600 Hours of Edward

by Craig Lancaster

  Mr. Withers didn’t say how I should dress for our meeting today, so I am going to err on the side of formality and wear my George Foreman suit and shirt with blue stripes. I wore the same thing on my date with Joy-Annette, which momentarily gives me pause. But I have known Mr. Withers for a long time, and I have no anxiety that he will wig out on me like Joy-Annette did. I think it will be OK. That I’m wearing the same outfit is just coincidence. It doesn’t mean anything.

  I head for the shower. I must keep moving so I am clean and dressed and at the Billings Herald-Gleaner by 10:00 a.m. sharp.

  – • –

  The woman at the front desk has a kind, cheerful face. “Can I help you?”

  “Mr. Withers, please.”

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your name?”

  “Edward Stanton.”

  She picks up the phone and punches in a number. “There’s an Edward Stanton here to see you. Yes, OK.” She hangs up.

  “He’ll be right down.”

  I glance around the foyer of the Herald-Gleaner. The woman I’ve been talking to is behind a big glass wall, and through it, I can see dozens of cubicles, with people in them typing away on computers or looking down at paperwork. Along the wall to the left, on the north side of the building, are glass offices. In the middle of the big room beyond the glass wall is a small table in a small pit surrounded by what appear to be trees. I can’t tell if the trees are real, though. They look real; some of the leaves are withering. But I also know that manufacturers have gotten very good at making fake things look real. I will have to ask Mr. Withers about this.

  Beyond the trees is a room with glass windows on three sides, a big table, and lots of chairs. Important meetings probably go on in there. To the right are more cubicles and more glass offices along the south wall. The Herald-Gleaner is a very active, important-looking place.

  “Edward, my boy!” The booming voice of Mr. Withers comes at me from behind the glass. I would recognize it anywhere. He pushes open a door and tells me to come in.

  “How are you, Edward?” he asks, offering a handshake, which I accept.

  “I’m doing well.”

  “Excellent, excellent.”

  I have seen Mr. Withers only a few times since I graduated from Billings West High School twenty-one years ago. Back then, he was probably younger than I am now, perhaps around thirty-five or thirty-six years old. Now he’s in his mid-fifties, the reddish-brown hair that I remember gone fully gray. He’s a little heavier and a little more crinkly around the eyes, but the voice and the manner are the same.

  “Edward, again, I was so sorry to hear about your dad. He was a good man.”

  “Yes.”

  He claps me on the shoulder. “Well, my boy, come on upstairs with me. We have a lot to talk about.”

  – • –

  On the walk up the stairs, Mr. Withers is telling me about his job at the Herald-Gleaner.

  “I’m the operations director,” he says. “That means, essentially, that I keep things running around here. That has to do with mechanical things, like the press, and the maintenance of the offices and the grounds. It’s a lot of responsibility. It’s a big place. I’ll show you more of it in a bit.”

  “Why did you leave Billings West?”

  “I’d been there thirty-three years. It was time. I had my full pension, and the principals and regulations were getting harder and harder to deal with. I felt like it was time for a change. You know that feeling, Edward?”

  “Yes.” I have been experiencing it a lot lately.

  “Anyway, here’s my office,” he says, ushering me into a small room that overlooks Fourth Avenue N., one of the busier streets in Billings. “Have a seat.”

  I sit down, and Mr. Withers settles in behind his desk.

  “The reason I wrote to you, Edward, is that I want you to come work for me.”

  I had not expected this, and so I can come up with only one word.

  “Why?”

  “I need someone like you. You’re good with your hands, and you can figure out anything mechanical. This place is forty years old. It needs a lot of maintenance. I figure you’re the guy who can help me.”

  “When?” I am simultaneously excited and scared. It has been a long time since I worked anywhere.

