600 Hours of Edward

our knees in the front yard, scrounging up snow and forming it into perfectly round projectiles. As Kyle rounds the corner and bears down on us, we start flinging snowballs at him. A few connect, but mostly we miss, sending little snow skid marks across the sidewalk. He really is fast on that thing.
    While Kyle wheels around the block for another pass, I have an idea. I slip over to the side of the house, where the snow is a little deeper from my neighbor’s shoveling, and I mold a few snowballs. Perhaps if Kyle doesn’t see where they’re coming from, he’ll be easier to tag.
    I see him round the corner and come down the straightaway, and I cock my arm back, try to time my throw, and then let it go.
    The snowball crashes against the back of Donna Middleton’s head, spraying snow on her shoulders.
    She pivots and faces me, her jaw slack.
    I look back at her and want to say I’m sorry, but my mouth moves only a little and forms no words.
    And then she throws a snowball at me, which explodes against my buttoned-up coat.
    She starts laughing, and I throw one back. Now she’s taking evasive action, running erratically in loops around the yard as I give chase. Kyle has left the Blue Blaster, and he’s chasing her, too. We’re throwing snowballs and chasing and laughing, and I cannot remember the last time I did any of these things.
    – • –
    That’s not true. I can remember.
    In November 1974, when I was five years old, my father took me on a business trip. We flew from Billings down to Denver on a Saturday—I remember the day clearly because there was no school, and it was the weekend before Thanksgiving. When we landed in Denver, my father hailed a cab that took us to a downtown hotel. It had been snowing in Denver, and downtown was mostly dead on a weekend. The gray of the day and the snow combined to give downtown Denver an eerie sort of pallor (I love the word “pallor”), one that was both appealing and a little creepy. After dinner, my father and I went outside and built a snowman on a deserted street corner, then pelted it with snowballs. It was fun.
    The next morning, another cab took us to the International Harvester dealer in Denver, where my father signed the paperwork on a new red Paystar 5000. It must take an awful lot ofpaperwork to close a deal on such a purchase; I remember that we were there for a long while. I amused myself thumbing through glossy brochures that touted the latest in International Harvester machinery.
    After that, we road-tripped in the new truck down to Midland, Texas, where the Mayhew Co. was waiting to put a drilling rig on the back of it. That’s the earliest memory I have of being in a big truck with my father, and I have vivid memories of thinking that he had to be just about the coolest father in the world. He was in a good mood, too, honking the horn for children in passing cars who would hold up their right fists and pull down twice, asking for such an acknowledgment. I can’t account for that good mood, because although I did not know it at the time, my father’s life was in a shambles. The reason I was with him at all was that my mother had left him, something I didn’t learn until years later, 1992, when my mother mentioned it in a fight with my father.
    In Midland, we were met by Grandpa Sid and Grandma Mabel, who picked us up and drove us the seven hours back to Dallas for Thanksgiving. That day, we saw rookie quarterback Clint Longley come off the bench after Roger Staubach got hurt and lead the Dallas Cowboys to an incredible 24–23 victory over the Washington Redskins, still one of the most amazing finishes in Cowboys history. Longley hit Drew Pearson on a fifty-yard touchdown pass with twenty-eight seconds left to win the game.
    “Teddy,” my father said, “as long as you live, you’ll never see another one like that.” (On a Thanksgiving Day nineteen years later, I saw one even more amazing, in a bad way. Leon Lett slid into the ball after a blocked field goal attempt that would have given the Dallas Cowboys a victory over the Miami Dolphins. Miami recovered the ball, kicked again, and won. I wrote LeonLett four letters that week, castigating [I love the word “castigating”] him for his foolishness.)
    Back in 1974, two days after Thanksgiving, my father and I were on a plane home to Billings. Mother met us at the airport. She had come home, never to leave my father again.
    Things just work out sometimes. I don’t know how or why. It would