Craig Lancaster - 600 Hours of Edward

“It’s an exciting time around here,” Mr. Withers says.

It looks like a nice place to work.

On the way up the stairs, Mr. Withers tells me that he can give me about $12 an hour to start, and that sounds good to me. It’s more than I have ever made, except for when my father gave me $5 million.

Back behind his desk, Mr. Withers says, “So, my boy, will you come to work for me?”

I don’t hesitate. “Yes.”

“Excellent, excellent.”

“When do I start?”

“Come on in Monday morning at nine, Edward. We’ll get your paperwork filled out, show you what you’ll be doing, and hit the ground running. How does that sound?”

“Good.”

“All right,” he says, standing up and clapping me on the shoulder again. “I’ll walk you down.”

A few minutes later, I’m back behind the wheel of the Cadillac. My father told me in my dream that it would take me anywhere I wanted to go. I never would have expected that it would be here.

I drive the Cadillac the short distance home, and my mind is swimming. I never thought I would be going back to work, but I trust Mr. Withers to take care of me. The hours he has in mind may lead to some changes in my routine. My 10:00 p.m. viewings of Dragnet will have to be moved. Maybe I can watch it after I get home at night. That means I won’t be going to bed at midnight sharp anymore. My common wake-up time of 7:38 a.m. will probably change, too. Between getting home after work and watching Dragnet , it will be close to 1:00 a.m., at the earliest, before I get to sleep.

My 10:00 a.m. Tuesday appointments with Dr. Buckley are safe. We will have much to talk about in just a few days.

And the grocery store can be visited whenever I need to. My new job won’t affect that.

I saw in the Billings Herald-Gleaner yesterday that Barack Obama, the new president, says “change is coming.” I wonder how he knew.

At home, I’m retrieving the mail—all advertisements—when I spot the envelope taped to my door. It says “Edward,” but it’s not the precise block writing of my father. Instead, it’s a pretty cursive. Whoever wrote this probably got good penmanship marks in school.

I set the mail on the stoop and tear open the envelope. Lined notebook paper, the kind I had to write on in school, is inside.

Dear Edward,

This is a letter of complaint. The difference between your letters of complaint and mine is that mine get delivered.

You have not been a good friend to me lately, and I want you to know that. You walked away from me when I was telling you how sorry I was about your father, and you yelled at me and Kyle when all we wanted was for you to come outside and be our friend.

Friends don’t do that, Edward. Friends talk to each other, and friends try not to be rude, even if they don’t want to come outside. If you’re going to be my friend, you can tell me that you don’t want to do something, and I will understand. That’s what friends do. If I’m going to be your friend, I will tell you if I don’t want to do something.

I have wrestled with myself over whether to write this letter. Our life has been hard lately, and I don’t need to waste time with someone who isn’t going to be a good friend to me. Your track record as my friend is unclear. I’m trying to figure out if you’re the Edward who argues with a little boy or if you’re the Edward who stood by me in court that day and brought me back here and made me feel good about myself again. Sometimes, I think you could be a really good friend for us. Sometimes, I don’t.

You might be interested to know that Mike won’t have a trial. After that scene in the courtroom, his lawyer advised him to accept a deal from the prosecutor. He will be going to prison for a while. Not forever, but hopefully long enough that he’ll leave us alone when he gets out. I think he will. The prosecutor told me that Mike gets just how much trouble he is in.

Edward, I want you to think about a few things:

If you’re going to be our friend, you have to be our friend all the time. That doesn’t mean we can’t disagree or want some time apart or even get mad at each other. But you can’t shut us out. I don’t have time for friends like that, and I can’t let Kyle rely on a friend who will ultimately let him down. He’s just a little boy, and he’s had enough disappointment.

Also, friends share. You have never been to our house, though we have asked you over. You have never even come to our side of the street. Your house is fine, and we will hang out there sometimes, but you have to come over to our house, too. It’s only fair.

What I’m saying is that our hearts and our door are open to your friendship. But you have to come over here and knock to get in.

We hope you do.

Kyle appears to have signed the letter. Like his mother, he has excellent penmanship.

I fold the letter and put it back in the envelope, and then I turn around and look across the street to Donna’s house.

Her car is there.

The curtains are pulled back.

She is home.

Nothing is moving on Clark Avenue except for the tree branches in the breeze and the leaves pushed down the street by the wind.

All I have to do is look both ways and cross.

So many people helped shape this book, but a few deserve special mention: my wife, Angela, for her encouragement and her guidance on plotting out Edward’s interactions with Dr. Buckley; Greg Tuttle, my colleague, for expertly guiding me through the workings of the Yellowstone County court system; Janelle Eklund, my high school English teacher, for igniting my love of literature and cheerleading this book; and Matt Hagengruber, Craig Hashbarger, and Stephen Benoit for being good sports and lending their names to the cause.

Edward would never have been on this ride if not for the original endorsement and hard work of Chris Cauble, Linda Cauble, and Janet Spencer at Riverbend Publishing, who believed in his story and were good shepherds, indeed. Alex Carr and the amazing crew at Amazon Publishing have been a joy to work with, and I look forward to seeing where Edward’s story goes from here.

Finally, I’ll just say this: With the exceptions of those who are (or were) obviously real—Jack Webb and the Dragnet ensemble, Matthew Sweet, the members of R.E.M., Garth Brooks, and the like—the characters in this work of fiction are just that, fictional. That said, some passages of the book were based on real events. Barack Obama was really elected president. Veteran character actor Clark Howat (may he rest in peace) really did answer a letter from a fan (me) and describe how Dragnet was filmed, and he could not have been more of a gentleman. I don’t know if Garth Brooks’s lawyer ever wrote anybody a cease-and-desist letter, but in this case, it’s immaterial. He/she certainly didn’t write one to Edward Stanton, who is fictional.

Oh, and the 2008 Dallas Cowboys? Sadly, they were all too real.

I look at my watch at 3:37 p.m.—3:37 and 17 seconds, because I have the kind of watch with an LED digital display for precision—and stop in the kitchen. I have another fifty-three seconds and could easily make it to the couch, but I stand still and watch the seconds tick off. The seven morphs (I love the word “morphs”) into an eight and then a nine and then the one becomes a two and the nine becomes a zero, and I keep watching. Finally, at 3:38 and 10 seconds, I draw in my breath and hold it. Time keeps going, and I exhale. I look down again and notice that I am standing on top of dried marinara sauce that sloshed out of the saucepan yesterday. And just like yesterday, I don’t have the energy to clean it up, even though it bothers me.