  “I’m thinking I’ll have you work what’s called the swing shift. It’s from the late afternoon until around midnight,” Mr. Withers says. Then, his voice gets a little lower and more serious. “Edward, I know about how you need to be left alone to do work. I know why. This job, you’ll be allowed to do that. You’ll report to me, but when you’re here, you’ll be working on tasks that I assign and that you’ll be able to do yourself. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he says, reverting to his usual cheer. “What do you say we take a look around?”

  – • –

  Mr. Withers takes me all over the Herald-Gleaner and explains to me what each part of the building does.

  The north side of the building, he says, is where the advertising and marketing staffs work, selling ads for the newspaper and its website and working on promotions and such. He introduces me to a lot of people, and I can’t remember all of their names.

  On the south side of the building is the editorial staff—the reporters and editors and photographers who cover the news and make a newspaper every night. I expect a frenzy of activity, like you see in movies about newspapers, but it’s a quiet place at this time of day. A lot of people are on phones.

  It turns out that the indoor tree is real. Mr. Withers smiles when I ask about it and points up to the ceiling, where there is a massive sunroof. “It’s a real pain to keep the leaves swept up,” he says.

  He also shows me the press and the new packaging center, where the newspaper is merged with ads from department stores and other inserted items, like Parade magazine in the Sunday newspaper. Mr. Withers explains that the press is running much of the time—not just with each day’s newspaper, but also with specialty magazines and jobs for other publications around the region. The packaging center is vast, an addition to the building that went up just in the past year or so.

  “It’s an exciting time around here,” Mr. Withers says.

  It looks like a nice place to work.

  On the way up the stairs, Mr. Withers tells me that he can give me about $12 an hour to start, and that sounds good to me. It’s more than I have ever made, except for when my father gave me $5 million.

  – • –

  Back behind his desk, Mr. Withers says, “So, my boy, will you come to work for me?”

  I don’t hesitate. “Yes.”

  “Excellent, excellent.”

  “When do I start?”

  “Come on in Monday morning at nine, Edward. We’ll get your paperwork filled out, show you what you’ll be doing, and hit the ground running. How does that sound?”

  “Good.”

  “All right,” he says, standing up and clapping me on the shoulder again. “I’ll walk you down.”

  A few minutes later, I’m back behind the wheel of the Cadillac. My father told me in my dream that it would take me anywhere I wanted to go. I never would have expected that it would be here.

  – • –

  I drive the Cadillac the short distance home, and my mind is swimming. I never thought I would be going back to work, but I trust Mr. Withers to take care of me. The hours he has in mind may lead to some changes in my routine. My 10:00 p.m. viewings of Dragnet will have to be moved. Maybe I can watch it after I get home at night. That means I won’t be going to bed at midnight sharp anymore. My common wake-up time of 7:38 a.m. will probably change, too. Between getting home after work and watching Dragnet, it will be close to 1:00 a.m., at the earliest, before I get to sleep.

  My 10:00 a.m. Tuesday appointments with Dr. Buckley are safe. We will have much to talk about in just a few days.

  And the grocery store
can be visited whenever I need to. My new job won’t affect that.

  I saw in the Billings Herald-Gleaner yesterday that Barack Obama, the new president, says “change is coming.” I wonder how he knew.

  – • –

  At home, I’m retrieving the mail—all advertisements—when I spot the envelope taped to my door. It says “Edward,” but it’s not the precise block writing of my father. Instead, it’s a pretty cursive. Whoever wrote this probably got good penmanship marks in school.

  I set the mail on the stoop and tear open the envelope. Lined notebook paper, the kind I had to write on in school, is inside.

  Dear Edward,

  This is a letter of complaint. The difference between your letters of complaint and mine is that mine get delivered.

  You have not been a good friend to me lately, and I want you to know that. You walked away from me when I was telling you how sorry I was about your father, and you yelled at me and Kyle when all we wanted was for you to come outside and be our friend.

  Friends don’t do that, Edward. Friends talk to each other, and friends try not to be rude, even if they don’t want to come outside. If you’re going to be my friend, you can tell me that you don’t want to do something, and I will understand. That’s what friends do. If I’m going to be your friend, I will tell you if I don’t want to do something.

