Dewey called Cody's cell phone four times. It went to voicemail every time.
He called Rick. He did not have the number. He called Dot, who had it written on the back of a guest check from that morning, because Dot wrote everything down.
Rick answered on the second ring.
"Dewey?"
"He's coming to you," Dewey said. "Cody. He's driving to Zanesville right now. He's upset. He heard something I said that I shouldn't have said."
There was a long silence on the line.
"Where is he going?" Rick asked. "He doesn't know where I live."
Dewey closed his eyes.
"He knows the address," he said. "It's on the envelopes. From your letters. He kept them in a shoebox under his bed. I thought he quit reading them when he was fourteen." He swallowed. "He didn't."
Dewey drove north in the dark on Route 9 with both hands on the wheel and his back screaming.
He had cooked for five thousand men on a ship in a typhoon. He had fed sailors through a fire on the hangar deck in 1993 and through the long nights in the Gulf. He had never once lost his temper in a galley in twenty-two years, because a cook who loses his temper burns the food, and men go hungry.
He had lost it tonight. In his own kitchen. In front of the one person he had ever cooked for who mattered.
That's my boy. Not his.
He had been saying it in his head for fourteen years. He had never once said it out loud. And the first time he did, Cody heard it.
Rick's apartment was over a tire shop on the east side of Zanesville. Cody's old Ranger was parked in the lot out front with the engine still ticking.
Dewey sat in his truck for a minute. Then he got out and climbed the outside stairs and knocked.
Rick opened the door. Behind him, in a small, clean kitchen with a table and two chairs, Cody was sitting with his hands around a can of soda, red-eyed.
Rick looked at Dewey. Then he stepped back to let him in.
"I made coffee," Rick said. "It's not very good."
"It never was," Dewey said.
The three of them sat at Rick's kitchen table. There were only two chairs. Rick sat on an upturned milk crate.
For a long time, the kitchen was silent.
Then Dewey did the hardest thing he had ever done.
"Cody," he said. "I'm sorry. What I said tonight was wrong. You're not mine, and you're not his. You're yours. You're seventeen. You get to decide who you love." He looked at his hands on the table. "I was scared. That's all. I was scared I'd lose you. That's not your problem. It's mine."
Cody stared at him.
Rick was looking at the floor.
"Your uncle's right," Rick said quietly. "About the truck in the parking lot. I can't just come back and pick you up." He looked up at his son. "Cody, I've watched you move cattle at the sale barn every Thursday since August. I never got out of the truck because I didn't think I had the right. I still don't."
"Then why'd you come to town?" Cody asked.
"Because I wanted to see you play," Rick said. "One game. Friday night. From the bleachers. That's all I came to ask. The rest of it, Zanesville, after graduation, that was me getting ahead of myself. Your uncle was right to be mad."
Cody did not say anything for a long time. Then he looked at Dewey.
"Uncle Dewey. Can he come to the game?"
Dewey thought about it. He thought about fourteen years of breakfasts at six and homework at nine. He thought about Clay Hollister's quiet voice in the barn. That man's been sitting in his truck every week for three months.
"No," Dewey said. "He can't sit in the bleachers."
Cody's face fell. Rick looked at the floor again.
"I work the chain gang on Friday nights," Dewey said. "Down on the sideline, with the first-down markers. I've done it since Cody was in Pee Wee. We're short a man this year. Floyd's grandson moved to Columbus." He looked at his brother. "You'd be about ten yards from him the whole game, Rick. If you want the job."
Rick Lamb looked at him for a long time.
Then he put his face in his hands.
On Friday night, at Panther Field, the Pine Hollow Panthers played their first playoff game in ten years against the Ridgeline Raiders from down the river, under the lights, in the cold.
It looked like half of Pine Hollow was there. Dot closed the diner at six. Hank and Lorraine Doyle sat in the third row. Clay Hollister sat at the very top of the bleachers, where he could see the whole field, and did not say a word all night.
On the home sideline, holding the orange down marker, was a tall, thin man in a red cap who had not been on a football field since he was a boy. Ten yards down the line, holding the chain, was his older brother.
Every time the Panthers' center snapped the ball, Rick Lamb stood a little straighter.
The Panthers lost, twenty-one to seventeen, on a field goal with four seconds left. Pine Hollow did not seem to mind very much.
After the game, Cody came off the field in his muddy jersey and walked straight to the sideline.
He stopped in front of the two men holding the chains.
He hugged his uncle first. Hard, the way he used to when he was small, with his helmet still in one hand. Then he turned to his father. Rick stood there holding the orange marker, not knowing what to do with his hands.
Cody put out his own hand.
Rick took it. They stood there a moment, shaking hands under the stadium lights, a man and his son who had met for the second time in fourteen years.
"Thanks for coming," Cody said.
"Thanks for letting me," Rick said.
Rick Lamb worked the chain gang for the Panthers all the next season. He drove down from Zanesville every Friday night and stood on the sideline beside his brother, and afterward the three of them went to Dot's.
Cody graduated in May. He did not move to Zanesville. He went to Ohio University in Athens, an hour away, to study agriculture.
He came home most weekends. Dewey cooked breakfast at six.
On the first Saturday in September, Dewey set the kitchen table on Feed Mill Road the way he had every morning for fourteen years. Two plates.
Then he stopped. He looked at the table for a while.
He went to the cupboard, got down a third plate, and set it at the end of the table, where Rick's truck was just pulling into the gravel drive.