Chapter 23
CHAPTER 23
J ACK PLACED HIS BOOK ON HIS NIGHTSTAND AND GLANCED UP at the wall clock. It was nearly 6:30 p.m. In a few minutes, Tom would be finishing up at the store, packing up his things, and returning home to his family for supper. He would put his tools away and neatly place all the paperwork on his desk, but he would leave the brass desk lamp on for Jack. The first time Tom gave him the keys to the store and told him he could let himself in whenever he wanted after hours, Jack thought Tom had simply forgotten to shut that light off. But the soft illumination that greeted him that first evening soon became a consistent, silent invitation to enter a space that had since become sacred to him.
Jack did not consider himself a spiritual man, but it was undeniable that Tom had come into his life when he needed it the most. He had given Jack a place to stay and the means to support himself. Working at the shop had restored a crucial part of him, the part that was most vulnerable yet the least visible.
His dignity.
Before Tom offered him the apprenticeship, Jack had been employed at Foxton Elementary School as a night janitor. He had taken the job for a few reasons, one being that he could do it after regular operating hours when the school was nearly deserted. He had struggled in school his whole life. He was a late reader. The words on the page were a code that took him months longer than other children to unlock. He preferred to sit in the back of the class, far from the blackboard and the teacher’s desk, where he thought no one would notice him. In high school, Becky had been the one who thrived in that environment, not he.
Working as a janitor, though, proved to be far more enjoyable than he imagined. Each night when the school was empty and he freely wheeled his trolley from classroom to classroom, he couldn’t help but smile when he saw all the beautiful signs of life from the children or the brightly colored bulletin boards that revealed the care the teachers had all so clearly taken to make learning fun.
He worked there for two years, wiping down desks, polishing the sticky doorknobs, emptying trash cans, and cleaning the toilets. It had been just the kind of job he needed, offering steady pay and late hours that enabled him to be close enough to life without having to actually engage with it. He breathed in the innocence of those children through the pencil drawings on their desks and the apple cores they tossed in the trash cans. All of it spoke to him of a lightheartedness that had escaped him in his own childhood and the years thereafter.
He especially loved classroom 8, at the end of the hall. On the front door hung a greeting that proclaimed Magic begins behind this door! Long yellow wands with sparkly glue, top hats cut out of black and gold construction paper, and stars crafted from aluminum foil adorned the entranceway. Jack knew that had he been a student in classroom 8, he would have loved learning a lot more than he had back in Allentown.
Of all the things he would miss at Foxton, it would be the proximity to that classroom. He always went to greater lengths to clean it more carefully than he did all the others. It was easy to love this particular teacher from afar because it was so clear how much she loved her students and her job.
So when Billy Flodstrom, the head of the school’s grounds crew, sat him down at the end of that June and informed him that they had to let him go, Jack was devastated. He felt as though he had lost the only remaining good thing in his life, particularly the chance to enter classroom 8 each night. He truly believed that, as the sign said, there was magic behind that door.
“With all the budget cuts in the district this year, there’s money for only one night janitor next fall,” Billy said quietly. “I’m sorry, I really am.” He stared down at his hands folded on the metal desk, avoiding eye contact with Jack, his discomfort rising off his skin like perspiration.
Jack sat calmly across from him, his back straight and his eyes focused straight ahead, a position he fell into during times of stress. This had proven to be one of the more positive remnants of the war for him.
“I’d appreciate it if, when you’re firing me, you looked me straight in the face. It’s the decent thing to do.”
Billy reluctantly lifted his eyes. “I feel very badly about this, Jack. You’ve always done a great job here.”
Jack watched as Billy fidgeted and his gaze shifted away. He had always proved unable to focus on Jack’s face for more than a second, and now his eyes traveled in the direction of the window. It was easier to fire a man who was invisible.
Jack wondered if anyone at Foxton had ever really seen him at all.
For Jack, life since coming home had been a series of challenges that offered unexpected gifts of healing. Five years after Tom had first sat down next to him at the VA hospital, Jack was now well aware the extent to which that meeting had shaped his life for the better. He often questioned whether he’d still be alive if had Tom not started a conversation with him that day.
For on that afternoon, Jack was not actually reading his copy of Rolling Stone . Instead, he had buried his face in the pages of the magazine as a shield, contemplating whether he still had the strength to go on living. He had endured several painful skin grafts after his injury, and he still struggled to come to terms with the fact that the doctors had repaired as much of his facial trauma as they could. The only thing that had gotten him out of bed once he had moved back East was his job at Foxton Elementary. But now, that had been taken from him as well.
So what Tom probably believed was merely a simple exchange between two strangers regarding the lyrics of a powerful new song had a far greater meaning for Jack. Tom’s eyes had never floated away from Jack’s face that day, even after he saw the full devastation of his injuries. They remained there as he excitedly spoke about Bruce Springsteen, rattling off several other songs he liked by the E Street Band. It was both mundane and extraordinary at the same time. Tom had treated Jack as if he were just any other guy.