Jack quickly finished up his homework, nothing too hard, mostly math, and changed into a pair of jeans, sneakers, his gray Knicks T-shirt, and his blue and orange Knicks jacket. Then he went outside on the stoop to wait for Dom to pick him up. Sitting there on the rough cement, he wondered what his mom was going to tell him and if the Knicks would win that night. He wondered a little bit more about his dad, too. But mostly he wondered how many hot dogs he was going to be able to eat. He decided that tonight he was going to go for a new record.

– "-"-"JOANIE KELLER WAS nervous.

She didn't understand it exactly. She knew what she was nervous about but she didn't really know why.

Possibly it was because, more than anything else in her life, Joan Keller wanted her son to be happy and she didn't know if what she was going to tell him would make him happy. If it didn't, she wasn't quite sure what she would do. Go ahead with the plans anyway? She didn't know if she could do that. Don't go ahead with the plans? She didn't know if she could do that either. Oh, God. When she thought about it like that, she guessed she did know why she was nervous.

She didn't want to think about it right now, she'd thought about nothing else for days, so she decided she'd keep herself busy and get some tiresome filing out of the way. But it didn't take her long before her brow was furrowed and her lips were moving and she was practicing exactly what she was going to say. This is nuts, she realized. He's ten years old and he's a great kid, so why wouldn't he be happy with the news? There was no reason that she could think of. No reason at all. So just tell him and hug him and kiss him and hope that he hugged and kissed her back. And, of course, he would. That's exactly what he'd do. So why be nervous? Pretty soon they'd be hugging and kissing and laughing all over the place.