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Prologue

When we were real little kids, Mom used to take Aaron and Doug and me to Sal’s Pizzeria for dinner almost every Tuesday, which is when they had their Family Night Special. I think she liked it because she didn’t have to worry about dinner for three growing boys for one night, but we liked it because there was a claw machine there—one of those giant contraptions with toys inside, all sorts, and a metal claw that you moved around with a joystick to try to grab at the toys. As soon as we got into the restaurant, Mom would hand us two dollars, which is how much it cost for three tries, and we’d huddle around the machine and plan our attack. We didn’t want to waste that two dollars, so we usually took the whole amount of time until our pizza came up, trying to get one of those toys (back then, I had my eye on a fuzzy blue monster, and Doug was desperate for one of the teddy bears, but after a while we would’ve settled for anything). Aaron, as the oldest, was the designated joystick manipulator, and Doug, the youngest, would stand at the side and holler when he thought Aaron had the best angle on the chosen toy. I was in charge of strategy.

Mom would sit at the table, waiting for our pizza, and read her book. I think she enjoyed the claw machine even more than we did.

We spent six months trying for a toy in that claw machine. Forty-eight dollars. Never got a single thing. No one else had gotten one either, we could tell. None of the stuffed animals ever shifted position. But we were determined to be the first.

Finally the owner, Sal Jr., made us stop. He said he couldn’t in good conscience let us waste any more money. Then he got a key from the back room, and unlocked the side window panel of the claw machine, and showed us.

“See how flimsy this thing is?” he said, poking at the claw. “Here, Trent, have a look.” He boosted me up, till I was practically inside the machine, and let me fiddle with the claw, too. After that it was Doug’s turn, then Aaron’s. “A cheap piece of metal like that,” Sal Jr. told us, “it could never grab hold of one of these toys. Not if you had the best aim in the world. Not in a thousand years. And you know why?”

“Why?” I asked. I was mesmerized. I remember.

“I’ll tell you, Trent. Because, look.” That’s when Sal Jr. grabbed hold of the teddy bear’s arm. Yanked it hard.

It wouldn’t budge. You could hear the seams in the bear’s stitching rip, just a little.

“They’re all packed in together super tight,” I said when I figured it out. “There’s no room for any of them to go.”

“Exactly,” Sal Jr. told me. He locked the side window panel back up. “Consider that a lesson in economics, boys.”

We got two pizzas on the house that night, with extra everything.

Aaron was so mad about the claw machine, he hardly ate. He said Sal Jr. had been stealing our money from the start, so it didn’t matter if he gave us pizza after, he was still a crook. Doug disagreed. He gobbled up his pizza so fast, you’d never even have known he wanted a teddy bear.

Me, though, I was more fascinated than anything. I felt like I’d learned a real lesson, a grown-up one, and it stuck with me. That’s the day I figured out that no matter how hard you tug at something, no matter how bad you want it, sometimes it just can’t be pried free.

I thought about that claw machine a lot after Jared died. Because there were days—who am I kidding, every day was one of those days—when I wished I could lift that moment out of my life, just scoop it up with an industrial-sized claw, and toss it into a metal bin. Remove it from existence, so that it never happened at all.

But I knew that wasn’t something I could ever do—and not just because I didn’t have a magic claw machine with the power to erase events from history. No, I knew I could never disappear that moment, because just like with the claw machine, there were so many events pushed up around it that there’d be no way to get it to budge. Everything that had happened before, and everything that happened after, those moments were all linked. Smushed together.

Still, I couldn’t help thinking that if I had it to do over, I never would’ve hit that hockey puck.