11/22/63

She still looked mistrustful, but now I saw something else on her face that gave me hope. When you’re young and have a kid, when your husband works manual labor — which his chapped, callused hands said he did — two hundred bucks can mean a lot of groceries. Or, in 1958, two and a half house payments.

“I could miss an afternoon in the woods,” Cullum said. “Town’s pretty well hunted out, anyway. The only place left where you can get a damn deer is Bowie Hill.”

“Watch your language around the baby, Mr. Cullum,” she said. Her tone was sharp, but she smiled when he kissed her cheek.

“Mr. Amberson, I need to talk to m’wife,” Cullum said. “Do you mind standing on the stoop for a minute or two?”

“I’ll do better than that,” I said. “I’ll go down to Brownie’s and get myself a dope.” That was what most Derryites called sodas. “Can I bring either of you back a cold drink?”

They declined with thanks, and then Marnie Cullum closed the door in my face. I drove to Brownie’s, where I bought an Orange Crush for myself and a licorice whip I thought the baby might like, if she was old enough to have such things. The Cullums were going to turn me down, I thought. With thanks, but firmly. I was a strange man with a strange proposal. I had hoped that changing the past might be easier this time, because Al had already changed it twice. Apparently that wasn’t going to be the case.

But I got a surprise. Cullum said yes, and his wife allowed me to give the licorice to the little girl, who received it with a gleeful chortle, sucked on it, then ran it through her hair like a comb. They even invited me to stay for the evening meal, which I declined. I offered Andy Cullum a fifty-dollar retainer, which he declined… until his wife insisted that he take it.

I went back to Sebago feeling exultant, but as I drove back to Durham on the morning of November fifteenth (the fields white with a frost so thick that the orange-clad hunters, who were already out in force, left tracks), my mood had changed. He will have called the State Police or the local constable, I thought. And while they’re questioning me in the nearest police station, trying to find out what kind of loony I am, Cullum will be off hunting in the Bowie Hill woods.

But there was no police car in the driveway, just Andy Cullum’s Ford woody. I took my new cribbage board and went to the door. He opened it and said, “Ready for your lesson, Mr. Amberson?”

I smiled. “Yes, sir, I am.”

He took me out to the back porch; I don’t think the missus wanted me in the house with her and the baby. The rules were simple. Pegs were points, and a game was two laps around the board. I learned about the right jack, double runs, being stuck in the mudhole, and what Andy called “mystic nineteen”—the so-called impossible hand. Then we played. I kept track of the score to begin with, but quit once Cullum pulled four hundred points ahead. Every now and then some hunter would bang off a distant round, and Cullum would look toward the woods beyond his small backyard.

“Next Saturday,” I said on one of these occasions. “You’ll be out there next Saturday, for sure.”

“It’ll probably rain,” he said, then laughed. “I should complain, huh? I’m having fun and making money. And you’re getting better, George.”

Marnie gave us lunch at noon — big tuna sandwiches and bowls of homemade tomato soup. We ate in the kitchen, and when we were done, she suggested we bring our game inside. She had decided I wasn’t dangerous, after all. That made me happy. They were nice people, the Cullums. A nice couple with a nice baby. I thought of them sometimes when I heard Lee and Marina Oswald screaming at each other in their low-end apartments… or saw them, on at least one occasion, carry their animus out onto the street. The past harmonizes; it also tries to balance, and mostly succeeds. The Cullums were at one end of the seesaw; the Oswalds were at the other.

And Jake Epping, also known as George Amberson? He was the tipping point.

Toward the end of our marathon session, I won my first game. Three games later, at just a few minutes past four, I actually skunked him, and laughed with delight. Baby Jenna laughed right along with me, then leaned forward from her highchair and gave my hair a companionable tug.

“That’s it!” I cried, laughing. The three Cullums were laughing right along with me. “That’s the one I stop on!” I took out my wallet and laid three fifties down on the red-and-white checked oilcloth covering the kitchen table. “And worth every cent!”

Andy pushed it back to my side. “Put it in your billfold where it belongs, George. I had too much fun to take your money.”