It wasn’t quite four o’clock—my dad got off at five—so I decided to bike to his job.
The employee parking lot of the water treatment plant was still full, and after a quick scan, I didn’t see my dad’s truck, so I went in to the secretaries at the front desk and asked if they could page him. One of them, an old lady with a crazy perm, squinted at me through her petri dish glasses. “He’s not here anymore,” she said.
“He’s gone for the day?”
“He’s just”—she waved her hand through the air—“gone.”
“Let go, she means,” said a brusque middle-aged secretary.
The linoleum seemed to tilt beneath my feet. It was happening: my life as I knew it was over. My father had been fired; we were going to have to move. I’d lose Jay and Toshi and New Veronia; I’d lose everything.
I biked back to my house in a daze. Maybe we’d have to move to Alabama now, or Canada, even, or some other awful place. From the end of our driveway, I stared at our little box of a house, tilted slightly to the left, with dirty windows and pieces of the roof flapping in a breeze. But still, it was my home, and I wanted to stay there, because I felt certain that the next place would be worse.
I turned away and biked a few doors down, to Toshi’s. I walked in without knocking, like always, and found him perched in front of the computer with the TV on behind him. He was looking up statistics, the only thing he ever used the computer for since his dad had set the parental controls. He said, without taking his eyes from the monitor, “Oh good; you came over. I just got back from hanging out with Jay.”
I felt a twinge of jealousy that they had done something without me while I had been watching my world fall apart.
“Did you know there are less than three fatal bear attacks a year? Jay makes it sound like… shit,” Toshi said as he finally looked at me, “what’s wrong?”
He came and sat beside me on the couch, and we stared at the TV for a while as I struggled to calm myself down. On the screen, men in fatigues were shooting other men in the head. When their skulls broke apart, it sounded like a softball hitting a garage door. A gold tooth fell at the feet of one of the army men.
I took a deep breath. “My dad got fired,” I said. “I just found out.”
Toshi tilted his head. “That’s all? Hey. Come on. I know it sucks, but it’s really not a big deal. I thought you were going to say he was in the drunk tank or something and you needed a bunch of money to bail him out.”
“You don’t understand.” Tosh’s dad, as a landscaper, got fired from jobs all the time. People would get mad that the yard Toshi’s dad created didn’t look exactly like the yard they’d pictured in their head, or the job would end up taking three times longer than promised, or the whole tri-state area would be out of blue spruce. “Last time my dad got fired, we had to move. It was horrible. I never saw my friends again.”
“Oh, yeah,” Toshi said, “how horrible that you met me and Jay.”
One of the army men pumped a round into what looked like a woman, but the force of the bullets dislodged a wig, revealing the body as a man’s.
“So now I’m going to have to leave the both of you,” I said. “And what if, wherever we move, there’s no one for me to hang out with? Moving to a new high school—that’s almost impossible.”
After a long time, when the army men had finished the job and were celebrating with whiskey, Toshi said, “Maybe you have everything wrong, and you’ll get to stay in this crappy town. It’s full of asbestos here anyway. It will be okay. Everything will work out; you’ll see.”
I said, “You don’t understand. You don’t have any idea.”
Toshi made his face like a carp’s, those unblinking, sad eyes, that mouth open in a way that made you think there was only slick nothingness all the way down.
I waited up for my father; I wasn’t going to let him sneak into his bedroom without telling me what was going on. When he came in, the time was almost one in the morning. He wasn’t expecting to see me: when he did, he stumbled a little, and then he threw back his shoulders and walked slowly and deliberately.
“Bennet,” he said, “you’re up late. Isn’t this a school night?”
“Dad, where have you been?”
He shrugged. “Out with friends.”
I knew that this was a lie: my father had no friends. Maybe there were a few guys from work he’d drink with on occasion, but now he didn’t have coworkers. “Where have you been, really?”
“At the roadhouse.” He shrugged again.
“I went by the plant today.”
He stood awkwardly in the middle of the living room, and I swear I saw the throb of his pulse quicken in the groove alongside his neck. Finally he said, “Why would you do that?”
“I found out that you got fired.”
“That’s not true,” he said. “That’s not true at all.”
Infuriated, I clenched and unclenched my fists, then chewed rhythmically on the inside of my own cheek. “Is this why you were so weird to me about that fake patio, at Jay’s house? You kept complaining that I lied—is that because you’ve been lying to me about everything?”
“No, that’s different—I’m not lying.” My dad strode into the kitchen and got a beer. “You’re the kid; you can’t lie to me.” He snapped off the cap and gulped from the bottle.
“I went there,” I said. “To the plant. They told me.”
“Who told you? Carol? That woman is batty.”
The fury stormed around inside me; I could feel it shoving my insides.
“I don’t know what you think you figured out,” my dad said. “But whatever it is, you’re wrong.” He leaned against the fridge as if this were any old casual conversation.
My head started a powerful ache. “Then why are you drinking so late at night? If you have to go to work tomorrow?”
“I’m not going to let a punk kid like you tell me what to do. You’re wrong, Bennet. I’m still working. Placed on a special assignment, lately. Schedule shifted around a little.”
Maybe I was hearing things; maybe those women in the front office had my dad confused with someone else, or they didn’t know about the special assignment. That one lady had seemed pretty senile. Maybe all the stress of trying to get girls and starting school again was messing with my reality. “Are you sure?” I said. “You’d tell me otherwise?”
“I swear to god.”
I didn’t understand how my father could always sound so right; maybe it was a skill I would learn with age, too.
He said, “But I do have something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
A hot wave of anticipation compressed my stomach. “What is it?”
“I want you to be excited about this, I really do. I want you to be… happy about something for once.”
“I’m happy,” I said. “What is it?”
“I want you to be happy because of something I did.” He pinched the skin above his nose, and fine wrinkles appeared across his forehead.
“What did you do?” A heaviness descended on my body, like every part of me had fallen into an exhausted sleep except for my overactive worry.
“Dammit.” He swayed a little on his feet. “I didn’t even do it. Actually, it wasn’t even me. It was your mother. Your mother called.”
The lamp in the corner brightened as if in a surge of electricity, and I squinted my eyes against it. “She what?”
“Called. On the phone.”
His toneless voice sent a fast thrill through me. “She hasn’t called in…”
“I know,” my father said.
We paused there in the now-dim-again light and waded through our own thoughts. My mother’s voice was husky, or it used to be—maybe she’d quit smoking cigarettes by now.