  I have wrestled with myself over whether to write this letter. Our life has been hard lately, and I don’t need to waste time with someone who isn’t going to be a good friend to me. Your track record as my friend is unclear. I’m trying to figure out if you’re the Edward who argues with a little boy or if you’re the Edward who stood by me in court that day and brought me back here and made me feel good about myself again. Sometimes, I think you could be a really good friend for us. Sometimes, I don’t.

  You might be interested to know that Mike won’t have a trial. After that scene in the courtroom, his lawyer advised him to accept a deal from the prosecutor. He will be going to prison for a while. Not forever, but hopefully long enough that he’ll leave us alone when he gets out. I think he will. The prosecutor told me that Mike gets just how much trouble he is in.

  Edward, I want you to think about a few things:

  If you’re going to be our friend, you have to be our friend all the time. That doesn’t mean we can’t disagree or want some time apart or even get mad at each other. But you can’t shut us out. I don’t have time for friends like that, and I can’t let Kyle rely on a friend who will ultimately let him down. He’s just a little boy, and he’s had enough disappointment.

  Also, friends share. You have never been to our house, though we have asked you over. You have never even come to our side of the street. Your house is fine, and we will hang out there sometimes, but you have to come over to our house, too. It’s only fair.

  What I’m saying is that our hearts and our door are open to your friendship. But you have to come over here and knock to get in.

  We hope you do.

  Donna and Kyle

  Kyle appears to have signed the letter. Like his mother, he has excellent penmanship.

  I fold the letter and put it back in the envelope, and then I turn around and look across the street to Donna’s house.

  Her car is there.

  The curtains are pulled back.

  She is home.

  Nothing is moving on Clark Avenue except for the tree branches in the breeze and the leaves pushed down the street by the wind.

  All I have to do is look both ways and cross.

  THE END

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  So many people helped shape this book, but a few deserve special mention: my wife, Angela, for her encouragement and her guidance on plotting out Edward’s interactions with Dr. Buckley; Greg Tuttle, my colleague, for expertly guiding me through the workings of the Yellowstone County court system; Janelle Eklund, my high school English teacher, for igniting my love of literature and cheerleading this book; and Matt Hagengruber, Craig Hashbarger, and Stephen Benoit for being good sports and lending their names to the cause.

  Edward would never have been on this ride if not for the original endorsement and hard work of Chris Cauble, Linda Cauble, and Janet Spencer at Riverbend Publishing, who believed in his story and were good shepherds, indeed. Alex Carr and the amazing crew at Amazon Publishing have been a joy to work with, and I look forward to seeing where Edward’s story goes from here.

  Finally, I’ll just say this: With the exceptions of those who are (or were) obviously real—Jack Webb and the Dragnet ensemble, Matthew Sweet, the members of R.E.M., Garth Brooks, and the like—the characters in this work of fiction are just that, fictional. That said, some passages of the book were based on real events. Barack Obama was really elected president. Veteran character actor Clark Howat (may he rest in peace) really did answer a letter from a fan (me) and describe how Dragnet was filmed, and he could not have been more of a gentleman. I don’t know if Garth Brooks’s lawyer ever wrote anybody a cease-and-desist letter, but in this case, it’s immaterial. He/she certainly didn’t write one to Edward Stanton, who is fictional.

  Oh, and the 2008 Dallas Cowboys? Sadly, they were all too real.

  Edward’s story continues in

  EDWARD ADRIFT

  Available April 9, 2013

  What follows is the first chapter in Edward’s new life.

  WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2011

  I look at my watch at 3:37 p.m.—3:37 and 17 seconds, because I have the kind of watch with an LED digital display for precision—and stop in the kitchen. I have another fifty-three seconds and could easily make it to the couch, but I stand still and watch the seconds tick off. The seven morphs (I love the word “morphs”) into an eight and then a nine and then the one becomes a two and the nine becomes a zero, and I keep watching. Finally, at 3:38 and 10 seconds, I draw in my breath and hold it. Time keeps going, and I exhale. I look down again and notice that I am standing on top of dried marinara sauce that sloshed out of the saucepan yesterday. And just like yesterday, I don’t have the energy to clean it up, even though it bothers me.

