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I don’t remember what the homecoming was like, but my wife does. She says I spoke to her in a rude and disrespectful manner. I told her that I had sold five hundred Fleetwood windows to the Conners Hotel. I also told her that she should look up the statistics on teenage marriages sometime.

Then I went upstairs, and I took the door off our bathtub enclosure. I told her Murra and I were trading doors.

I got the door off, and then I went to sleep in the tub.

My wife woke me up, and I told her to go away. I told her Gloria Hilton had just bought the Conners Hotel, and I was going to marry her.

I tried to tell her something very important about thistles, but I couldn’t pronounce thistles, so I went to sleep again.

So my wife poured bubble-bath powder all over me, and she turned on the cold water faucet of the bathtub, and she went to bed in the guest room.

About three o’clock the next afternoon, I went over to Murra’s to finish putting up his windows, and to find out what we’d agreed to do about the bathtub enclosure door, if anything. I had two doors on the back of my truck, my door with a flamingo and his door with Gloria Hilton.

I started to ring his doorbell, but then I heard somebody knocking on an upstairs window. I looked up and saw Murra standing in the window of Gloria Hilton’s bathroom. My ladder was already leaning against the sill of the window, so I went up the ladder and asked Murra what was going on.

He opened the window, and he told me to come in. He was very pale and shaky.

"Your boy showed up yet?" I said.

"Yes," he said. "He’s downstairs. I picked him up at the bus station an hour ago."

"You two hitting it off all right?" I said.

Murra shook his head. "He’s still so bitter," he said. "He’s only fifteen, but he talks to me as though he were my great-great-grandfather. I came up here for just a minute, and now I haven’t got nerve enough to go back down."

He took me by the arm. "Listen—" he said, "you go down and sort of pave the way."

"If I’ve got any pavement left in me," I said, "I’d better save it for home." I filled him in on my own situation at home, which was far from ideal.

"Whatever you do," he said, "don’t make the same mistake I made. You keep that home of yours together, no matter what. I know it must be lousy from time to time; but, believe me, there are ways of life that are ten thousand times lousier. "

"Well," I said, "I thank the good Lord for one thing—"

"What’s that?" he said.

"Gloria Hilton hasn’t come right out and said she loved me yet," I said.

I went downstairs to see Murra’s boy.

Young John had on a man’s suit. He even had on a vest. He wore big black-rimmed spectacles. He looked like a college professor.

"John," I said, "I’m an old friend of your father’s."

"That so?" he said, and he looked me up and down. He wouldn’t shake hands.

"You certainly are a mature-looking young man," I said.

"I’ve had to be," he said. "When Father walked out on Mother and me, that made me head of the family, wouldn’t you say?"

"Well now, John," I said, "your father hasn’t been too happy, either, you know."

"That certainly is a great disappointment to me," he said. "I thought Gloria Hilton made men as happy as they could possibly be."

"John," I said, "when you get older, you’re going to understand a lot of things you don’t understand now."

"You must mean nuclear physics," he said. "I can hardly wait." And he turned his back to me, and he looked out the window. "Where’s Father?" he said.

"Here he is," said Murra from the top of the stairs. "Here the poor fool is." He came creaking down the stairs.

"I think I’d better go back to school, Father," said the boy.

"So soon?" said Murra.

"I was told there was an emergency, or I wouldn’t have come," said the boy. "There doesn’t seem to be any emergency, so I’d like to go back, if you don’t mind."

"Don’t mind?" said Murra. He held out his arms. "John—" he said, "you’ll break my heart if you walk out me now—without— "

"Without