His friend Dave gave it him straight out.
“My mother doesn’t approve of you,” Dave said. “She told me not to bring you around the house anymore. She never wants to see you again.”
It came as a shock to the thirteen-year-old. He never did anything worse than the usual stuff. He was okay.
The thing that set Dave’s mother off — what she couldn’t bring herself to forgive in her son’s friend— was the fact that he hadn’t said thank you after they took him to the lake that day to keep their only child, their Dave, company.
It wasn’t like the boy came from sour or ungrateful people. It was true they sometimes used a smile or an attitude instead of words to say thank you. If someone offered you something and you accepted it, you were automatically showing gratitude. It worked for them.
The boy didn’t particularly care what Dave’s mother (she who insisted on ruining sandwiches with lettuce) thought of him. What worried him was that he wasn’t up to speed on something as basic as saying thank you. Why was that? He couldn’t very well ask his parents to explain.
He was getting ready to start high school that fall and began to obsess that there were other traps that would make him look stupid in front of kids who knew better.
He decided he would keep his eyes open and his mouth shut, even though that was what tripped him up in the first place.
