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Tom just never heard from his father. Not a line.

"That was when Tom began coming into the restaurant looking like thunder.

The college began needling him for the water-fight damages, as well as second-semester tuition.

He took his first exam, physics, and got an A on it. He's pretty smart.

"He still didn't hear anything from home.

He took the second exam, French, and thought he flunked it.

That same afternoon he went into the office and told the dean he was quitting, and he packed his stuff and left.

I didn't see him again till a week ago.

I didn't know if he'd got sick of me, or left town, or what.

"He says he wrote his father that he had a good job, and they could forget about him.

Then he broke into that cellar on a dare or for kicks.

"So here we are. What do we do next?"

Hilda looks at me—me, age fourteen—as if I might actually know, and it's kind of unnerving.

Everyone I know, their life goes along in set periods: grade school, junior high, high school, college, and maybe getting married.

They don't really have to think what comes next.

I say cautiously, "My pop says a kid's got to go to college now to get anywhere. Maybe he ought to go back to school."

"You're so right, Grandpa," she says, and I would have felt silly, but she has a nice friendly laugh.

"I wish I could persuade him to go back. But it's not so easy. I guess he's got to get a job and go to night school, if they'll accept him. He won't ask his father for money."

"You two got my life figured out?" Tom has come up behind us while we were lying in the sand on our stomachs.

"I just hope that sour grape at the filling station gives me a good recommendation so I can get another job. The way he watches his cash register, you'd think I was Al Capone."

We talk a bit, and then Hilda gets up and says she's going to the ladies' room.

She doesn't act coy about it, the way most girls do when they're sitting with guys.

She just leaves.

"How do you like Hilda?" Tom asks, and again I'm sort of surprised, because he acts like he really wants my opinion.

"She's nice," I say.

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