Excellent Richard Ford story in current New Yorker

Excellent Richard Ford story, Displaced, in current New Yorker, tells of a young (15) man in Jackson, Miss., whose father has just died unexpectedly and who struggles w/ feelings of loss, self-pity, and social isolation - notably, that all the kids at school treat him differently, as a kind of pariah, and he cannot explain or comprehend this change in his fortunes. His mother takes a job as a motel desk clerk, and much of the story involves his fascination, at first at a distance, w/ a boarding house on his street (touches of Carson McCullers here?), which eventually leads to his friendship w/ a slightly older but far more experienced young man, Niall, from a family of Irish immigrants who live in a few rooms in the boarding house - his father supposedly a cab driver but who most of the time is "under the weather," so Niall has free access to the cab. He asks the narrator (Henry?) to join him at a drive-in movie, where he offers the narrator some "hooch" and then makes a pass at him, completely confusing and befuddling the young man. At the end, we learn that no more came out of this - save a vow of silence on both sides - and Niall heads off for the Navy, where, he informs them by letter somewhat later, he washes out and the family returns to Ireland - the opposite of the American Dream. Ford tells the story from the vantage of a mature adult man looking back, and the story has the virtues, so family from many Ford stories and novels, of a tone of honesty and clarity of vision about the past, plus the added quality of leaving some things hinted at but unsaid: The narrator's mother seems attracted to Niall in a strange way, but we never know whether anything came of that attraction. It's suggested the N left the Navy because of his homosexuality, but, again, that's just a possibility, hovering above the edge of the narrative. The narrator himself is a blank - seldom gives more than two-word answers to any social overture and, as the adult looking back, he gives us little or no information about the effect of this homosexual overture - did it change his life in any way? Through guilt, desire, taboo, loathing? We don't know, and that openness is one of the strengths of this story. My only quibble is that Ford seems to spin his wheels in the first few paragraphs, belaboring the point that the death of a father affects the son socially in many ways, but this part of the story is abstract and ineffable - perhaps would have been better to start more quickly and let us just surmise the social isolation or perhaps give an example of the social ostracism the narrator experienced on his father's death.