“Hello?”
“Andrew Landis?” It was an unfamiliar man’s voice, hoarse and soft. “This is DeVaughn Sills. I’m Clement Sills’s son.”
“Hello,” said Andy, setting his free hand on the desk, surprised and yet not surprised to hear from the son whom his friend so rarely mentioned, a son he’d never met, even as Mr. Sills’s health had declined.
“My daddy passed last night.”
“Oh, no,” Andy said. He and Mr. Sills had talked it over—the death, and what would happen next—when he’d visited the previous weekend. Mr. Sills, whom Andy had never been able to call by his first name, had been in his bedroom. The room had been cleared of all the stacks, the books and magazines, the collections of teapots and ceramic roosters, the thick scrapbooks about Andy. There was only a hospital bed, and two white plastic chairs for visitors. “I’m ready to go,” Mr. Sills told him. “I lived a good long while.”
“You have so many friends,” Andy said. This was true. There’d been the boys whom Mr. Sills had met and befriended and helped over the years, many of whom had found their way into one of those white plastic chairs over the last weeks. They had left tokens, too: photographs of themselves with Mr. Sills, at basketball games and graduations, at weddings and christenings and First Communions and commencements. Pride of place had been saved for a framed photograph from Athens, of Mr. Sills, beaming, with his arm around Andy and the two of them wrapped in the American flag, with Andy in his laurel wreath and Mr. Sills wearing Andy’s gold medal.
“I’ve made my peace,” Mr. Sills wheezed. A tear slipped down his cheek. “I’m not afraid.” But his hand was trembling when Andy took it. “I will miss this world,” he said. His chest labored upward, paused, and sank down. “Andy,” he said, reaching for Andy’s hand. Andy leaned close. Mr. Sills’s eyes were closed, and his voice was faint, but each word was clear and deliberate. “You can stop running now.” Andy sat with him, waiting for more, but his friend’s eyes stayed closed, and he didn’t wake up again for the rest of the afternoon.
“Visitation’s Wednesday and Thursday, and the funeral’s Friday at noon, at Mother Bethel on Sixth and South,” DeVaughn Sills said.
Andy knew the church. Mr. Sills had brought him there for years on the day before Christmas, to hear the choir sing Handel’s Messiah. Once, he’d gone to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.
“I’ll be there,” Andy promised.
“Then I’ll see you,” said DeVaughn.
•••
On Friday morning, the church was packed with people, hushed and dim, with the sunshine filtered through stained glass, and it smelled like dusty carpet, old paper, and the lilies in the flower arrangement that decorated the handsome brass-trimmed casket that stood in the front of the room. It was closed, per Mr. Sills’s request. “Let ’em remember me living, not dead,” he’d told Andy, and Andy had been the one to bring the clothes his friend had chosen to the funeral parlor and tell the director there to skip the cosmetics.
He spotted DeVaughn right away, standing in the back of the church and looking so much like his father that Andy’s heart almost stopped. DeVaughn wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a dark-gray tie. His hands were free, but when he walked, Andy saw the shackles around his ankles, and then he spotted the corrections officer who stood by the door. He felt his eyes welling, and wondered if DeVaughn even had gotten a chance to say goodbye.
The first row was filled with boys and young men, some in suits and some in collared blue shirts and khakis. A few of them were crying. Lori had left him at the doorway and had gone to sit beside a tall man in a dark suit. Andy looked at him, then looked away.
After Mr. Sills’s favorite hymn, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” the preacher stepped up to the lectern. He bowed his head for a long moment, then began. “Our friend is gone,” he said.
“Yes, Lord,” said one of the ladies Andy recognized from Mr. Sills’s house, an older lady in a pink suit and matching hat.
“Whose lives did our friend Clement Sills not touch?”
“That’s right,” called another woman.
“Our friend was a humble man. A man who knew how to fix what was broken. He came into our homes with his box of tools and the young man he’d taken under his wing, and he fixed things. Fixed broken windows, leaky faucets, furnaces that didn’t want to heat and air conditioners that didn’t want to cool. But more than that, he fixed those young men. He saw what was broken in each of them, and he fixed it.”