"Nonsense." Dad straightened. "This is the happiest moment of our lives—or at least it should be."
Dad grinned. An understanding, intimate and gentle, flickered across his handsome, gray-thatched features. For an instant Tom felt that he was not alone.
Then the grin faded. Dad resumed his role of proud and blustering father. Light glittered on his three rows of Driver's Ribbons. The huge Blue Ribbon of Honor was in their center, like a blue flower in an evil garden of bronze accident stars, crimson fatality ribbons and silver death's-heads.
In a moment of desperation Tom turned to Mom. The sadness was still in her face, but it seemed over-shadowed by pride. What was it she'd once said? "It's terrible, Tom, to think of your becoming a Driver, but it'd be a hundred times more terrible not to see you become one."
He knew now that he was alone, an exile, and Mom and Dad were strangers. After all, how could one person, entrenched in his own little world of calm security, truly know another's fear and loneliness?
"Just a little celebration," Dad was saying. "You wouldn't be a Driver unless we gave you a real send-off. All our friends are here, Tom. Uncle Mack and Aunt Edith and Bill Ackerman and Lou Dorrance—"
No, Dad, Tom thought. Not our friends. Your friends. Don't you remember that a man of twenty who isn't a Driver has no friends?
A lank, loose-jowled man jostled between them. Tom realized that Uncle Mack was babbling at him.
"Knew you'd make it, Tom. Never believed what some people said 'bout you being afraid. My boy, of course, enlisted when he was only seventeen. Over thirty now, but he still Drives now and then. Got a special license, you know. Only last week—"
Dad exclaimed, "A toast to our new Driver!"