I don’t know if my father had any friends. He wasn’t the friendly type. He didn’t socialize; he didn’t have hobbies. He’d go fishing or hunting if someone asked (usually Froehmer) but he’d never initiate it. He must have gone out, but I don’t remember it. I never remember him saying “my friend” when talking about anyone. It was always what they did, or where they were from. “Ustico, the plumber,” or “Sweeney from the Board of Ed.” It was about what they did. The men who came and went in and out of the house, the men who paraded past his dead body, they were business associates, colleagues, acquaintances. I don’t know if he ever thought of one of them as anything more than someone he worked with, someone he did something for, someone who owed him money. I don’t think a single one of them was a friend. A friend is there when you need them; a friend visits you in the hospital. A friend carries your casket at your funeral. Or at least makes an appearance. Froehmer sent flowers. And an envelope.

Froehmer had always been there, as long as I could remember. He’d been there for my father and he’d been there for me. I couldn’t figure it out. I still haven’t.

“You never know how someone will react to death,” Frank told me. “People don’t act like themselves sometimes.”

“You think I should give him a pass?”

“That’s not what I mean,” Frank said. “You should place it in context of how he’s acted all the time you’ve known him.”

I tried to think of it that way. Froehmer would do more for me, more than even my own father.

—

My father was right about his money. There wasn’t as much as I thought. A lot of it had gone to medical, I knew that, some of it had gone to the funeral arrangements. Maybe he’d spent the rest, maybe he never had as much as he wanted everyone to believe. Maybe he figured out how to take it with him after all. There should have been more, it seemed to me, but there wasn’t. I emptied out his bank account, then I went around the house and found as many of his envelopes as I could. Then I left town. I wasn’t going to look back, and I didn’t. What I left behind caught up with me anyway.