“You seem to be going through an awful lot at once.”
Warren turned back toward Jan. Her eyes captured his instantly, as though she'd been standing beneath him with a safety net. He found unusual comfort there. It had been a long time since someone had been able to soothe him with a glance.
“Yeah, you could say that. Crystal, the job, my mom. It's not like I couldn't handle any one of those or that any of them were a surprise. Crystal and I hadn't been working for a while, the company had been running in the red for the past few years, and Mom started showing signs of her age seconds after Dad died. It's the confluence that makes this so tough.”
“You're a whole lot stronger than me. I think I'd be hiding under my bed if it were me.”
“Something tells me that's very far from the truth.”
Jan's eyes glittered. “Let's just say I can appreciate how difficult this must be for you.”
“Thanks.” What she said helped. Simply being in this moment with her made a difference. “Did I tell you I got a job nibble yesterday?”
Jan sat forward. “No, that's great news.”
“At least it's
some
news. To say that the market is a little cool right now would be greatly understating it. I spend a few hours every afternoon working contacts, and this is the first even marginal sign of interest I've gotten.”
“I can't believe I don't know this, but what do you do for a living?”
Warren considered the question for a second, since he wasn't currently doing
anything
for a living. “I was a vice president at a holding company.”
“Sounds serious.”
Warren scoffed. “I was a middle manager for a corporation that owned other companies. Essentially I supervised supervisors.”
“And there aren't a lot of jobs for supervising supervisors right now?”
“There aren't a lot of jobs for anything right now.”
“Oh, I definitely know that. I say a little thank you every time I walk into my office and see that my desk is still there.” She chuckled to herself and then said, “Do you like this âsupervising supervisors' thing?”
Warren had only asked himself that question a few thousand times in recent years. “I think I'm fairly good at it and, you know, people tend to like things
that they're good at, I guess. My father was great at it. He considered managing an art form. I think I let his enthusiasm rub off on me.”
For as long as he remembered, Warren had admired his father. He took his life seriously and yet still seemed to enjoy every part of it. The guy talked about his job as though he were running the State Department, seemed to know everything that was going on in Warren's school and social lives, and treated Mom like she were the heroine in some forties musical. That was one heck of a parlor trick and Warren hadn't fully appreciated how difficult it was to accomplish until he'd become an adult himself.
He realized he'd stopped talking in mid-thought. When he looked at Jan, it became obvious to him that she was waiting for him to finish.
“I don't feel I've actually
done
anything. Managing is just so vague. I mean, you
do
something every day.”
Jan responded with an exaggerated nod. “I do, I do. Yesterday, I helped Mrs. Patel find her teeth. Today, I helped Mr. Larson change out of wet underwear. I hear they're going to give a Nobel Prize for that next year.”
Warren held up a hand. “Nope. I can disparage being a middle manager, but you're not allowed to disparage being someone who helps people. We have to have some ground rules here. I looked this up online the other day. Do you know that nursing is America's most trusted profession?”
“I did know that. We tend to remind ourselves of that as we try to pay the bills.” She paused and
appraised him. “I'm a little surprised that you know it, though.”
Warren tried to treat this casually. “A person can only do so much networking in a day.”
She let it pass. “Is this nibble for a new job similar to your last job?”
“Broadly speaking.
Very
broadly speaking. It's a division manager position for an auto parts company.”
“That could be fun. Are you a car guy?”
“I
have
a car.”
“Sounds like the perfect fit, then.”
There was a bit of rice left on Jan's plate and she scooped up the last of it. A couple of days ago, she let a couple of broccoli florets go unfinished and Warren considered this to be a statement on his skills with the vegetable.
“If you get this job, I guess you won't be fattening me up anymore,” she said.
“First of all,
Janice
, you are decidedly not fattening. I think another of our ground rules needs to be that you don't ever have to worry about the way you look. I mean, really. And second, the office is only a couple of miles away. I'll bring you takeout.”
Jan got a look in her eyes that Warren couldn't read clearly. “It's January.”
“What?”
“Jan isn't short for Janice. My full name is January.”
This struck him as surprisingly revealing. Warren guessed that nearly everyone Jan knew assumed that her full name was Janice. “Do you have eleven siblings?”
“Only two. And, no, my little sister's name isn't March.”
“January. That's nice. Why don't you use it?”
Jan shrugged. “I shortened it in school to fit in. It just stuck.”
“I guess we all do that sort of thing.”
Jan's mind seemed to drift a bit, but then she focused back on him. “So you'd really bring me takeout?”
For the second time today, Warren felt embraced by Jan's eyes. Rather than feeling comforted this time, though, he felt a level of uneasiness that he did-n't particularly mind. “If you wanted me to.”
“It wouldn't be the same as your cooking.”
“Actually, I hear the place down the block makes a mean Sole Vanessa.”
“I'm sure they do.” Jan looked at her hands for a second. For the first time since they'd been having lunch together, Warren wasn't sure where the conversation was going to go next. He found this disorienting in all the right ways.
Then Jan stood quickly, reaching for the plates. “Hey, we'd better clean up so I can get back to my desk. You never know whose teeth I'll need to find this afternoon.”
NINETEEN
Strangely Recognizable
Another day, another hundred miles in the morning. Joseph had stopped wondering if he was going in the right direction or even whether he should direct Will or let Will go wherever he wanted. Though he'd had more than his share of frustration, his experiences the last couple of days suggested that what he needed to do more than anything else was just let these experiences come to him. He couldn't actively seek clues; he just needed to be available when they showed up. He had fewer expectations about a revelation in a road sign. Instead, he waited for another message; something similar to the vision in the store or the “conversation” with his wife.
