When Owen suggested to Buddy Rourke that he donate his braces to the scrap drive, Buddy didn’t think it was funny. Buddy was a serious boy, headed for a career in engineering or construction or electricity. He could fix lamps, knowing how to insert and screw down hook-shapes of copper wire into the terminals of a switch and how to splice the wires of Christmas lights when a bad socket made the whole string dark. He taught Owen how to tame a current which would flow one way with magical, instant results but which with contacts reversed would balk and melt the wires. Buddy subscribed to Popular Mechanics and had sent away for a make-it-yourself radio kit that he had assembled to the point where you could hear static and a faint voice pulsing in and out. Though the two boys could achieve great rapport working on projects in Buddy’s cellar—not quite a rumpus room but better-lit than Owen’s, with a well-stocked workbench that had been created and abandoned by Buddy’s absent father—there was a potential awkwardness in the relationship because of Buddy’s being a year and a half older. Once, anticipating Buddy’s coming to his house one afternoon to play Monopoly—a game the boys for a season were passionate about, between their passions for gin rummy and chess—Owen had set up the board on the living-room rug with a loving elaboration, arranging the Chance and Community Chest cards in a spiral, like the staircases in Hollywood musicals, and setting out the red hotels and green wooden houses in a formal pattern, a perfect Christmas-colored village as if seen from an airplane.

Buddy, coming into the room, said with limpid disgust, “Oh, Owen!” and scrabbled the cards into the usual rough stack and dumped the hotels and houses back into the box. Owen was stung, and tried for the rest of his life not to risk showing how much he cared for somebody and then looking foolish. Make sure the circuits are established before plugging anything in: otherwise, meltdown.

After a fight over something soon forgotten, leaving the basement in tears, Owen heard himself yelling at Buddy, the crowning insult: “At least I have a father!”