One time when I was a junior in in high school I got a ride with a friend to his house after school. We were going to play basketball. We had been friends since freshman year. I had never been to his house. No one went to his house.
We did not notice that no one went to his house. He always went to someone else's house. It never occurred to us to notice that he always came to our houses.
Mothers loved him because he was so polite and courteous and he helped clear the table and offered to do dishes and that sort of thing. We would have razzed him for sucking up to our mothers but he was a wrestler and enjoyed pinning us to the grass for entertainment.
Fathers liked him because he was a wrestler and because his dad had been an aircraft engineer in the war. His dad died suddenly one day in the kitchen. He was the one who found his dad dead at the kitchen table with his coffee spilled on the newspaper.
The newspaper was open to the business section, he told me once. I asked him what he did with the newspaper after he took care of his dad and mum and kid sister and the ambulance and the undertaker and the priest and he pinned me to the grass without comment.
He was an excellent wrestler. He had a crush on a girl in school, and had told us all about it many times, and finally screwed up his courage, and practiced asking her out in front of the mirror to check his facial expression, and was about to ask her out, when suddenly another guy asked her out, and she said yes, and the next day at lunchtime my friend walked into the lunchroom and sought the other guy out and pinned him to the linoleum floor of the lunchroom without comment.
We parked his car in the driveway and I asked where was his mum's car and he said she and the kid sister were away with the aunt at some army aircraft engineer reunion thing in the city and we had the run of the house so we could eat and then play ball and then maybe watch the Knick game if I didn't have to hustle home. I said great and we went in the house.
I went in the kitchen with