He was friends with everyone. His only son was friends with no one

"Pass the kichel,” Yehuda told Moish Taub. “I’m starving.”

Kehillas Kol Yaakov was thrumming with noise and movement. Men and boys passed around baskets of Tam-Tams and containers of herring, elbows bumping and napkins flying.

Taub grinned and handed him the platter. “Don’t fill up too much,” he warned Yehuda with a mock-serious face. “The cholent hasn’t come out yet.”

Eli, Taub’s eldest, rolled his eyes. “You always tell us that,” he said.

“Yeah,” Binyomin, Taub’s second son, laughed. “I think it’s getting old, Ta.”

Yehuda frowned, looking around. “Have you boys seen Nochum?” he asked the Taub kids.

Eli shrugged. “Not sure,” he said. “Maybe I saw him reading in the coat room?”

Yehuda cringed. Reading? In the coat room? He looked at all the fathers and sons around him, eating, laughing, enjoying. They seemed so…normal. Something in his throat tightened.

A voice shook Yehuda out of his bleak reverie. It was Fried-from-the-downstairs-minyan. “Did you order Nochum’s tefillin yet?” he asked. “His bar mitzvah is this year, right?”

“Please don’t get him started,” Taub moaned. “Does he ever talk about anything else?”

Yehuda ignored him. Even as he grinned at Fried, he felt that familiar stab of pain in his chest. “You better believe it,” he said.

He’d been dreaming of Nochum’s bar mitzvah for years. Even Nochum’s early diagnosis as “on the spectrum” couldn’t steal this milestone from Yehuda. This was his only son after all. But the thought of the simchah without Aidel…Yehuda clenched the napkin in his hands until his knuckles turned white.

It had been five years already, and while Yehuda had mostly settled into his subdued single existence, planning the bar mitzvah he and Aidel had so anticipated was bringing so many memories into painful relief.

No one had to know that, though. So he just clapped Taub on the shoulder and said again, “Yup, it’s going to be something big.”

Taub rolled his eyes and helped himself to some more herring. “Don’t forget to send me an invite — I like a modest simchah. You know where I live.”

“C’mon, you know it’ll be huge,” Gross-the-Chase-points-guy said, laughing. “I’ve had the date marked since the shalom zachor.”

Yehuda laughed too, while wondering if everyone around him was really oblivious to his mixed feelings about the upcoming simchah.

He thought of Nochum reading in the coat room, and realized he’d never really discussed the plans for the bar mitzvah with his son. He’d have to do it soon, before finalizing arrangements with the hall. He had an uneasy feeling about the conversation, but tried to push it to the back of his mind. Which 12-year-old didn’t want a show-stopping bar mitzvah?