Three-Martini Lunch by Suzanne Rindell

surpassed them.
    â€œ
Latin!”
Clarence hooted. “What’s a nigger boy like you doin’, fooling around with Latin?”
    I stiffened at the slur and didn’t answer.
    â€œWhen they start teaching Latin at ol’ P.S. 24?” he asked, still laughing at my expense.
    â€œThey don’t,” I said. “I go to Warner Academy.”
    At this, Clarence stopped laughing and narrowed his eyes at me. “What’s that?”
    â€œPrivate school,” I said. He proceeded to ask me questions about my schooling, and I haughtily explained the circumstances.
    â€œHuh,” he grunted when I’d finished my explanation. “Sounds to me like you think yo’ better than us, boy.” I widened my eyes at the accusation. “Yeah,” he continued. “I see the way you been lookin’ at me, actin’ like I’m gonna give you a case of them head-bugs or somethin’ . . . You think yo’ shit don’t stink.”
    By this point, his eyes had turned eerily black and the expression on his face had grown hard and bitter.
    â€œBut I’ll tell ya something, boy . . . you may think yo’ something special,but you just a chip off the ol’ block. Your mama tell you your old man a war hero. Sure—he march up Fifth Avenue in that fool parade with the rest o’ us, but that about it. He ain’t seen no action in the Pacific. Ever’body know yo’ father discharged for bein’ a coward and a thief.”
    â€œHe saw action in France in the first war,” I said, “and he was discharged for his health.”
    â€œHah! That disability an act of mercy; they couldn’t charge him with nothin’ else.” Clarence leaned forward on his elbows and licked his lips. The lamp over the kitchen table threw long, ugly shadows down his face, and I realized he was winding up for some kind of final blow. “He such a coward, he murdered a man just so’s they wouldn’t have no proof o’ his thievery,” Clarence growled in a low, confiding voice.
    I got up from the table, trembling, and stormed out of the room. I lay in bed for the rest of the night, hurt and confused. I didn’t believe Clarence’s story; he was a drunk and a bully. Nonetheless, he had struck some kind of chord. There
was
something funny about my father’s discharge. A disability discharge made sense on the surface of things: My father was old by active duty standards, and there was no question his respiratory ailment was real. And yet, there had always been something slightly discomfiting, an unanswered question that hovered like a dark cloud. I couldn’t shake the image of my father in the living room, his eyes snapping instantly to my face as he rushed to say, “We don’t need to discuss that, Clarence
.
”
    Staring up at the ceiling of my bedroom, only a ten-year-old boy, I was suddenly afraid to learn the truth, and this fear remained with me into adulthood, long after my father passed away.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    C larence stayed with us for a full month, well past the point of his welcome, as far as my mother was concerned. Late at night, I could hear her complaining about him, leveling some kind of accusation I couldnever make out, not even with a water glass pressed against my bedroom wall.
    As my mother’s resentment mounted, eventually my father had a falling-out with Clarence, and I assumed it had to do with her objections. I could never be certain what the straw was that broke the camel’s back. I caught a few fragmented lines of the final fight between my father and Clarence, but they were cryptic, my father demanding over and over again, “Explain to me what these bars doin’ in yo’ things!” Clarence, for his part, adopted a stance of indignation over the violation of his privacy, until finally he gathered his belongings and I heard the front door