The Happiest People in the World by Brock Clarke

coffee at Doc’s when they were back in town visiting. Matty thought the whole thing was very sweet; it made him hopeful: everyone finds the people, or person, they’re meant to find, eventually.
    â€œI have missed you,” Matty had told Locs on the phone.
    â€œThat’s the second thing,” she’d said.
    So he’d agreed to hire this guy—whoever he was, whatever kind of trouble he was in—as his guidance counselor. “Is he going to come here by himself?” Matty had asked. He waited for Locs to answer. But she didn’t. She was waiting for Matty to tell her something. Either: Because I want you to bring him. Or: Because I don’t want you to bring him. And before he could ask himself, again, Am I really going to do this? he’d said, “Because I want you to bring him.”
    â€œMaybe I will,” Locs had said. “But then again, maybe I will not.”
    And then she hung up, leaving Matty with two visions of the future. Both of them gave him a bad feeling.
    â€œI have a bad feeling,” Matty said.
    â€œWell, as I was just saying, I had a bad feeling that December in Turku as well,” Lawrence said.
    â€œUncle Lawrence!” Kurt yelled, and then he waved at Uncle Lawrence to come over.
    â€œI’m being paged,” Lawrence said, and he walked over to his nephew. Matty then turned in the opposite direction and thought, Where are they? And a second later, there they were: Ellen and a man walking toward him through the snow. The man looked tall—taller than Matty—and thin; he had gray hair and had lost most of it except for on the sides, but he was one of those tall, fit men who cut their remaining hair very short, and so he looked youthful even though he was not young. Locs had described the guy—Henrik Larsen—as a goofball. But he did not look like a goofball. Matty, on the other hand, was dressed in his ridiculous homemade umpire uniform. The uniform was supposed to be a joke, but now he wondered whether he’d succeeded a little too fully in making it so. He was wearing Kurt’s old soccer shin guards, and the pieces of black plastic barely covered half the length of his shins. He’d also stuffed a pillow into his red sweatshirt for a chest protector. And while his mask was a genuine umpire mask, it was ancient, and several bars had been broken, so that the ones that remained were too far apart to stop anything—a ball, a rock—from reaching his face. He’d dressed like this for the fourteen years he’d umpired this game, but today, for the first time, he felt like a man who was absolutely ill equipped to go into battle.
    Matty shook the guy’s hand when he got close enough, and said, “So you must be my new guidance counselor.”
    The guy didn’t say anything. He just took his hand back, then crossed his arms and frowned. Locs was supposed to have told this Henrik that he was going to be the new Broomeville Junior-Senior High guidance counselor. Did this frowning and arm crossing mean she hadn’t told him? Although she
had
told Henrik to call him Matthew. What
else
had she told him? Locs, Locs. He felt her nearby. She might even be sitting in the stands, watching him. He looked at Henrik, making sure he didn’t look anywhere else. “Henry,” Ellen said. “This is Matthew.”
    Henry? thought Matty. “I go by Matty,” he said to Henry.
    â€œOr Big Red,” Ellen said.
    Matty felt his face turn unhappy. He wondered whether Henry could see it behind the mask. Henry was still frowning; his arms were still crossed. “I went to Cornell,” Matty explained to Henry.
    Henry let his frown disappear. For now. It felt so good, knowing he could and would be able to return to it. Earlier he’d wondered whether there was a difference between Jens and Henry. This was the difference: Jens was always a little out of control, even though he insisted that he