To Die For by Joyce Maynard Page A

and I had always planned on Larry going to college, but when he graduated high school, he said that was it. What are you going to do? He starts tending bar down at the restaurant. We tell ourselves now’s just not his time yet. His time will come.
    Then he met Suzanne, and it seemed like that was going to do it for him. That little blonde had enough ambition for the two of them. “You know, Dad,” he said to me, not too long after he met her, “Suzanne’s going to go far in the world.
    “You wait and see,” he says. “One of these nights you’ll turn on the news in the den and it’ll be Suzanne up there on Channel 7. And she’ll be coming home to me.”
    He said being around her gave him a reason to make good himself. He was always telling us things Suzanne told him, how you’ve got to have a goal in life. Whatever it is you want, you can attain it, if you try hard enough and believe in yourself. You have to think positive. Don’t ever doubt yourself, and don’t get distracted looking over your shoulder at the other guy. Just be the best you can be, or be all that you can be. Go for it. Now I’m probably getting it confused with some commercial. But you get the idea. And I’m telling you, it all sounded pretty good to Angela and me. It seemed to us like Suzanne was giving Larry just the kick in the pants he’d always needed, to get somewhere.
    Six, maybe eight months after he’d met her, Larry comes up to me real serious one night, says he needs to have a talk with me, man to man. He’s been thinking about his future, and he’s set his priorities. A person can’t get anywhere just having fun all the time. He wants to make something of himself, and not just party the rest of his life. All the things I used to tell him, only now he’s telling them back to me.
    The bottom line was, he’d cut his hair and signed up for a night course in accounting. Told me he wanted to learn the restaurant business properly, so he could take over the place one day and make me proud. “I think I got a future in this line of work, Dad,” he tells me. Well, I could have told him that. A person would come into the bar just to be around that boy. You trusted him. He listened to what you said. He’d make you feel he cared, which he did.
    “OK, son,” I tell him. “Show me you mean business and I’ll make you weekend manager come fall. I won’t treat you no different than if you were somebody else’s boy, though. No special favors. Business is business.”
    You should’ve seen how serious he was about the whole thing, right from day one. Sold his drums. Went out and bought a briefcase, and a diamond for Suzanne. Handed out our matchbooks every time he walked in a door. People were telling me they’d run into Larry somewhere and before they could even spit it out to say, “How do you like those Red Sox?” he’d be asking them, “You give any thought yet to where you’re holding your company Christmas party this year? You tried my mother’s lasagna recently?” He’s hiring bands, got a comedy night once a month, ladies night at the bar. And so forth.
    Next thing I know, my son’s close to doubled our business, Saturday and Sunday nights. No college degree, but the guy’s golden. He takes the bonus I give him and puts a down payment on a condo. The place on Butternut Drive.
    All this time, Suzanne and Larry were engaged, although what with his night hours and her job at the mall, sometimes days went by he didn’t see her. Angela used to say she couldn’t understand it how two young people in love could be apart that way. My wife’s more what you might call the romantic type. But by my way of thinking, those two kids were just being sensible. Before a couple starts their life together, they need to have their ducks in a row.
    He gave her the Datsun for Christmas. Nothing was too good for that girl, as far as my son was concerned.
    They were married in July, and she gets this new job at a cable TV station. He