Ray and Pat

It was the easiest of friendships. They didn’t have to work at it. They never bothered to acknowledge it. Things just clicked.

What first brought them together was plane geometry. They spent hours on the phone working through the logic of it all. By the winter of their freshman year they had a friendship, including nicknames used only between themselves.

Growth came late to both boys so they weren’t special at a boys’ school where teams went to State. Their great talent was mocking the absurdity of the adult world. Nothing was sacred.

It wasn’t long before they traded their phones for cars. They cruised out of boredom — tuned to the Top Forty — in search for girls.

Both boys’ fathers were absent, but in different ways. One was simply out of the picture; the other had problems. By coincidence their mothers were both grocery-store cashiers. If the two women had ever talked, it would have been at the funeral.

After graduation things began to change. They piled into cars one night, and raced. One of their close buddies lost his life, another lost the use of his leg. They all lost something.

The two young men headed in different directions. One went to work and started a family. The other went to trade school. Both moved away. Neither was at the other’s wedding.

They hadn’t had a falling out. They were simply careless and thought friendships like theirs would come along every few years.

The two of them meet some fifty years later and ordered sandwiches. It turned out they both had homework to do and they wondered if they might be able to work on some of it together.