“You can’t be here, bro.”
“Why not?”
“Because you don’t work here anymore, man.”
“That will change.”
Scott Shamwell arches an eyebrow, and just for a moment he looks like John Belushi in the excellent movie Animal House, which always makes me laugh.
“How do you figure?” he asks.
“I wrote to Mr. Withers and asked for my job back.”
“What did he say?”
“I haven’t sent the letter yet.”
Scott Shamwell comes closer, until he’s less than a foot away from me. His eyes look sad. He reaches out a big freckly arm and sets his hand on my shoulder.
“Ed, buddy, I really hope that works. But unless you get the job back, you can’t be here, man.”
I drop a board.
“Why?”
“It’s just not the way things are done. If you got hurt—”
“I’m not going to get hurt,” I say.
“I’m just saying, if you do, it will be a bad scene, man. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
“I guess not,” I say.
“All right, man. Let me help you put this stuff back in the car.”
We gather up my things and dump them in the trunk. Scott tells me to leave the wheelbarrow, that he’ll bring it by my house in a few hours with his truck so it doesn’t scratch the roof of my Cadillac.
I’m about to leave when Scott Shamwell, who has on a short-sleeve pressman’s shirt and is holding himself in the cold, whistles and motions for me to roll down the window. I hit the button, and the glass recedes into the door.
“Eddie, call me after Christmas, and we’ll go out and do some radical shit.”
“OK,” I tell him.
He turns and goes back into the building at a jog. I head for home, with a right turn on North Twenty-Seventh, a right on Third Avenue, a right on Division, and lefts on Lewis and Fifth Street West before another right onto Clark Avenue, which leads me home. I don’t even care about the left turns. I’m that disappointed.
I leave the tools in the car and trudge into the house. I don’t feel very good. I don’t know what to do with my time. If my life right now were an Adam-12 episode, it would be called “Log 152: An Involuntarily Separated Employee Can’t Help Anyone.”
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2011
From the logbook of Edward Stanton:
Time I woke up today: I’m not sure what to put. After the debacle (I love the word “debacle,” although I hate actual debacles) at the Herald-Gleaner, I didn’t fall asleep again until after 1:00 a.m., and I woke up to pee at 2:14, 3:31, 4:16, and 5:27. I finally woke up for good at 10:22, when the phone rang.
High temperature for Thursday, December 8, 2011, Day 342: 26
Low temperature for Thursday, December 8, 2011: 13
Precipitation for Thursday, December 8, 2011: 0.06 inches
Precipitation for 2011: 19.40 inches
At first, the ringing phone folds itself into the haze of my dream, a sandy vision in my head that slips away from me the moment I realize that I am awake.
I push myself off the bed and run to the extension in the kitchen wearing my underwear and just one sock, on my left foot.
“Hello?”
“Edward, thank God.”
A funny thing happens when I hear the voice of Donna Middleton (now Donna Hays, since she got married), my best friend. It’s as if my brain fast-forwards through the time that I’ve known her. I remember when she moved across the street from me: September 12, 2008. I remember when I met her for the first time: October 15, 2008. I remember that she didn’t like me, and because of that, I didn’t like her very much, either. But that didn’t last. She and her son, Kyle, became my very good friends. We had good times together. I even built Kyle a super-awesome three-wheeler called the Blue Blaster. And then Donna met Victor Hays and married him, and he became my friend, too, but later he took them away from here.
“Donna, why are you calling me?”
I realize immediately that I have said the wrong thing. The phone call surprised me.
“Please forgive me, Donna,” I say. “I had a bad night.”
Her words come at me fast.
“Edward, I promise you, I’m going to double back and ask you about your bad night, because I’m really sorry to hear about that. But can I tell you something first?”
“Yes.”
“It’s about Kyle.” Her voice is urgent.
“Kyle?”
Any vestiges (I love the word “vestiges”) of sleep clear my head immediately. My heart beats faster, and I wish at once that I were six hundred miles away in Boise right now with Donna and Kyle and not here in my stupid kitchen in stupid Billings.
