My mother had left a week earlier to stay with her sister in Manchester because my uncle was recovering from surgery and my aunt needed help with their three wild, young children.My stepfather and I had begun to adapt to our time without her, trading off on cooking duties initially and then falling into a pattern of eating out or sending out for food. Neither of us was any good at cooking. My best effort was beans on toast, and then I burnt the toast.As I stood scraping the blackened edges he said, “We’ll order pizza tomorrow.”The laundry room was getting filled to overflowing, and we ended up making bets on stupid things like football games on television for which the loser would have to do the laundry. We had a very close relationship. Since I was an only child I got a lot of his attention. This increased as I became an increasingly accomplished athlete when I entered adolescence. While he had never been as versatile as me in his youth he had always loved sports and admired athletes. He was in great shape and ran every day and worked out constantly. He came to all my football games and was my biggest fan. I loved his unabashed, sometimes publically embarrassing, support for me and my teams. He was Greek and very outgoing about his emotions.
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