‘The tools of ignorance,’ he said, and smiled at me.

‘This won’t take much time,’ Clarence Snow said. Then he walked out the front door, leaving my father and me alone in the lighted shop.

My father sat back in his folding chair, stretched his legs in front of him, and wiggled his toes in his yellow socks. ‘He’ll fire me,’ he said. ‘That’s what this’ll be.’

‘Why do you think that?’ I said. And it shocked me.

‘You don’t know about these things, son,’ my father said. ‘I’ve been fired before. These things have a feel to them.’

‘Why would he do that?’ I said.

‘Maybe he thinks I fucked his wife,’ my father said. I hadn’t heard him say that kind of thing before, and it shocked me, too. He was staring out the window into the dark. ‘Of course, I don’t know if he has a wife.’ My father began putting on his street shoes, which were black loafers, shiny and new and thick-soled. ‘Maybe I won some money from one of his friends. He doesn’t have to have a reason.’ He slid the white shoes under the chair and stood up. ‘Wait in here,’ he said. And I knew he was mad, but did not want me to know he was. He liked to make you believe everything was fine and for everybody to be happy if they could be. ‘Is that okay?’ he said.

‘It’s okay,’ I said.

‘Think about some pretty girls while I’m gone,’ he said, and smiled at me.

Then he walked, almost strolling, out of the little pro shop and up toward the clubhouse, leaving me by myself with the racks of silver golf clubs and new leather bags and shoes and boxes of balls–all the other tools of my father’s trade, still and silent around me like treasures.

When my father came back in twenty minutes he was walking faster than when he’d left. He had a piece of yellow paper stuck up in his shirt pocket, and his face looked tight. I was sitting on the chair Clarence Snow had sat on. My father picked up his white shoes off the green carpet, put them under his arm, then walked to the cash register and began taking money out of the trays.

‘We should go,’ he said in a soft voice. He was putting money in his pants pocket.

‘Did he fire you,’ I asked.

‘Yes he did.’ He stood still for a moment behind the open cash register as if the words sounded strange to him, or had other meanings. He looked like a boy my own age doing something he shouldn’t be doing and trying to do it casually. Though I thought maybe Clarence Snow had told him to clean out the cash register before he left and all that money was his to keep. ‘Too much of a good living, I guess,’ he said. Then he said, ‘Look around here, Joe. See if you see anything you want.’ He looked around at the clubs and the leather golf bags and shoes, the sweaters and clothes in glass cases. All things that cost a lot of money, things my father liked. ‘Just take it,’ he said. ‘It’s yours.’

‘I don’t want anything,’ I said.

My father looked at me from behind the cash register. ‘You don’t want anything? All this expensive stuff?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘You’ve got good character, that’s your problem. Not that it’s much of a problem.’ He closed the cash register drawer.