left me disturbingly unaffected. At least for a while. I wondered if I were truly crazy not to feel engulfed by the loss and unable to function. But the sorrow was simply delayed and intermittent. It did not come when it should have but appeared in discrete packets over a series of discontinuous days, stretching into months. Once, while tossing Teddy into the air, a packet appeared in the space between us, and vanished once he was back in my grip. Once, I positioned my palm between my eyes and the sun, and I felt this had something to do with Granny, for it was she who stood between me and what would scorch me. It was not that I missed her; she was so far from me by the time it was all over that our communications had become spare. She lived in me dead or alive. Even now, the absence of her letters is the same as getting them, for when I have the vague notion that one is due, I feel the familiar sensation of comfort that I did when I held a physical letter in my hand.

The day after the letter was Easter Sunday. It reminded me that as an adolescent I was primped and combed and then incarcerated in a wool suit that had the texture of burrs. I was then dragged to church, where I had to sit for several hours on a cushionless maple pew in the suffocating Texas heat. These experiences drained me of the concept of Jesus as benevolent. I did, however, proudly wear an enamel pin that signified I had memorized the books of the Bible.

That Granny’s death fell so close to this nostalgic day was just bad luck, and that Easter I lay in bed gripped in a vise of reflection. It was after ten, and although my thoughts of the past were viscous and unbudging, the darkness in the room intensified my hearing, allowing me to keep at least one of my senses in the present. Amid a deep concentration on a potato salad of thirty years ago, I heard a car door slam, followed by hurried steps, followed by a quiet but persistent knock on my front door. I threw on pants and a T-shirt and opened the door without asking who it was.

Clarissa stood before me in a shambles, with Teddy clinging to her like a koala bear. I had not seen either of them at all during Easter week.

“Are you up?” she asked.

“I’m up,” I said, and Teddy, holding out his arms, climbed over onto me. Clarissa came in, glancing toward the street. “He’s back?” I said.

“He was here all week and things were tolerable at least. But today he started getting agitated. It’s like he’s on a timer. He began phoning every five minutes, which got me upset, then he suddenly stopped calling and I knew what was next. I heard a car screech outside my apartment and I knew it was him, so I got Teddy and bumped his head hurrying him into the car seat.” By now her voice was breaking and she soothed Teddy’s head with her palm. “Can I just sit here or stay here for a minute or maybe the night till I figure out what to do?” But she knew she didn’t have to ask, just stay. Teddy gripped my two forefingers with his fists and I moved them side to side. “Do you have anything?” she asked. “Any baby wipes or diapers or anything?” I had it all.