By Peter Gordon
Just after New Year’s, my father lost the engineering job he’d held for nearly twenty years. He and hundreds of other smart, educated, scientifically gifted men were unceremoniously unseated and cut loose from the only life they knew.
He decided to go down to North Carolina to look for a job because he heard engineers were in high demand there. North Carolina was like a magic password to this kingdom of untold possibility where everything was inverted, every obstacle to happiness swept away. The plan was for my mother and me to join him once he’d found something and got settled. I was in the midst of applying to colleges and had already been rejected for early admission by the music school I had pinned my hopes on. My father said the colleges down South were as good as anywhere and once we had established residency we could pay in-state rates – not that this was about money – and I wouldn’t have to slog my cello case through the snow.
The night before he left, he came into my room and lay down on the bed next to me.
“I know what it is when you think you’ve been waylaid and think nothing will ever be good again,” he said. “But believe me, this is just a bump in the road, me losing my job, you losing your –.” He tried to find the right word but it was pretty apparent he had no idea what I’d lost. “The funny thing about dreams is that when one gets lost you get to find another one. Because there will be another one that comes along. There always is.”
He drove off the next morning before the sun came up. Within two days of his arrival in Charlotte he had four interviews lined up. It was like in the movies, he said. The first firm picked him up in a limo. The second company greeted him with a warmup jacket with its corporate logo emblazoned on the front and my father’s last name on the back; they even got the size right. Within a week he accepted a job offer from yet another suitor, one even more enamored of him than the first two. The next day we got special delivery of a North Carolina barbecue basket and had a long-distance family celebration dinner with the phone receiver upturned in the middle of the kitchen table, him eating the same thing as us on the other end of the line. Chicken, pork ribs, hushpuppies, cornsticks, green slaw. He’d say, Okay, now the chicken, and we’d all pick up a chicken leg. Now let’s try the ribs, and we’d all bite into a rib at the same time.
The next time he called, a few days later, he asked my mother and me to both get on the phone. He told us he’d come to a realization. It hit him like a lightning bolt out of the blue. It was nothing he expected, or anticipated, or God knows had gone searching for. It turned out he hadn’t just moved, he’d moved on. He said the phrase once, then repeated it slowly, emphasizing the on in a way you knew he’d practiced over and over to get the inflection just right. What it boiled down to, he said, was him staying where he was – in North Carolina – and us remaining where we were.
For how long, Michael? my mother asked.
For forever, Margaret, he answered without hesitation in the same flat, factual, knowing tone he answered any question you could ever ask him about bridge suspension or dead load.
Are you on some new medication? she said. Are you drunk?
He let the questions roll off of him. He swore none of this was planned. He was as surprised as anyone things had taken this turn. Believe him when he said this was the exact opposite of what he wanted for us as a family. This was one hundred and eighty degrees from how he saw our future playing out. He never expected to be the sort of man who turns his back on his responsibilities and he didn’t expect us to understand because he barely understood it himself. The only way to describe it was like waking up from a long dream and seeing yourself for the first time, this new version of you that is facing in a new direction and can’t ever turn around, can’t ever look back.
Peter Gordon is a fiction writer living in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in a wide range of publications, with recent and forthcoming work in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Post Road, BULL and elsewhere.
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