Chapter 12 A Challenge You Have Overcome #3
Jeanne slipped out. “Oh please.” Steve should have been writing cover letters.
He should have been meeting with his headhunter.
Instead, he offered up a yellow legal pad with a handwritten screed.
Dear Erin, As much as I enjoy your presentations—very—I find myself incapable of stepping onto your cool platform together with the team.
I am a book editor, and content provider, aka writer.
I am not an animator, coder, or video editor.
My texts do not need performers. They interact right here on the page.
Andrea said, “You’re not serious, are you?” Because here she was, building her home business hour after compassionate hour, and all he wanted was to burn his ships. “You’re not sending that anywhere.”
“Why not?” He was proud of his manifesto, his jeremiad.
“You should be working on next steps.”
“I am!”
“This is not one of them,” Andrea said, because what was Steve thinking?
Actually, he was thinking about how he’d given up on poetry so he could earn a living.
Ha, he thought, the joke’s on me. He was thinking about technology and whether he could find another job without boot camp which Steve’s brother, Dan, insisted was the answer.
Dan knew a musicologist who had changed careers that way.
You came to camp a baroque music specialist, coded nonstop, and emerged a programmer.
“Is that your phone?” said Andrea.
Steve picked up and said, “Speak of the devil,” although he’d only been thinking about his brother.
“How’s it going?” Dan said.
“I’m contemplating coding camp.”
“Great. I’m telling you! It’s the way to go,” Dan said immediately.
“I’m not so sure.”
“People do it all the time,” said Dan.
“I’m not people,” Steve replied.
“I’m just saying, think out of the box.”
You’re an insurance agent, thought Steve. Meanwhile, Dan’s wife Melanie got on the phone. “Hey, happy anniversary!”
Steve exchanged looks with Andrea, who sat close enough to overhear. “Thanks,” he said, as Melanie asked, “How are you guys celebrating?”
It felt like a trick question. Not what are you doing for your anniversary, but how are you guys doing?
When he got off the phone, Andrea said, “Only Melanie would remember that.”
“So you forgot too,” Steve ventured hopefully.
“Oh, I didn’t forget.”
“Well, you didn’t mention it.”
“You know what?” Andrea said. “I’m tired of reminding everyone of everything.
” She had been emailing students, and now she closed her laptop, because all she did was say, Don’t forget to send me your next draft, and time to register for the next SAT.
She was the scheduler and list-maker and timekeeper. What else is new? said Jeanne.
“You always take offense,” said Steve. “You are personally offended at everything I do.”
“No,” said Andrea. “It’s what you don’t do. It’s what you constantly ignore.”
“I’m not ignoring anything.”
“Nate heard from Brown today.”
Instantly Steve’s tone changed. “Was he rejected?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“What? He didn’t tell you?”
“No, he didn’t say anything.”
Steve hoped against hope. “So maybe…”
“That’s how I know.”
Steve glanced down at the entryway to check for shoes.
Nate must have taken refuge at Mackenzie’s house.
He didn’t like his own house at the best of times—and Steve couldn’t blame him.
Unhappiness filled every room. Why should he come home?
Why would he tell his parents anything? He would leave just like his brother; he would disappear into the ether, leaving them to bicker over dying houseplants.
Not yet. Steve and Andrea heard the garage door rumbling below and there was Nate in his bike helmet. No Mackenzie, just their own kid, huge and strong, nose red, cheeks glowing.
Nobody spoke—not even Jeanne. In fact, Andrea could not hear Jeanne’s voice at all. She just walked up to Nate and wrapped her arms around his chest, which was the highest she could reach, and said, “I never went to Brown.”
“I didn’t either,” Steve put in from the kitchen table. “And look at us. Look how well the two of us turned out.”
Nate pulled away and Andrea studied his face.
She saw stubbornness there, and frustration, a little sadness, but mostly surprise.
It was the first time he had been rejected from anything.
“You’re gonna be great. Nate the Great!” she told him, and Steve remembered Nate at four in his homemade superhero cape.
“This is just the beginning,” said Andrea, and Steve loved her for that—for her hope, her battered optimism.
If only she’d stopped there. As Nate headed to his room she could not help calling after him.
“Why don’t we sit down this weekend and plan your next applications? ”
Nate’s voice floated back. “No thanks.”
Steve threw up his hands. “Did you have to mention that?”
Surely Jeanne would have had a comeback, but at that moment Andrea had no idea what she would say. It was a strange feeling, like shaking water from your ear. “Oh well,” she told Steve, “I had to ask.”
—
The next morning, Steve got the call. Cody ushered him into Erin’s office, and she told him how much his work had been appreciated, and how much the company had changed and how unfortunately Hillier was restructuring, which meant new roles for everyone.
Steve said, “And no roles for some.” This interruption startled Erin. She seemed to forget her lines, so Steve encouraged her, “Do go on.”
He would have preferred to quit. Much preferred to type and send his letter, but he didn’t have a chance.
He simply walked out in the middle of the day.
Briefcase in hand, he joined the throngs in midtown, the guys in ski hats, and the other guys in suits, and the tourists with their kids shopping for Christmas in the glass department stores.
So, this was freedom. Perfect emptiness.
This was what he had been waiting for. What did it say about him that his first impulse was to buy something?
He wanted to go out and spend his nonexistent money on a treat, a lavish gift—but of course he didn’t.
He kept walking. He walked all the way down to the West Village where you could purchase antique tricycles and letterpress stationery. Then he walked back to Penn Station.
What he really wanted was dark chocolate.
Andrea liked good chocolate, especially with hazelnuts or almonds—but he didn’t buy any, because she worried he was eating so much candy.
He found a florist instead, and stood in front of the glass refrigerator case, a morgue for roses.
You could get a dozen in a long box like a coffin.
“Special occasion?” the tiny saleslady asked.
“Anniversary. One day late.” He wasn’t sure why he confessed to that.
“Long stem red,” the florist told him with authority, but the roses looked vampiric, almost black. The orange roses were much better, flaming colors, perfect for a firing—except the flowers weren’t for him.
He looked at potted orchids, azaleas, cacti—maybe a little hostile for the occasion—and then he saw it, an overpriced ficus standing in a ceramic pot, an entire tree with a slender gray trunk, and abundant fluttering leaves. “I’ll take that.”
Now the saleslady frowned, as though she was concerned for him. She tied a red ribbon around the trunk and handed him a blank card. “Careful, careful,” she warned, as he left the shop and struggled with the door.
The whole thing was a struggle. The heavy pot and tickling leaves right in his face.
He almost fell stepping onto the escalator at the station.
He wrenched his back, but he fought on, wrestling the tree onto the train.
There he sat with the pot on the floor in front of him.
Who bought a ficus in the city and took it to New Jersey?
Apparently, he did. He should have asked Andrea what she wanted—probably nothing.
His back was seizing, and he wished he’d bought the flaming roses—but a tree had roots.
It was alive. Meanwhile, the florist’s card was the size of a postage stamp—much too small to say what he was thinking.
That he was starting over. That he was glad and disillusioned all at once.
That he was lucky to come home to Andrea and Nate—and Zach, who had just arrived for winter break.
That this tree reminded him of the song, although it didn’t come with a bird or a feather or an egg.