  At 3:38 p.m. and 10 seconds, twenty-one days ago, on Wednesday, November 16, 2011, Mr. Withers fired me from my job at the Billings Herald-Gleaner. I know it happened at that time because as Mr. Withers said, “I hate like hell to have to tell you this, Edward,” I looked directly at my Timex watch on my left wrist, where I always keep it. Its display read 3:38:10, and I made a mental note to write it down as soon as possible, which I did exactly 56 minutes and 14 seconds later, as I sat in my car. A phrase like “I hate like hell to have to tell you this” is a precursor to bad news, and I think the fact that I recognized this is what caused me to look at my watch. I was right about the news. Mr. Withers finished by saying, “but we’re going to have to let you go.” He said a lot of other things, too, but none of them are as important. I couldn’t listen very closely, because I needed to concentrate on remembering the time. The time is now logged, but that’s purely academic. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it, although I hesitate to say that definitively. I can think whatever I want. It doesn’t mean things will happen that way. It’s easier to stick to incontrovertible (I love the word “incontrovertible”) facts.

  That I needed 56 minutes and 14 seconds to get to the car can be attributed to the fact that getting fired is no simple thing. In the movies and on TV, getting fired never seems complicated. Some boss, generally played by someone like Ed Asner, comes out of an office and says, “You’re fired,” and the fired person leaves. But Mr. Withers doesn’t look like or sound like Ed Asner, and he made me sign a lot of papers—things like the extension of my health care benefits through something called COBRA and the receipt of my final paycheck, which included the hours I had worked in that pay period and what Mr. Withers called “a severance,” which was two weeks’ pay, or 80 hours at $15 an hour, minus taxes. The severance check came to $951.01. When I asked Mr. Withers why I was being fired, he said that I wasn’t being fired
per se (I love the Latin phrase “per se,” which means “in itself”) but rather that it was what the company liked to call “an involuntary separation.” He said that often happens when a company needs to cut its costs. Labor, which is to say people, is the biggest cost any company has. Mr. Withers said it was an unfortunate reality of business that people sometimes have to endure involuntary separations.

  “So, Edward, don’t think of it as a firing,” he told me as he shook my hand, after he took my key and my parking pass. “You didn’t do anything wrong. If we could keep you on board, we would. It really is an involuntary separation.”

  I think Mr. Withers wanted to believe what he said, or maybe he wanted me to believe that he believed it. I don’t know. I veer into dangerous territory when I try to make sense of subtext, which is a word that means an underlying, unspoken meaning. I would rather people just come out and said what they mean, in words that cannot be mistaken, but I haven’t met many people who are willing to do that. I will tell you this, though: Another word I love is the word “euphemism,” which is basically a nice way of saying something bad. The incontrovertible fact is that “involuntary separation” sounds a lot like a euphemism to me.

  – • –

  Getting fired, or involuntarily separated, from the Billings Herald-Gleaner has made it a real shitburger of a year. Scott Shamwell, one of the pressmen at The Herald-Gleaner, taught me the word “shitburger.” Scott Shamwell was always coming up with odd and interesting word combinations, and most of them were profane, which delighted me. One time, the press had a web break—that’s when the big roll of paper snaps when the press is running, which means they have to shut everything down and re-thread the paper—and Scott Shamwell called the press a “miserable bag of fuck.” I still laugh about that one, because the press is almost entirely steel. There’s not a bag anywhere on it that I’ve ever seen, and now that I don’t work at the newspaper anymore, I’ll probably never see the press again. I don’t know. Again, it’s hard to be definitive about something like that. If I ever get a chance to see the press again, I’ll take one last look and see if there’s a bag somewhere. I don’t think there is.