“Can I ask you something?” he said.
Caleb nodded.
“What do you think the best part of that day was?”
The boy looked surprised. “You stopping him.”
“What about June being born?”
“Oh. Yeah. That was good too.”
Owen set the picture down. “I think June being born was a lot better.”
“Because nobody got hurt?”
“That’s one reason.”
The boy hesitated. “A kid at the summer program said you were a secret assassin.”
Owen closed his eyes for half a second.
“I’m not.”
“He said you know how to kill someone with one finger.”
“Then he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Caleb looked at his grandfather’s damaged left hand and almost smiled at the absurdity, but the smile faded.
“Everybody was asking me about it. They wanted me to show them the move.”
“What did you do?”
“I told them I didn’t know. One boy pushed me and said, ‘Come on, do what your grandpa did.’”
Owen felt anger rise, sudden and hot. Not at the boy who had pushed Caleb, exactly, but at the way a clip of violence had entered the child’s life as a game other people expected him to play.
“Did you push him back?”
“No. I went to the counselor.”
“Good.”
“He called me a baby.”
“Going to a responsible adult when someone is trying to hurt you isn’t being a baby.”
Caleb stared at the drawing. “But you didn’t go to an adult.”
The question landed cleanly. Owen could have said that he was an adult, that the circumstances were different, that he had tried to get away. All of it was true and none of it fully answered what the child wanted to know.
“Sometimes adults make decisions in seconds because something is happening right then,” he said. “I want you to know something important. I didn’t enjoy hitting him. And I’m not proud that you had to see it.”
“Are you sorry you did it?”
“I’m sorry it got to that point. I still believe I had to stop him once he tried to hit me. Both things can be true.”
Caleb sat in silence. Then he pushed the drawing toward Owen.
“Should I erase the star?”
“That’s up to you.”
The boy picked up a pencil, considered, and drew a second picture beside the first. It showed his grandfather sitting in the hospital with a tiny baby in his arms. The image was simple and uneven. Owen’s hand was drawn with too many fingers.
“That’s my new favorite part,” Caleb said.
Owen touched the corner of the paper. “Mine too.”
After lunch, Megan asked her father to walk with her onto the back porch. June was sleeping in a portable bassinet beside the kitchen window, and Drew had taken Caleb to build the model spaceship.
