Page 40 of Engineering a Love Story

“That’s it, then,” he says when I finally pause. “You’re divorced.”

I explain that Ash and I have an appointment with a mediator. “It takes a while, I guess.”

“Yeah? And what happens now?”

Plans circle in my mind, my salary, my rent, how I’ll make it all work. But I don’t expect my father to be comforted by any of this, and I worry that attempting to argue my position with him will only make me wobblier.

He wants to know what I’ll do for money. “Will there be any, from him?”

I never told my father about the agreement the Kelseys made me sign, though it wouldn’t surprise him, I don’t think. He’d understand their self-protective suspicion.

I ask him not to worry about my finances, though asking people who have always worried about money not to worry about money is like asking them not to breathe.

He’s quiet again, and I mention last night’s ballgame, hoping to revert us to small talk. This works for a few minutes as we rehash the game and lament the sorry state of the bullpen.

When we’ve exhausted that topic, a rare silence sits on the line, and this makes me nervous. I feel fragile, like I won’t be able to properly defend myself if he attacks. I decide I’ve fulfilled my duty. He knows how to reach me now. I tell him I have to run to meet a friend for a late breakfast.

“Wait, you need to—”

“Really, I have to go.”

After we hang up, I sit for a few minutes. I try to read the paper, to work up concern about the doom and gloom that seems to dominate the news in our new century, the tight election polls and the treacherous stock market. But the anxiety and guilt from that call is too much, and I get up and grab my bike. Knowing Ash, this bike is nicer than anything my less-than-novice skills deserve, but I love its lightness. I easily heft it to my shoulder and carry it down the stairs.

This time, I head right for the bike path and ride hard. Before I know it, I’m in Lexington. Realizing how near I am to the Minuteman National Park, a place I sometimes sought when Ash and I first moved to the city and I felt claustrophobic and in need of trees, I make the quick detour to the park. Once there, I ride slowly on the dirt track, passing the historical placards. I don’t stop to read them, since I already know what they say, but I continue through the park until I reach Concord.

Here, I slow and walk my bike along the quaint streets. From certain angles, this town is so charming, it seems lifted from the pages of a storybook. It’s hard to believe people attend to normal errands here, but there they are, coming out of the bakery and the tiny hardware store. It’s a far cry from the main drag in my old town. Maybe that bustled once too, but I never saw it. Now the main streets near my father’s house boast a Subway, a video-rental place, a few bars, and many blank storefronts.

The cycling has calmed me, but I’m still agitated from the call with my father. Until I met the Kelseys, I didn’t realize that anger and cynicism aren’t universal baselines. I thought everyone was angry and cynical, natural emotions when you feel it’s only a matter of time until the next bad thing happens. Or at least that’s how it always felt in my father’s family. There’s the wearing down that comes from years of physical labor, low wages, and inadequate healthcare. And then the lightning-strike calamities like what happened to my mother.

My father and his brother Joe drew high lottery numbers and avoided the war in Southeast Asia, but their two brothers went. Billy returned relatively unscathed and quickly married and joined Joe at the paper company. But Eric, who was closest to my father’s age, was “never right” after his service—that’s what my father used to say. Like his brothers, Eric went to work at the paper mill, but it didn’t last. He remained single and went on living with my grandparents in their house on a country highway that led out of town.

Eric drank, though generally it was cans of beer at home in my grandparents’ backyard amid the scramble of old picnic tables. It pleased my grandmother that Eric didn’t spend money in a bar. He passed a lot of time out beside the cinderblock firepit, drinking into the night, until the January morning my grandmother failed to find Eric in his bedroom, and she came down to see he wasn’t outside either.

I was young when this happened, but I remember my father heading out that day to look for Eric. The police even got involved, a development that thrilled Wade and me at the time. It was nearly dark by the time Eric was found in a snowbank near a hiking trailhead a half mile from my grandparents’ house. No one knew if he was trying to go into the woods, maybe to lose himself intentionally. If he accomplished what he’d set out to do or if it had all just been some dumb accident.

No one spoke of it again. My grandparents died not long after from some indecipherable mess of high blood pressure, dementia, and what we were told at the time was old age, but thinking of it now, they couldn’t have been out of their sixties.

My father and his brothers worked, divorced, remarried, got laid off, were injured on the job. Their wives, including my mother, spent their twenties and thirties mothering, and we all grew up chasing each other around at one uncle’s house or another.

And then my mother died. It had been a shock, a before-and-after break in life. But it had also been only one in the line of tragedies: Eric, another brother out on extended disability, stolen cars, factory strikes, drunken brawls. Then, after all that, the factories started closing, the evaporation of a dream that never really was.

Bad things happen. You’d be foolish to expose yourself to unnecessary risks when there’s so much already out there, just waiting for you. Cycling back to Cambridge, I’m aware that I can’t let my father’s view of the world dictate my life. I don’t live with him any longer. I’ve made a break from that place.

Still, that trip down memory lane makes daydreaming about Seth Murphy seem outlandish. What is it I imagine might happen? Hauling my bike back up the stairs to my apartment, I try to envision a scenario that results in Seth (pink shirt, purple tie) standing by the rotary phone in my father’s kitchen. I have to lower my bike on the second-floor landing and lean onto its handlebars to absorb the absurdity of that image. It was weird enough Ash ever stood there, though the first time that happened, I hadn’t known enough to recognize how awkward it should have been. None of it bothered Ash anyway. He always acted like my family and hometown were irrelevant, things that couldn’t touch him. And I suppose he was right.

All this mooning around is silly. Seth can call. Or not. It doesn’t matter. Not in the long run.

***

When my phone rings at ten that evening, I’m lying on my sofa reading my latest classic. I gingerly lift my phone from the floor, not wanting to be disappointed again. Seeing the San Francisco number, I decide before I even answer that I won’t make a fuss about his silence.

Seth says hello and the gravel of his voice bumps across my skin. He asks how I’ve been and I make a noncommittal sound, mostly because my mouth has gone dry. Seth rushes on in an apologetic tone. “Work has been crazy. I was in LA all week, staying with Raf. I’m sorry, I meant to call days ago. The time zones kept getting away from me.”

His excuses sound lame, though I also suspect he’s telling the truth. He’s scattered. The fact that he hasn’t called might not be meaningful. Likely, none of this is meaningful.

“It’s fine,” I say, dismissing all my angst from the past week.

We continue to trade pleasantries. It sounds like he’s moving around. I hear a rustling of clothes or sheets.