Will still seemed determined to get him where he needed to go, wherever that was. He'd tried talking to the boy about his latest observations, but Will seemed to be more comfortable with the idea that they were headed
someplace.
Will drove with his usual sense of purpose. After some time on the highway, he exited and started winding down a smaller road.
“Shouldn't someone your age be thinking about college right around now?” Joseph said as Will played music from a band named, aptly enough, The Alternate Routes.
“Yeah, that's what I've heard.”
“You're not buying it?”
Before answering, Will took a moment to pluck out a few notes on his steering wheel guitar, bending the last note dramatically. “It's hard for me to think of myself as a college student.”
“Because you don't like school?”
“School's fine. I'm just not sure what
more
school is gonna give me. I don't think that where I'm supposed to go next has anything to do with professors.”
Joseph tried to get a fix on this notion. As happened during every conversation he had with Will, he tried to draw back on his personal experience. But while the day-to-day of life seemed natural to him, his memories of what he'd been through and with whom he'd interacted continued to be nothing more than an itch in the back of his brain. His immediate reaction was that Will's attitude about his future did-n't feel right, that he was selling himself short in some way, but he couldn't tell if he was reacting this way because of what he felt he knew about the boy or because of some inner sense based on experience.
“So where are you supposed to go?”
Unlike before, there was no hesitation this time when Will answered. “I think I'm supposed to make something.”
“Really? You mean like a carpenter?”
“Not that, I don't think, though I'm really
good with power tools. I can absolutely kick butt with a band saw. That's not what I was talking about, though. I think I'm supposed to create. This probably sounds ridiculously vague to you, but I still haven't figured some things out. Did I mention that I play guitar?”
Joseph watched Will's fingers dancing on the “fretboard” of the steering wheel even as he spoke. “I might have guessed that.”
“So I'm thinking that what I'm supposed to do could be a music thing. Or it could be something physical. I made this, I don't know,
structure
out of sheet metal a couple of months ago and it just
sang
to me. You know?”
“That would be great.”
“Yeah, it would. Or I could go some other way completely. I don't have it all down yet, obviously. But I have this really strong sense that I'm supposed to make something that people can use in some way, whether it's songs or structures or dishwashers or whatever.”
Joseph found Will's sense of animation exciting. The kid was a fascinating combination of nonchalant and driven. Things obviously mattered to him, but he didn't care about things casually. He was either fully engaged in something or not engaged in it at all.
For the first time since he'd found himself in this situation, Joseph wondered about his own job. Was his employer wondering where he was? Did they call home to talk to his wife when he didn't show up for work the day after he showed up in this other place instead? Did his wife update them after Joseph
“talked” with her yesterday â and if so, how did she explain that conversation?
Strangely, it didn't feel as though he were missing work at all. There was no little tickle in his brain about a job. Was he unemployed? That didn't seem right, either. He was really looking forward to his memory returning so he could stop asking himself so many questions. Meeting new people could be very enjoyable, but the enjoyment paled quickly when the new person was yourself.
A few minutes later, the road narrowed and they turned toward a large open park filled with kids throwing balls and flying kites. Joseph hadn't even noticed the weather when they left this morning, but he now saw that the day was bright and cloudless.
“You hungry?” Will said.
“I'm getting there.”
Will pointed off to his left. “The second I saw that hot dog truck, I got very hungry. I think that truck has something I need.”
“Hot dogs in the park sound good to me.”
Will parked the car on the opposite side of the street from the truck and they walked over. Joseph ordered two hot dogs with grilled onions, spicy mustard, and sauerkraut, while Will took his with ketchup only. Joseph found the idea of a hot dog with ketchup extremely dull, but he kept his opinion to himself. Goading the kid to eat more adventurously had been a fruitless exercise so far. Obviously, this was not something in which Will engaged.
They took their food to a bench near the park's playground. As they sat, a large dog with tight black
curls galloped up to them and sniffed at their food. Will started to tear off a piece of his bun for the dog, but just then a slim young woman in very skimpy running shorts came up to retrieve the animal, throwing a leash around him.
“I'm so sorry,” she said. “He's an escape artist. Especially if there's any food around. He's figured out how to slip off the leash.”
“Quite all right,” Joseph said as the woman scolded the dog and pulled him away. Joseph noticed Will watching the woman's legs as she headed deeper into the park. He couldn't blame him; the woman had lovely legs. He tried to think of his wife's legs, but nothing came to him, though he knew instinctively that the woman he loved looked at least as good as this woman when she wore skimpy shorts.
“Do you have a girlfriend at home?”
Will broke his stare, though he seemed to do so reluctantly. “I'm keeping it casual at this point.”
“That was a beauty.”
Will looked off in the distance again. “Yeah.”
“The dog, I mean. A standard poodle, I think.”
Will looked over at Joseph coyly, the wry grin in full bloom. “Yeah. Standard poodle.”
Joseph chuckled and took another bite of his hot dog.
It truly was a gorgeous day out, the warmest of their trip. Joseph felt less inclined to stay in motion than he had previously. It was as though his body were telling him that it needed some time on this bench, just listening and watching. Was this a good thing, as he tried to suggest to himself earlier, or
was it a sign that he was resigning himself in some way?
He glanced over at the playground. Two kids were attempting to climb a rope ladder at the same time, each trying to reach the next rung first. At a curving slide, one little girl was preparing to go down while a little boy tried to get up it from the bottom at the same time. They tumbled off together, stood looking a little dazed, and then ran off to the next piece of equipment.