Chapter Fifteen
Right away, he started looking. There seemed to be plenty of opportunity out there, with all the companies that had moved into the area since the end of the war.
But his only job interview experience was when he’d applied at Tuck he still had it.
Why, then, would he want to do something so…
laborious? Good for the body, he said—and added that he shouldn’t have to explain why the job appealed to him.
But, she wanted to know, how were they going to get by on what he made?
She brought in almost nothing from the dance lessons she was giving.
Not even half the grocery bill. If he expected her to get a real job, they were going to have to talk about hiring a babysitter.
It was a lot of change, all of a sudden, she said.
He told her she didn’t need to get a job; he’d come up with a new budget, and they would make it work.
They’d have to trim some corners, was all.
He’d sell the Buick he now wished he hadn’t bought brand-new off the lot last year; he’d get something used and cheap instead.
They wouldn’t make any big purchases for a while.
She loved that Buick. “It’s a lot of change,” she said again.
—
He spent the first half of each shift feeding steel wire into a machine that made cone-shaped coils, and the second half attaching those coils to crossbars and fastening them together with extension springs to make understructures for sofas and armchairs.
The work, in some ways, was closer to his engineering minor than anything he’d done at Tuck far from it, you had to stay alert to avoid getting injured.
The company was based in Maumee and was small, with just three facilities—this one employing sixty people.
There were nine other men at stations similar to Felix’s, and down at the other end of the workroom, ten men building wooden furniture frames.
Between them: the fabrics department, where they pulled bark cloth and velvet off great rolls and cut it and ran it through the stitcher; and the polyurethane foam and stuffing department, where they cut pads and cleaned and combed cotton into layerable sheets.
Felix’s nicked-up hands ached at the end of the day in ways they hadn’t since basic training, but he punched his time card secure in the knowledge that he’d put in a good eight hours, that overtime was possible, that he was responsible only for his spot, within his station, and that the next shift would pretty much be the same as the last.
At lunch, some of the workers dispersed, but the majority gathered in the enclosed porch that opened off the loading dock at the back of the building, where there were picnic tables and a bay door that let in fresh air.
Most of the men had been in the Second World War.
Two had done a stint in Korea, and one had fought in both wars and was recently retired from the service.
Over sandwiches and thermoses of coffee, these men talked, sometimes, about what campaign they’d been in, what raid, what battle.
They told stories that ranged from funny to dead serious.
The heavier, more harrowing accounts, Felix noticed, were told calmly, almost without emotion.
The facts were allowed to speak for themselves.
The person who kept the story wheel turning—the one who would prompt people to talk at whatever table he was sitting at, or at any of the six tables, since he tended to move around during lunch—was one of the wood workers, a guy named Bishop, who was around Felix’s age, wore a flattop and horn-rimmed glasses, and had an infectious smile.
He’d spent the war as a plane mechanic on a carrier in the Pacific and had seen plenty—he’d been at Midway, Guadalcanal, Okinawa—but the stories he told about his years in the service were all on the light side. Training mishaps. Pranks.
It occurred to Felix that there were probably a lot of men who, like him, were asked about the war by people who hadn’t been in it—spouses, well-meaning friends—and just didn’t want to say.
Because it was too hard to do justice to the memories, maybe.
Because the emotions attached to them couldn’t be casually revisited.
The porch, at lunchtime, was a safe discussion field.
You didn’t have to explain anything you didn’t want to.
You could stop midsentence and no one expected another word.
It was interesting to listen in on, but it occurred to Felix that the baton was eventually going to come his way.
He’d already acknowledged to the guys in metalworks that he’d served on a cargo ship, but he couldn’t see himself opening his mouth to expand on that, to speak about the Teague and not have it lead to—the Teague.
He worried that whatever he tried to say would break his composure, which was something he’d rather avoid, if possible.
He moved his lunch venue—casually, inconspicuously, he hoped—to the little break room near the front entrance of the building.
—
On Saturdays, Margaret often taught a class or two at the studio, and Felix was in charge of Tom. She was always telling him how wild Tom was around her. But around Felix, Tom was quieter. He was like a pH strip, maybe, changed by whatever he was currently steeped in.
They went to the movies. They went to Owen’s Ridge after each heavy snow.
Tom had taken an interest in models—cars and planes and boats—so they sometimes went to the hobby shop and found him something to build.
One Saturday, Felix took him ice skating at the outdoor rink next to Hedleston’s Auto Lot.
As soon as he got on the ice, Tom found a couple of other kids from his class and off they went, smooth as little swans.
Felix hadn’t been on skates since college.
The blades added almost two inches to his height, making him seem to tower over everyone else, and he expected to be wobbly but wasn’t; he moved almost gracefully, in fact, the muscles in his legs remembering the moves it took to balance.
A dozen or so kids, a dozen or so grown-ups were going around and around.
The rink manager came over the loudspeaker and interrupted the organ music to remind them that there was no shoving.
A woman in a short red coat passed Felix on the inside, her brown hair lifting over her collar.
She met his eyes and smiled. When she passed a minute later, she smiled again, and this time he smiled back.
Was this flirting? If it was, he was flattered.
It was like being mistaken for someone else, and going with it for a few minutes.
He was skating close to the outside wall now, where spectators rested their elbows.
He lost sight of the woman, then spotted the back of her coat as she stepped off the ice to greet someone waiting for her.
A handsome fair-haired man with his arms out. They embraced.
Those were the easiest flirtations, Felix thought, and the safest. The ones with no chance of going anywhere.
Then his eye caught on a man in a leather jacket leaning over the wall up ahead, watching him approach.
Augie. No doubt, Augie. But when Felix looked over his shoulder, it was someone else entirely, a complete stranger.
He drew one foot across the path of the other as he rounded the turn—and went down.
—