Though the same picture appeared week after week, I still scanned it for small message differences.

•  •  •

Now, no photographs, no word. Missing in Action, one electric-blue Plymouth (its pale interior startling as a white sock around the calf of some dark, older boy). My parents having purged our house of any telltale Herald Traveler, I grew so jumpy/bold from missing Dan, I blurted during dinner, “Wwwwwhat ever happened to … ?” (I didn’t even need to finish—they’d been waiting.)

Mother stiffened from Casual to Regal. Using her linen napkin, she blotted her mouth, then—napkin stretched between her fists—studied it as if my question had made the cloth go beautifully bloodstained.

Dad cleared his throat, public speaking, “Someday, I’ll explain, son. Once I figure it out more myself. There are certain men, often not the ones you’d expect … Dan went and tried something that … Dan’s left us, basically. Nobody understands it. Pass the turnips, son, and take more or you’ll never make the Six Footers Club. Mighty good turnips tonight, Helen, crispier. Son, I know how much you, all of us, feel so attached to, but … Fact is—son?—around our town?—what Dan tried?—it’s the one thing a man cannot come back from….”

This passed for clarification. I simply nodded, swallowing it whole. I would need to bike to the library. I understood I was not meant to know … how bad, it was, whatever Dan had chanced…. Did Everyone’s Great Shame come from his having attempted it, or his longing for something Dan really truly wanted but never even nailed?

He ceased being. He stopped being, as Mom put it (her joke, not mine) “The Heartthrob of our Community Chest.”

Monopoly had one card we most dreaded: GO TO JAIL. The worst part, you could only sit, could just admire the others’ hopping happily forward, snatching up your better hotels. Eventually, your fellow players quit even addressing you; you could watch them from up close forever, but could not get OUT.

IV. Book Me Passage on The Fellow Ship

When Mom complained about the hours Dad squandered getting even worse at golf, he reminded her: the happiest times of his whole life had been spent at war, with other loud good boys in mobs and squadrons. “Helen, I need my weekly fellow ship time.” The Fellow Ship. Guys spoke of it often, as being golden. As something craved nearly as much as women were, by all real men. Me too. I heard about a local high-school athlete winning “a full Fellow Ship to Duke” and envied him his crowd on board, the jolly boyish upriver voyage clear to that steepled campus.

At age six, I made The Fellow Ship a pirate craft, longer than wide, a carved dragon’s head snarling at its rapier tip, a barge almost too pointedly male ever to float on nebulous female water.