Summary

Denny Pelletier went out for a walk one night in December and reflected on his life. All of his children had married young, like himself, and moved away and he began to think they were too quiet recently. Perhaps they were angry with him. He thought of how his classmates’ children had waited to marry until they were late in their twenties, or “like the really handsome Woodcock boy—thirty-two when he married his pretty yellow-haired bride,” (140). The previous year, one of his sons saw his old high school yearbook and noticed that the other kids called him “Frenchie,” commenting that it wasn’t funny and slightly offensive. At the time his feelings had never been hurt, but looking back he realized that he merely accepted that he was different. He left school early and went to work in the mills, never considering...