You bastard, I thought. You knew I might have second thoughts, and this is how you took care of them, right? Sure I’d had second thoughts. But thoughts are not choices. If he’d had the idea I might back out, he was wrong. Stop Oswald? Sure. But Oswald was strictly secondary at that point, part of a misty future. A funny way to put it when you were thinking about 1963, but completely accurate. It was the Dunning family that was on my mind. Arthur, also known as Tugga: I could still save him. Harry, too. Kennedy might have changed his mind, Al had said. He’d been speaking of Vietnam. Even if Kennedy didn’t change his mind and pull out, would Harry be in the exact same place at the exact same time on February 6, 1968? I didn’t think so. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I bent over Al and kissed his cheek. I could taste the faint saltiness of that last tear. “Sleep well, buddy.”
