He asked Ozias himself the following Saturday, in that back yard, while they were doing something with a hedge, and I was not there and neither of them has ever told me how that went.
What I know is that there is now a drawing on that mantelpiece, in a frame, beside the photograph.
Orson did it from the photograph. It is not good. He was nine and he cannot do faces.
I have seen it twice and both times I have had to go and look at something else in that room.
Orson is nine now.
He did not want any of the fifty lunchboxes and he was very firm about it. They went to the school, and the office there did something sensible with them that I was not involved in, and about thirty children in that building have a lunchbox that came off my lawn and do not know it.
He kept the metal one.
That was Ozias’s idea and it was not negotiable either. He said a boy who can go twenty days without eating his lunch has earned a decent box to put one in.
Orson takes it to school. It is enormous and it is dented and it is completely ridiculous and he has taken a certain amount for it, and he does not care, and there is a name scratched into the bottom of it in capitals.
He knows whose name it is. He has met him eleven times.
They are not grandfather and grandson and I want to be clear about that, because everybody who hears this wants the ending where an old man is folded into a family and comes for Christmas.
He does not come for Christmas. He was asked, twice, and said no both times, and the second time he was quite short about it.
What happens is that on Saturdays, if it is dry, Orson goes down to number forty-one and they do something in that back yard for about an hour. Gutters. A hedge. The step.
He still shouts about the ball. That has not changed at all and Orson finds it very funny.
Estelle has not been back.
She telephoned me in the November and what she wanted to talk about was how the street had treated her since, and how she had only said what everybody was thinking, and I let her finish and then I said I had to go.