“He’s been expelled. It happened just this morning. Holy crap, Edward, I was on my way to the grocery store, and I got a call from his principal, and he says Kyle can’t come back to school the rest of the semester at least. My kid! My beautiful, smart kid. I…I just…how do you even…”
There are a million—not literally a million, but a lot of—things I want to ask Donna, including whether her grocery store has self-checkout stands, but instead I say, “Slow down.” In my head, I hear Dr. Buckley’s voice and the things she said to me many times. Slow down. Take it in small pieces. Tell me what happened. Tell me what’s wrong. My memory of Dr. Buckley whispers the words in my ear, and I say them out loud on the telephone.
“Tell me what happened.”
“Edward, it’s all so incredible, I just don’t even know how to begin. I mean, you know it hasn’t been an easy transition for Kyle here.”
“I know.”
“He had a lot of friends there, and seventh grade is a really tough time to change schools, because all of these other kids, they’ve been together for years, and Kyle’s had to figure out how to find a place with them. It’s been hard. His grades have been slipping all year, and at first, you know, we figured maybe it’s just the adjustment and a different set of teachers here. We were confident he’d catch up, but he hasn’t. If anything, it’s gotten worse.”
“OK.”
I rub my bare right foot on the kitchen floor, and it feels something hard and raised against the linoleum. I look down and see the marinara stain. I resolve to scrub it up today. I’ve waited long enough.
Donna keeps going. “On his last report card, he had a D in algebra. A D! Math is his favorite subject. His marks for conduct were bad, too, and we knew then that we were up against something big, because he’s never had that kind of trouble.”
“OK, but how did he get expelled?”
I rub my foot against the stain again.
“I’m getting to that. I just wanted you to, you know, have some background. He got expelled because…God, I can barely say it.” Donna’s voice goes into a low whisper. “Edward, he called his English teacher a cunt.”
I giggle.
“Edward!”
I giggle again.
“I’m going to hang up.”
“No, don’t. I’m sorry.”
I hold the phone away from my face and cough real loud to clear my throat.
“I’m sorry.”
“I want to know where he could have heard such a word,” she says.
I have no idea. Scott Shamwell is the only person I know who uses the word “cunt” without any shame, but he gets away with it only because there are no women on the press crew. Anyway, I don’t think he’s met Kyle.
“He probably picked it up from another boy,” I say, trying to be helpful.
Donna starts crying. “I don’t know what to do. I asked Kyle what in the world has happened with him, and he said he hates living here, he wants to be back in our house across the street from you, that you’re the only friend he has.”
I silently thrill at this, although I immediately wonder if I should let Donna know that. Donna and Kyle and Victor left here in June, and I miss them.
“What did you say?” I ask.
“I didn’t sa
y anything. I sent him to his room so I didn’t kill him. Not kill him, kill him. You know I’d never do that. I need to talk to Victor, but he’s out of the office this morning and he’s not picking up his cell. I know Kyle misses you. We all do. But I can’t see that just giving him whatever he says he wants is going to fix what’s wrong here. You know?”
“Yes.”
The crying has stopped. “Would you have room for him? If we were to let him come see you, I mean?” she asks.
“Yes. Of course.”
She sniffles. “OK. Let me talk to Victor. We’ll figure out what to do from here.”
“Good.”
Again, I slide my foot along the soiled linoleum.
“Edward,” she says, “why did you have a bad night?”
“Um…”
“I feel really bad that this has been all about our problems. What’s going on there?”
I press at the edge of the sauce stain with my toenail, trying to lift it. It’s no use.
“Donna, I’m going to have to call you back. OK?”
“What—”
I hang up.
— • —
The spilled, hardened marinara comes up without any problem once I apply a rag soaked in hot water and some scrubbing to it. It then occurs to me that this will leave me with one spot on my kitchen floor that’s cleaner than the rest, which is, of course, unacceptable. I go back to my bedroom, pull my grubby clothes from the bottom drawer of my bureau, slip into them, and then I return to the kitchen and fill the mop bucket with warm water and floor cleaner.
