I’d arrived home Thursday and hadn’t called anyone or done anything for two days. No one knew I was back except Isabel, Dad, and Nathan. Dad hadn’t called; he’d assumed I was busy doing whatever it was young people do, and was delighted when I showed up. I didn’t expect Isabel to call. We shot off some texts, hers full of heart emojis, but she was happy and occupied with Grant and Gertrude—as she should be.
But Nathan didn’t call either, and I wasn’t sure what to think about that.
The idea that one’s happiness can depend entirely on a particular person—it is not possible . . . Austen’s line had returned to me over and over during my two days of sleeping and moping. I hoped she, again, was right.
To be fair, it hadn’t all been sleeping and moping, I’d also sent and received a flurry of e-mails with MedCore. Interviews were scheduled for Wednesday, and they booked me a flight out of Austin Tuesday afternoon.
“You can always change your mind?” Dad’s statement tilted up into a question laced with hope. He leaned forward with his hands on his knees, as if eager for my answer. Eager for a new answer.
“Too late for that. I’ve got a hotel booked for Tuesday through Friday. They sent me terms this morning, so I expect Wednesday’s interview is a formality. They even hired a relocation firm to help me find an apartment. So next weekend it may come down to packing and going.”
“You accepted then.”
I shook my head. “I made it clear I was not accepting. When I say it’s too late, I mean at WATT. It’s changing and my new boss . . . Well, it’s time for me to go. But I do need to talk to Craig first. Despite anything else, everything else, I owe him that. I was wrong to just send an e-mail. He gave me ten minutes on Monday.”
Dad chuckled. “The same lightning bolt, eh? I’m surprised he gave you more than five . . . But he’s going to miss you. Don’t forget those days in the garage. Garages are special places.”
I smiled. Garages were Dad’s treasured places. If you needed to talk to him about something serious or had bad news to relay, you did it in the garage. He had a workbench set up in a corner and it was his creative home. It was also where we connected—Dan, Curt, Scott, and me. If there was one room in the house that had formed us the most, it was the garage.
“Did Dottie order you a cake?”
I snorted and caught myself. “Didn’t call to find out . . . I forgot you knew Dottie.”
Dad knew all WATT’s staff, at least the ones who were part of that original garage bunch. Dottie came on board a couple weeks before we moved into the office building. She had been hired as an office manager, but Craig needed a “garage manager” first, so he brought her on board early. She and Dad had co-managed the packing.
I watched a star shoot across the sky, then realized it was an airplane. It made my eyes prick. I swiped at them. “You wouldn’t recognize WATT now. It’s got over sixty employees and layers.”
“Layers, huh? Rungs on a ladder.” Dad sat back in his chair and joined me watching the stars again. “Don’t sell yourself short. No matter how much it has changed, that company will miss you. It’s made up of all your friends. You were the first engineer; you designed all those gizmos, that kiddie robot that was so hot a couple years ago, that battery, and the—”
“You’re right. It was good work.” I cut him off. I didn’t want to hear about it.
I also didn’t want to hear that “the company” was going to miss me. That wasn’t true. The company had no feelings, and with its growth rate, WATT was no longer an idea, an enterprise, or a start-up. It was a company. Besides, wasn’t that the whole point of It’s just a job? There was no “missing”—on either side.
“Are you running?” Dad whispered the question.
“Every morning.”
That’s not what he was asking, and I knew it. He knew I knew it, because he didn’t comment or clarify. He waited. I waited too and watched the stars. A few flickered and the sky felt like music. Music required honesty.
“Yes,” I whispered back.
Dad reached out and covered my hand with his own, just as I had done to him moments before. He didn’t pick it up or squeeze it. He just rested his on top of mine. It was warm and solid and the perfect weight, that reminder that I couldn’t escape unseen. I swiped at my eyes again with my free hand.
“I accepted a job to rewire Mrs. Harris’s new kitchen.”
“Okay . . .” I choked on a laugh. I had not expected him to follow up with that. “But she’s got to pay you more than a chicken. We talked about this.”
“She is. I printed cards with the pricing schedule you designed and she accepted it. I standardized the whole thing like you suggested. But I wondered . . . What would you think if I invited her out to dinner sometime?”
“You’re asking Mrs. Harris on a date?” I heard my tone. It was almost offensive in the amount of surprise that rippled through it.
I sat up, faced him, and tried again—this time as a sentence, and I smiled as I said it. “You’re asking Mrs. Harris out on a date.”
Dad kept his eyes trained on the sky. “I don’t know that I’d call it a date, but I care about her. She and I have gotten to talking over the past several months, and I’m thinking dinner is a good start—dinner and maybe a movie. Maybe that’s too much for one night?”
“I think you could squeeze it in.”
“Perhaps I’ll take her to La Buona Vita in LaGrange. We went there for your birthday a few years ago, remember?” He slid me a glance. “Isabel ordered that huge cake with the sparklers.”
Isabel. She’d seen my dad, my “relational” dad, as she’d called him, better than I had.
“I remember.”
“It’s a little fancier than what I was thinking for a first date, but the drive will be lovely this time of year.”
I leaned back and watched the music. “I agree, Dad. Do that first and save the movie for your second date.”
Dad’s machine doled out a bag of Skittles every two hours. I let several drop before I circled back each time and swiped the colored rainbow from the catch bowl.
After the third bag, I stood in the center of my studio apartment and surveyed the scene. From the living room, one 360-degree turn exposed every square foot of my home except the shower, which resided behind the bathroom door. The kitchen had been stripped of all superfluous stuff—perishables I couldn’t eat, nonperishables I wouldn’t, and redundancies. I refused to pack and move six strainers or twenty-seven empty Mason jars.
I’d hesitated over the jars. My old piano teacher sent me three jars of jam every August. The day they arrived always felt like my birthday, and I practically licked each jar clean—all the while pushing aside, and yet cosseting, that little nudge, that pinprick, of the something lost that they evoked.