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think of it late at night, which he never did at home: and Jim’s friends sloping up the street with him to stop at the drugstore by the Jersey Central tracks, seemed—hold it—like his father of all people. Which didn’t make any sense at all to Jim because he didn’t gravitate to his father, whereas the guys were his friends. His father had a way of showing up at places with a sour or indifferent eye as if he felt the same seeing Jim get hit and knocked out of bounds onto a pail as he did seeing him dropkick a field goal against the cold wind that brought the peanut-and-vinegar scent of horses, their hides, their dust, their hardening fields. (In attendance, though, was Mel.)
    But no, the father seemed like the friends to him because—wait—Jim slugged Sammy, they were fourteen, Sammy kicked him and ran, they all ran, they were running past the newspaper, the father was like the guys because, because, because he kept him from getting someplace he had to get to, that was how they were alike: it was dumb and a surprise arriving at that conclusion and maybe exhausting even while gulping a twisted toasty cruller at his grandmother’s, who wore her hair wound in a gray bun and had always told him stories you didn’t have to believe if you didn’t happen to but you still kind of did, and wanted more, and yet sometimes they had a funny brand of politeness between them, Jim and Margaret (he would jump up laughing even to himself in the middle of her story and run outside onto the kitchen porch and yank open the screen door and leap the seven steps(!) down onto the first flagstones of the backyard). Sometimes he thought he was supposed to be hearing things that he wasn’t, yet she left him alone, but not the way his mother had her way of being left alone. His grandmother smelled (more on one side than the other) of nutmeg he realized years later and soap the way his mother smelt of the same amber soap but pound cake and lemons for her tea. Slow the conclusion—like wading waist-high in Lake Rompanemus— because he didn’t quite know what it was, and exhausting (not his own word) because he knew he could follow it up, the conclusion, like the way he often thought about girls and what he liked and about New York (miles away across the Jersey flats with the Statue which was officially in Jersey very close facing away from them up the alley of the Narrows of New York Harbor) when they drove in once, he and his little brother Brad and two other kids with Mr. Bob Yard the electrician and his wife, who seemed to have a big running argument all the way so the boys stopped discussing how much money they had to spend for candy, the couple yelling at each other about his unpredictable driving and butting in when one or the other would speak to the kids who were not theirs, the couple making noise and all through this pretty much laughing, all the way to see Bing Crosby in a movie at Radio City Music Hall, New York hardly a fifty-mile drive, that seemed year by year more and more too close; but about his father being like his friends, well that conclusion wasn’t exactly exhausting either: it was like what you got left with when you arranged to already have other work (that you happened also to like) as an excuse when your father wanted you to work at (give him credit) a dime more an hour in the office of the paper running errands that involved taking down important reportable information, and doing "a bit of everything," with a chance to learn not only everything but how to engrave stationery—"where" what got substituted for, was whatever real reason stood behind the excuse of ("Sorry") already having more than enough odd jobs, a reason which was only half there, and this was like the conclusion about his friends and father which asked to be followed by a next thought but asked so that you half felt you’d made up its asking, and so this conclusion about his friends and his father keeping him from getting someplace he had to