They all went to the front door. ‘Willie, where’re you going?’

‘I don’t know. I just start traveling. When I see a town that looks green and nice, I settle in.’

‘Will you ever come back?’

‘Yes,’ he said earnestly with his high voice. ‘In about twenty years it should begin to show in my face. When it does, I’m going to make a grand tour of all the mothers and fathers I’ve ever had.’

They stood on the cool summer porch, reluctant to say the last words.

Steve was looking steadily at an elm tree. ‘How many other folks’ve you stayed with, Willie? How many adoptions?’

Willie figured it, pleasantly enough. ‘I guess it’s about five towns and five couples and over twenty years gone by since I started my tour.’

‘Well, we can’t holler,’ said Steve. ‘Better to’ve had a son thirty-six months than none whatever.’

‘Well,’ said Willie, and kissed Anna quickly, seized at his luggage, and was gone up the street in the green noon light, under the trees, a very young boy indeed, not looking back, running steadily.

he The boys were playing on the green park diamond when came by. He stood a little while among the oak-tree shadows, watching them hurl the white, snowy baseball into the warm summer air, saw the baseball shadow fly like a dark bird over the grass, saw their hands open in mouths to catch this swift piece of summer that now seemed most especially important to hold on to. The boys’ voices yelled. The ball lit on the grass near Willie.

Carrying the ball toward from under the shade trees, he thought of the last three years now spent to the penny, and the five years before that, and so on down the line to the year when he was really eleven and twelve and fourteen and the voices saying: ‘What’s wrong with Willie, missus?’ ‘Mrs. B., is Willie late a-growing?’ ‘Willie, you smokin’ cigars lately?’ The echoes died in summer light and color. His mother’s voice: ~Willie’s twenty-one today!’ And a thousand voices saying: ‘Come back, son, when you’re fifteen; then maybe we’ll give you a job.’

l-le stared at the baseball in his trembling hand, as if it were his life, an interminable ball of years strung around and around and around, but always leading back to his twelfth birthday. He heard the kids walking toward him; he felt them blot out the sun, and they were older, standing around him.

‘Willie! Where you goin’?’ They kicked his suitcase.

How tall they stood in the sun. In the last few months it seemed the sun had passed a hand above their heads, and they were golden toffee pulled by an immense gravity to the sky, thirteen, fourteen years old, looking down upon Willie, smiling, but already beginning to neglect him. It had started four months ago: