Done with his first year at college, Paul came home that summer and fell back in with his friends from high school. They were jocks, three-season athletes. One or two had gone to good schools on athletic scholarships. More of them had stayed in New Bedford and gone into their fathers’ businesses, or gone to technical school for the nine months between graduation and an apprentice license as electricians or plumbers. Those were some of the kids Paul hung out with. They met together every night to act out Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days.” They were still underage, so their preferred hangout was the outdoor basketball court at the high school, where they could sit in a car, between games of skins versus shirts, and knock back Bud Lights without too much scrutiny from slow-rolling police cars. In their minds, anyone who might see the former heroes of the basketball court, or the baseball diamond, or, best of all, the football field, playing a pickup game would think back to those golden hours and be charmed by the scene of these gods on earth still flaunting the jump shots of their high school years. The drunker they got, the more those glory days revealed the flaws in their postgraduation lives. Some were doing grunt jobs, ordered around by bosses who had once themselves been glory boys. Or, they were like Paul, an average student but a moderately talented athlete, which got him a scholarship to play on an average state basketball team that never even made it into the play-offs.

Ronnie Markham was one of the boys who made it to a big school on an athletic scholarship. They always talked about how someday there would be a trophy named after him; his athletic prowess had put the school on the map time and again. It helped that his father had the largest, most successful car dealership in the area. Markham Motors, three generations old, enjoyed a fair amount of signage on the playing fields of our high school.

It had been a while since Ronnie had hung out with Paul. A year older than Paul, he had finished his sophomore year at BU. They’d reconnected on the basketball court and now Ronnie showed up at our house three days out of four. He and Paul would go out, shoot those baskets at the high school, and then do whatever it was that they did until the early hours of the next day. Sometimes I’d open the door and there he’d be on our front step, still the Greek god of New Bedford. “Hey, kid. Where’s Paul?” That was the sum total of his interest in me.

And then it wasn’t.

That summer, Markham Motors did a little trimming. Cost cutting. Belt tightening. My father’s job was on the line; it had been a few years since the last bronze plaque.

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