For about ten seconds, standing at the bar in the room I own, I heard my own laugh in the middle of the crowd’s — I’d started it before I processed it, the reflex of a man who has spent forty years being the one who takes it well. Then I said what I said and watched him work out that I wasn’t joking, and he did the thing they all do, which is turn it into a compliment: no kidding, that’s great, good for you. I bought the hall in 2016 after twenty-two years of running the equipment yard on Route 9. I own the yard, the hall, and the building the pharmacy rents. I never left the parking lot because I bought the parking lot.
I didn’t announce it. I thought about it — I had the mic in my hand at ten o’clock to thank the committee — and what I said instead was that the bar was open till midnight and to drive safe. It wasn’t grace. It was that I’d spent a year looking forward to a night with people I grew up with and I’d have traded the whole speech for one person asking me what I’d been doing since 1984. Nobody did. Not one. They asked about my knees and my mother and whether the diner was still open, and every single question was about the town, not about me in it.
My daughter came in from the parking lot around eleven and we sat at a corner table and she ate the last of the four thousand dollars of catering off a paper plate. She’s twenty-eight and lives in Chicago and she said, “Dad, why do you care what these people think,” and I said because I was seventeen in this building, and she said, “You’re sixty,” and that was more or less the end of my reunion. I’ve since decided I’ll host the fiftieth too. Same room, same donation, and I’ll rent it to them at full price if the committee asks, because I’ve learned something about what free things are worth to people. The guy at the mic sent me a message on Facebook in March asking about warehouse space. I haven’t answered it yet.
