Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

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Nate Zamost took that week off school. We wondered what he did those long days other than the funeral, which couldn’t have taken more than a few hours. The Zamosts lived in one of those houses just across the fence from Foley’s Pond. Nate’s sister, Barbara — the family called her Babs — slid under the chain link and waddled down to the water. This was 1979. She was two and a half.

The day Nate Zamost came back to school, we refrained from playing Kill the Guy with the Ball. At recess, we stood around in a ragged circle on the edge of the basketball court and spoke to one another in polite murmurs. We were a group of guys in junior high who hung out together. It’s not like we weren’t capable of understanding. Some of us even had sisters. Instinctively, we seemed to get it that our role was not to understand, or even console, but, in the spirit of funerals, to act. That being authentically sorry, whatever this might have looked like, would have been out of place, even unwelcome. So we stood there and looked at our shoes and kicked at loose asphalt. Nate went along with it. He played chief mourner by nodding his head slowly. I remember Stu Barkus finally trying to say something.

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