It’s when I’m sweeping up, clearing the floor for washing, that I’m thinking of 8:17 a.m. on Saturday, June 4, as I stood in the driveway of Donna’s house, across the street from mine, and I waved good-bye to her and Victor and Kyle. They moved to Boise because Victor’s job with the railroad got transferred there.
I can’t say I was surprised. I mean, I can actually say the words “I was surprised”—that’s easy—but I wouldn’t believe them if I did. Victor was talking about the possibility all the way back in October 2010. It was October 31, which I remember because we were handing out Halloween candy to the neighborhood kids when he said something about it to Donna and she nodded. I badly wanted to ask why he would even consider moving to Boise, Idaho, and leaving this great neighborhood, but I didn’t say anything. I just wished hard that it wouldn’t happen, and you can see what wishing leads to—nothing good. By March, all that remained was for Kyle to finish up school here so they could pack and move.
I’ve noted before that it’s silly to think that time actually speeds up. It doesn’t. It’s just an illusion. But it sure seems to move quickly when something you don’t want to happen is imminent (I love the word “imminent”). June came so fast, figuratively speaking. My three best friends—my only three friends, really—left town, and I’ve been sad ever since. I talk to them on the phone, but it’s not the same. I don’t like talking on the telephone. I also exchange e-mail with Donna and Kyle, but that’s not the same, either. Donna is the best friend I’ve ever had. She really knows how to call me on my bullshit without being a beeyotch (a word I learned from Kyle, and one I still don’t quite understand). Seeing her words on my computer screen is better than nothing, I’ll concede, but I would prefer that I could see her in person every day, like I used to. I liked how her hair would get lighter in the summertime and the freckles on her nose would look more pronounced, even though all of that was just a trick of the light. I liked how she walked really fast and stiff when she was angry. I liked how she could make me smile by smiling at me, when everybody else who smiles at me just makes me nervous.
As for Kyle, I met him on October 15, 2008, and so I’ve known him for 1,148 days of the 4,684 days he’s been alive. (That means Kyle was born on February 9, 1999, making him twelve years, nine months, and twenty-nine days old.) I’ve known Kyle for more than 24 percent of his life. That means I’m invested, and that’s why it hurts that I don’t see him every day. He’s been gone from here for 187 days, and that’s 187 days of getting smarter, growing taller, and becoming closer to a man. I used to measure Kyle’s height once a month along the side of my little garage, because I could plainly see that he was growing fast, but what my eyeballs told me was no match for solid data. The data is still there on the garage, written in blue ballpoint pen for anyone who wants to see it, but the last measurement happened on June 1 of this year. Between March 1, 2009, when we took the first measurement, and June 1, 2011, when we took the last, Kyle went from 4 feet 10 ⅜ inches tall to 5 feet 6 7⁄16 inches tall—taller than his mom. It’s a shame I can’t tell you how tall he is now. I’ll never paint that garage again, so I at least have the measurements we took to remember that he was here.
I’ve tried to blame Victor for my friends being gone, because if Donna hadn’t met Victor, she wouldn’t have married him and there would have been no railroad job in Boise to take them away from here. The problem with blaming Victor is that it forces me to assume that nothing else would have changed, and I’m not comfortable assuming anything. That Dr. Buckley retired and I lost my job go to show that a lot has changed, not just the presence of Victor and his job in Boise. I prefer facts, and while it is a fact that Victor’s job led my friends away from me, it’s also a fact that Donna and Kyle love him and want to be with him and are happy they found him, and I think that should be given at least as much consideration as anything else. And even though I’m unhappy that my friends are gone, I like Victor too much to blame him. Donna and I were already good friends when he came along, and he tried hard to be my friend, too, which isn’t always easy. He even asked me to serve as a witness when he married Donna at the courthouse, which was nice of him to do.
