The Good Stone

At the first clear indication that his health was in decline, Jefferies kept a promise to himself and put in his two weeks at the corporate office in Phoenix, showing up in his best suit and shoes to say his farewells. He had just suffered his first stroke—a “pinprick,” the doctor had called it, though it had felt more like a broadsword passing through the left side of his head—and for the first time in his life, at seventy-two, Nigel Jefferies was feeling his age.

As soon as the news was out, all the brass from the fifteenth floor were called down to slap him on the back and tell him how the place would never be the same. He’d been at Renck Office Suppliers forty-one years. After his early days cold-calling offices on Central Avenue, Jefferies had worked his way up to regional head of sales, seen the company through buyouts and two recessions, and then, after his son’s accident and untimely death, asked to take a quiet nine-to-fiver in Inspections and Warranties and stayed there thirteen years. The bosses had been dropping hints for the last seven that he should retire, but they couldn’t just let him go; he was a piece of attic nostalgia, out of view but impossible to throw out, collecting dust and retirement percentages in a low-profile satellite in Sante Fe. “So long’s I’m healthy,” he’d say at his annual reviews, which had been just formalities since his stepping down, “I’m showing up to work.”

They told him not to bother with the two weeks. He cleared out his office, put his house on the market and, almost as soon as the last of the wine was slurped at his going-away party, jumped on a nonstop to LAX with two suitcases and a bag of vitamins. He wanted a California beach and quickly realized everyone else did too. He endured a month in an oceanside condo, where all the young residents listened to oonceoonce music on their patios and played video games with the surround sound on, before Jefferies broke his lease and took a fixer-upper down in Torrance. This was a city close enough to the shoreline but with less party music, just the right balance of sleepy suburbia and nuts-and-bolts industry to remind Jefferies of his own hometown in northern Colorado. He would take his coffee out to the lawn most mornings and go through his paper, not so much reading as planning what to read later, while the sun hammered at him like an old sparring partner. His neighbors on one side were young flight attendants who were never home, and on the other side was a Korean family, whom he caught glimpses of through the windows—usually the boy, sometimes the mother, seldom the father—but never actually met. No introductions were made, no invites for tea or cocktails extended, and Jefferies was just fine with that.

It was the boy who eventually brought him out of his comfortable solitude. He was a chubby and restless child, a little spooky in the way he would stare through his window and disappear as soon as Jefferies nodded or waved. Two weeks passed before he started waving back, another week before he responded to simple questions from across the lawn. Then the boy, who was eight and introduced himself as Eugene, came over one afternoon to ask if he could play basketball on Jefferies’s hoop. An old, weatherworn backboard and rim hung above the garage, and there was even a faint blue stripe painted on the driveway as a free-throw line. He told the boy no problem and went to put on some sneakers, wondering if he could still sink a few shots after a half century of rib eyes and six-packs. But when he went outside, Eugene was standing under the basket with nothing in his hands.

“Where’s your ball?” Jefferies asked.

“Don’t have one,” he said.

“How’d you expect to play basketball without...