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And as if all this weren’t sufficiently bewildering, there was a noise I had never before associated with 80 Front Street; it was a noise in the driveway, and my bedroom windows didn’t face the driveway, so I had to get out of bed and leave my room to see what the noise was. I was pretty sure I knew. I had heard that noise many times at the Meany Granite Quarry; it was the unmistakable, very lowest gear of the huge, flatbed hauler—the truck Mr. Meany used to carry the granite slabs, the curbstones and cornerstones, and the monuments. And sure enough, the Meany Granite Company truck was in my grandmother’s driveway—taking up the whole driveway—and it was loaded with granite and gravestones.

I could easily imagine my grandmother’s indignation—if she was up, and saw the truck there. I could just hear her saying, “How incredibly tasteless of that man! My daughter not dead a day and what is he doing—giving us a tombstone? I suppose he’s already carved the letters!” That is actually what I thought.

But Mr. Meany did not get out of the cab of his truck. It was Owen who got out on the passenger side, and he walked around to the rear of the flatbed and removed several large cartons from the rest of the load; the cartons were clearly not full of granite or Owen would not have been able to lift them off by himself. But he managed this, and brought all the cartons to the step by the back door, where I was sure he was going to ring the bell. I could still hear his voice saying “I’M SORRY!”—while my head was hidden under Mr. Chickering’s warm-up jacket—and as much as I wanted to see Owen, I knew I would burst into tears as soon as he spoke, or as soon as I had to speak to him. And therefore I was relieved when he didn’t ring the bell; he left the cartons at the back door and ran quickly to the cab, and Mr. Meany drove the granite truck out of the driveway, still in the very lowest gear.

In the cartons were all of Owen’s baseball cards, his entire collection. My grandmother was appalled, but for several years she didn’t understand Owen or appreciate him; to her, he was “that boy,” or “that little guy,” or “that voice.” I knew the baseball cards were Owen’s favorite things, they were what amounted to his treasure—I could instantly identify with how everything connected to the game of baseball had changed for him, as it had changed for me (although I’d never loved the game as Owen had loved it). I knew without speaking to Owen that neither of us would ever play Little League ball again, and that there was some necessary ritual ahead of us both—wherein we would need to throw away our bats and gloves and uniforms, and every stray baseball there was to be found around our houses and yards (except for that baseball, which I suspected Owen had relegated to a museum-piece status).

But I needed to talk to Dan Needham about the baseball cards, because they were Owen’s most prized possessions—indeed, his only prized possessions—and since my mother’s accident had made baseball a game of death, what did Owen want me to do with his baseball cards? Did they merely represent how he was washing his hands of the great American pastime, or did he want me to assuage my grief by indulging in the pleasure I would derive from burning all those baseball cards? On that day, it would have been a pleasure to burn them.

“He wants you to give them back,” Dan Needham said. I knew from the first that my mother had picked a winner when she picked Dan, but it was not until the day after my mother’s death that I knew she’d picked a smart man, too. Of course, that’s what Owen expected of me: he gave me his baseball cards to show me how sorry he was about the accident, and how much he was hurting, too—because Owen had loved my mother almost as much as I did, I was sure, and to give me all his cards was his way of saying that he loved me enough to trust me with his famous collection. But, naturally, he wanted all the cards back!

Dan Needham said, “Let’s look at a few of them. I’ll bet they’re all in some kind of order—even in these boxes.” And, yes, they were—Dan and I couldn’t figure out the exact rules under which they were ordered, but the cards were organized under an extreme system; they were alphabetized by the names of players, but the hitters, I mean the big hitters, were alphabetized in a group of their own; and your golden-glove-type fielders, they had a category all to themselves, too; and the pitchers were all together. There even seemed to be some subindexing related to the age of the players; but Dan and I found it difficult to look at the cards for very long—so many of the players faced the camera with their lethal bats resting confidently on their shoulders.

I know many people, today, who instinctively cringe at any noise even faintly resembling a gunshot or an exploding bomb—a car backfires, the handle of a broom or a shovel whacks flat against a cement or a linoleum floor, a kid detonates a firecracker in an empty trash can, and my friends cover their heads, primed (as we all are, today) for the terrorist attack or the random assassin. But not me; and never Owen Meany. All because of one badly played baseball game, one unlucky swing—and the most unlikely contact—all because of one lousy foul ball, among millions, Owen Meany and I were permanently conditioned to flinch at the sound of a different kind of gunshot: that much-loved and most American sound of summer, the good old crack of the bat!

And so, as I often would, I took Dan Needham’s advice. We loaded the cartons of Owen’s baseball cards into the car, and we tried to think of the least conspicuous time of day when we could drive out to the Meany Granite Quarry—when we would not necessarily need to greet Mr. Meany, or disturb Mrs. Meany’s grim profile in any of several windows, or actually need to talk with Owen. Dan understood that I loved Owen, and that I wanted to talk with him—most of all—but that it was a conversation, for both Owen’s sake and mine, that was best to delay. But before we finished loading the baseball cards in the car, Dan Needham asked me, “What are you giving him?”

“What?” I said.

“To show him that you love him,” Dan Needham said. “That’s what he was showing you. What have you got to give him?”

Of course I knew what I had that would show Owen that I loved him; I knew what my armadillo meant to him, but it was a little awkward to “give” Owen the armadillo in front of Dan Needham, who’d given it to me—and what if Owen didn’t give it back? I’d needed Dan’s help to understand that I was supposed to return the damn baseball cards. What if Owen decided he was supposed to keep the armadillo?

“The main thing is, Johnny,” Dan Needham said, “you have to s

how Owen that you love him enough to trust anything with him—to not care if you do or don’t get it back. It’s got to be something he knows you want back. That’s what makes it special.”

“Suppose I give him the armadillo?” I said. “Suppose he keeps it?”

Dan Needham sat down on the front bumper of the car. It was a Buick station wagon, forest green with real wooden panels on the sides and on the tailgate, and a chrome grille that looked like the gaping mouth of a voracious fish; from where Dan was sitting, the Buick appeared ready to eat him—and Dan looked tired enough to be eaten without much of a struggle. I’m sure he’d been up crying all night, like me—and, unlike me, he’d probably been up drinking, too. He looked awful. But he said very patiently and very carefully, “Johnny, I would be honored if anything I gave you could actually be used for something important—if it were to have any special purpose, I’d be very proud.”

That was when I first began to think about certain events or specific things being “important” and having “special purpose.” Until then, the notion that anything had a designated, much less a special purpose would have been cuckoo to me. I was not what was commonly called a believer then, and I am a believer now; I believe in God, and I believe in the “special purpose” of certain events or specific things. I observe all holy days, which only the most old-fashioned Anglicans call red-letter days. It was a red-letter day, fairly recently, when I had reason to think of Owen Meany—it was January 25, 1987, when the lessons proper for the conversion of St. Paul reminded me of Owen. The Lord says to Jeremiah,

Before I formed you in the womb

I knew you,

and before you were born

I consecrated you;

I appointed you a prophet to the

nations.

But Jeremiah says he doesn’t know how to speak; he’s “only a youth,” Jeremiah says. Then the Lord straightens him out about that; the Lord says,

Do not say, “I am only a youth”;

for to all to whom I send you you

shall go,

and whatever I command you you

shall speak.

Be not afraid of them,