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but this is Tommy Williams!”
    “It’s who?” In his work shirt and underpants, he looked powerful but also cartoonish, like a bear dressed up for a job interview.
    “Lou, for God’s sake, put that boy down,” our mother said.
    My father lowered Tommy to the ground, where he doubled over and gasped for breath. He was a chubby kid, and his face, which was freckled and normally pale, was now the color of a valentine.
    “Hey, son,” my father said, so sweet suddenly, so transparent. He put his hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “You all right? Want some ice cream? How about some ice cream?”
    “That’s okay,” Tommy croaked. “I think I’ll just go home.”
    “Actually, no,” my father said, and he guided the boy through our open door. “We’d like you to stay for a while. Come on inside and join us.” He turned to me and lowered his voice. “Find some ice cream, damn it.”
    If there’d been anything decent in the house, anything approaching real ice cream, it would have been eaten long ago. I knew this, so I bypassed the freezer in the kitchen and the secondary freezer in the toolshed and went to the neglected, tundralike one in the basement. Behind the chickens bought years earlier on sale, and the roasts encased like chestnuts in blood-tinted frost, I found a tub of ice milk, vanilla-flavored, and the color of pus. It had been frozen for so long that even I, a child, was made to feel old by the price tag. “Thirty-five cents! You can’t get naught for that nowadays.”
    That this was my thought while my friend sat, red-throated as a bullfinch, at our dining room table speaks volumes about that era. Even if Tommy had escaped captivity and run back home, it’s not likely his parents would have called the police, much less sued and sent us to the poorhouse. No angry words would be exchanged the next time his father passed mine in the street, and why would there be? Their son hadn’t died, just gone without oxygen for a minute. And might that not make him stronger?
      
    On opening the ice milk I saw that it had thawed before its last freezing. Beneath an inch of what looked like snow, the texture was wrong, too slick-looking and so hard it bent the spoon and came out in slender, translucent chips. It took everything I had to chisel out a bowlful of them, but in time I did. Then I carried it in to Tommy and set it before him on the table. It was strange, him faced with dessert while the rest of us were still working on dinner. For a minute he just sat there, staring down and blinking. My father chose to interpret this as an expression of wonder. “That’s right,” he said. “It’s all for you. I’m sure we can even find some more if you want it.”
    Tommy looked at us, seven sets of eyes, watching, and he reached for his spoon.
    “There you go,” my father said. “Attaboy. Eat up.”

Think Differenter
    Of the many expressions we Americans tend to overuse, I think the most irritating is “Blind people are human too.” They are, I guess, but saying so makes you sound preachy and involved, like all your best friends are blind—which they’re probably not. I, personally, don’t know any blind people, though the guy I used to buy my newspapers from had pretty bad cataracts. His left eye had a patch over it, and the right one reminded me of the sky in a werewolf movie, this pale blue moon obscured by drifting clouds. Still, though, he could see well enough to spot a Canadian quarter. “Oh no you don’t,” he said to me the last time I bought something. Then he actually grabbed my hand!
    I pulled it back. “Well, excuusssse me.” Then I said, “I think it’s a-boat time I take my business elsewhere.” Normally I say “about,” but I wanted him to think I was Canadian, which could have been true if I was born a couple hundred miles to the north. The son of a bitch half-blind person. I’m through defending the likes of him.
    Number two on my irritating expression list is “I’ll never