All this thinking about my friends moving away inspires another thought. If Donna and Victor are willing to send Kyle here for a few days, I’ll have time to spend with him before I have to fly to Texas. We can watch football games, go for walks, build things in my basement workroom. I will ask him about his troubles at school. I will tell him about the shitburger year I’ve been having. We’ll go outside and get a new measurement of his height on the garage, something that we badly need. It could be a good thing for both of us, and I remember that Dr. Buckley once said that “mutually agreeable” outcomes are the best kind. She’s a very logical woman.
I mop the floor, and I’m happy about this idea I have. When I’m done, I’ll call Donna back and tell her what I’m thinking, and then I’ll hope that she and Victor are amenable (I love the word “amenable”) to this course of action.
Happily, I dip the mop, like I’m Fred Astaire and it’s Ginger Rogers.
I’m pretty funny sometimes.
— • —
I’ve finished in the kitchen, taken the wheelbarrow back into the garage (Scott Shamwell left it outside, just like he said he would), had a shower, put on my good clothes, and had my breakfast of oatmeal—along with my fluoxetine and new diabetes drugs—when the phone rings.
“Hello?”
A voice I know instantly comes back at me.
“Edward, it’s Nathan Withers.”
This is incredible. The mailman hasn’t even picked up my letter and already it’s gotten results.
“Hello.”
I hear him clearing his throat.
“Edward, my boy, I’ve always shot straight with you, haven’t I?”
I’ve never seen Mr. Withers use a gun, but I recognize this idiom.
“Yes.”
“I intend to keep doing so,” he says. “I heard you were here last night, trying to fix those steps on the south side of the building.”
“Yes.”
“You can’t do that. I don’t want to hear about you being here again. Am I clear?”
I want to cry. “Yes.”
“Now, listen,” he says, more softly than when he told me never to visit the Herald-Gleaner again. “I know it’s hard. My boy, I would have never let you go if I’d had any other choice. Now, I’m n
ot supposed to tell you that, but again, I’m shooting straight with you. Working here is something you’re going to have to let go. It’s hard, and you did good work, and you don’t deserve what happened to you. Have you ever heard the phrase ‘deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it’?”
“Yes. Clint Eastwood said that in Unforgiven.”
“That’s right. You’re a talented man and a good worker, and somebody will appreciate that and give you a job, if you want one. But it won’t be here. If you need a recommendation, I will write you one. If you want to have lunch sometime, I’ll buy it. But you’re not getting your job back. Do you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“OK. Edward, have a good Christmas. Life is so much more than where you work. Find something you want to do, something that belongs to you and nobody can take away, and do that happily for the rest of your life. I know you can.”
“I will try.”
“That’s good. Take care.”
Mr. Withers hangs up.
I want to go back to bed.
Unfortunately, I have to pee first.
— • —
It’s 1:57 p.m. when I wake up for good. I woke up thirty-three minutes earlier and an hour and twelve minutes earlier to pee. While I have no statistical data to back this up, I can say with near-certainty that I’ve never peed this much in my life.
The reason I woke up for good is an idea. It’s one of the best ideas I’ve ever had. Again, tracking my number of ideas and their respective qualities is not something I ordinarily do, so I’m making this statement not based on empirical fact but on gut feeling. I don’t imagine that I’ll ever completely warm up to gut feelings, given their intrinsic (I love the word “intrinsic”) lack of reliability, but in recent years I’ve learned to accept that I have them.
Now that Mr. Withers has stated without equivocation (I love the word “equivocation”) that I will not be going back to work at the Billings Herald-Gleaner, I am not bound to be in this house or in Billings. Furthermore, as my lawyer, Jay L. Lamb, has made clear, I’m fucking loaded. I have never really thought of it that way, but I remember that was Scott Shamwell’s reaction when I told him how much money my father left me when he died. “Bro,” he said, “you’re fucking loaded. Why are you working here?” He meant it as a rhetorical question, but in time, Mr. Withers answered it for him by involuntarily separating me.
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