The Geography of You and Me

The only time Owen had ever seen him was at his mother’s funeral, where after the ceremony, in the midst of all the handshakes and kisses, the hugs and condolences, he’d noticed a man handing his father a business card. Dad had taken it with numb fingers, nodding mechanically, and Owen watched as he slipped it into the pocket of his suit. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that he brought it up.

“I don’t know if you met my cousin Sam at the…” he trailed off, unable to say the word funeral. In the days leading up to it and the days that had followed, he’d somehow managed to avoid it altogether, talking around it, the word a black hole that had opened up in the very center of their lives.

Owen shook his head. They were sitting at the kitchen table, an untouched casserole dish between them, one of dozens that were stacked like bricks in the fridge.

“He offered me a job. In New York,” Dad said, raising his eyes from the table, where a column of light from the window spotlighted a thin layer of dust. Already, the house no longer felt like the same one they’d lived in just ten days before.

“New York City?”

Dad nodded. “He owns a few buildings there,” he explained. “He wants me to manage one of them.”

“Why?” Owen asked, and Dad was silent for a moment. The question wasn’t a necessary one. He’d been out of work for almost a year now, a contractor in a town where there was nothing new to be built. He’d picked up work as a handyman here and there, enough to keep them going, but it wasn’t permanent. He’d needed a job long before the accident, and he still needed one now.

“Because,” Dad said quietly. “Because I’m not sure we can stay here.”

It wasn’t the answer Owen had been looking for; it wasn’t even a response to the right question. He didn’t know whether his father meant for financial reasons or emotional ones, whether he’d given this a lot of thought or was just saying it out loud for the first time now, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it yet himself.

But even so, he understood.

“Let’s go out west then,” he said, sitting forward at the table. “Let’s just get in the car and drive, like you and Mom used to do.”

Dad’s eyes flashed with pain at the memory, and he shook his head. “This isn’t just some lark, O,” he said. “We have to be logical about this. There’s no work for me here. If we sell the house—” He paused, his voice cracking at this, then pushed on. “We’ll have the money for whatever’s next. But who knows how fast that’ll happen, and for now he’s offering us an apartment with the job. And I just can’t…”

“… stay here,” Owen had finished. He breathed out, then raised his eyes to meet his dad’s. “I know,” he said finally. “Me neither.”

It was true. Too much had changed. His mother was gone, and the house didn’t feel like theirs anymore. Even his two best friends were different. At the funeral, Owen had watched the pair of them—who had said all the right things and been nothing but supportive—begin to laugh helplessly when one tripped over nothing at all, his arms windmilling before he managed to right himself again. They were trying their best to hold it together, their laughter threatening to bubble over, and from across the lawn, Owen just stood there—alone and apart, solemn and heartbroken and hopelessly, endlessly, miserably sad—and it was then that he felt the first pinpricks of doubt that things would ever be normal again.

It had always been the three of them: Owen, Casey, and Josh: a steadfast team, a solid unit. They’d grown up playing hide-and-seek and then tag, soccer and then football; they’d studied together a thousand times and found a thousand ways to avoid studying at all; they’d talked about girls and sports and their futures; they’d teased each other mercilessly and had been there for one another in the most surprising of ways. But in that moment, everything was different. They were over there, and he was over here, the space between them already too big to cross.

And as it turned out, Owen and his dad left town before he even had a chance to try, his best friends becoming just two more items on the list of things they left behind.

Now his knees felt unsteady as he watched Sam approach him from the other side of the lobby. He was short and dark and broad-shouldered, the opposite of Owen and his dad in every way, and he offered a hand when he was close enough, which Owen shook warily.

“Nice to see you again,” he said, though they hadn’t actually met before. “Quite a night, huh?” He didn’t wait for a response. “I’ve been doing the rounds today, checking on all my buildings. Obviously, this thing has caused a lot of hiccups. Any chance your dad’s around?”

Owen opened his mouth, then closed it again, unsure what to say. But it didn’t matter anyway. Sam barreled on without giving him a chance.

“Because I gotta tell you, I’ve got a boatload of problems here, too many for the doormen to be handling on their own.” He reached out and put a beefy hand on Owen’s thin shoulder. “Listen, I know you guys are going through a rough time, but the whole reason to hire a building manager is so there’s someone to manage the building, you know? And on a day like this, it doesn’t look too good when he’s nowhere to be found.”