Chapter Four

Monday, October 11th

“How’d the job hunt go?” Dad asks when I walk in the door. He’s sitting where I left him a few hours ago—in the living room, watching ESPN while solving a newspaper crossword during the commercials. Dad used to look at the want ads in the paper, but he’s abandoned that hopeless pursuit. I say nothing, but my discouraged face tells the story of my job search.

“Welcome to my world,” he shouts over the TV.

“Just not many jobs in Fenton for the world’s second most promising young writer,” I crack. Josh Brown, of course, has never and will never work a hard day in his privileged life.

Dad shrugs and puts down the paper. “Who’s the first?”

“Josh Brown,” I respond, then tell Dad the story about Josh’s return to FHS.

“How can I become a great writer if I can’t even be the best at crappy Fenton High?”

“You should think about something more practical, Carson. Learn a trade.”

“And that worked out so well for you,” says his asshole ungrateful son.

He sips his coffee, which is cold, and says nothing, which is colder.

Dad planned to start college, but Mom got pregnant with Carol, so he went to work on the line at GM truck assembly. He’d work a while, get laid off, get called back. After a few years of this, soon after Caitlin was born, he started going back to school to learn a trade. By the time I was born, he’d moved off the line and become a pipefitter. He made enough money that we could afford to move from Flint into Fenton. Things were good, but then that job started the same pattern—work some, get laid off, work some more. When Carol was in high school, Dad went back to school a second time and started all over in machine repair, which he always said was the best job in the plant. Nothing but problem solving all day, and no matter what happens, they’ll always need machine repairmen—or so he thought. But then the economy tanked again. He was laid off, except this last time was maybe the last time.

“Sorry, Dad, that was mean,” I confess.

“Don’t know how to break it to you, son, but no matter who you are or what you do,” he says slowly, trying to sound wise, “there’s always going to be someone better at it than you.”

“Wow, Dad, thanks for the pep talk. You should apply for a job as a football coach!”

He sips more coffee. “Son, I’m just telling you how the world works. Take or leave it.”

“Is that what you and Mom told Caitlin? That she wouldn’t make it?” I snap in anger.

Dad gulps the coffee since I’ve broken the unwritten rule of the Banks household. Don’t talk about Caitlin, don’t even mention her name. I know some of the other things he said to her—‘We can’t live with what you’ve done and what you’ve become. Take it and end this!’—so nothing would surprise me. The trauma of that Christmas morning shook all shock out of me.

The real question I want to ask, but never can, is what happened that morning. But they don’t know I heard it all. Dad doesn’t know how much the choice he gave Caitlin haunts me still.

Dad stares at me for a second, not angry or hurt—more confused. After a few seconds, he rises from his chair. He taps me on the arm as he passes by me. “Come outside with me.” He walks into the kitchen, places the coffee cup in the sink and heads toward the door. Do I follow his orders—that worked for Carol—or defy him like Caitlin? Which sister am I most like? I follow him into the kitchen, but that’s as far as I can make my body move.

“I got stuff to do,” I say. “I need to get something ready for creative writing club.”

“Seems like you already made up your mind that you’re not the best, so why bother?”

I hate when Dad, or anyone, calls me on my self-hating bullshit. Why can’t they let me whine and wallow in my envy and anger? It’s a space Caitlin and I shared too often.

“Unlike those crossword puzzles I do, the world’s not black and white,” Dad says. He puts on his work jacket and opens the door. “But maybe, Carson, you already know everything.”

He closes the door behind him and I stand in the kitchen. Here’s what I do know—not just about Dad and his lost American dream, not just about Caitlin’s lust for fame and her lack of talent, not just about Mom’s plans to strike it rich with some new career. Like my goal of being the best writer at school, like all those expectations people build up around high-school milestones like homecoming and prom, around holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas, it seems high hopes just set up bitter disappointment. I don’t need Tim’s talent with trigonometry to figure out this simple equation— Despair measures the distance between daily life and dreams.

“You coming or not?” Dad shouts. I look out of the window. It’s cold for October and I can see his breath. He opens the garage and ducks out of sight. He’s challenging me to decide if I want to be the good son or the bad son. You’d think after that test failed so badly with Caitlin on Christmas morning, he’d never, ever ask one of his kids to make that choice again.

I head upstairs, turn on the computer, sit down, but there’s nothing but a blank screen.

Despite my daily no-porn pledge, I head straight for skin sites. I block out the knowledge, not just of Caitlin, but that any of these girls are real. They’re props, not people. I know from Thien that real people—at least any real girl I’m likely to meet—are nothing like these girls on the screen. Real girls, in my limited experience, don’t shout your name, scream in ecstasy or do the sexual things like porn chicks. Like most lessons, I learned that one the hard way.

I stop when I see another blonde with big tits. Not Caitlin, but it could be. How can I keep doing this? How can I keep looking at this knowing my sister is doing this—or worse?

Unable to look at the sadness of porn or the horror of the empty screen, I do what I should’ve done in the first place. I put on my hoodie and head outside to be with Dad.

He’s in the garage, cleaning the snowblower. “What are you doing? It’s October!”

“I like to be prepared.” That’s Dad to a T, which might explain why we’re still in this house. Dad’s a big saver, I would say. Frugal, Mom would say. A cheap bastard, Caitlin said.

As we work on the snowblower, we talk about nonsense like Detroit sports and school, certainly not about Caitlin. He deals with the insides, changing spark plugs and the like, while I work on the chute and auger. When I reattach the snowblower discharge chute, it makes a clicking sound.

“You know what that means?” Dad asks.

“No, what?”

“That the work is good and the parts fit together perfectly,” he continues. “Too loose, no click. Too tight, no click, just lots of cracking. But that clicking sound means it is just right.”

“Are you Goldilocks or Mr. Goodwrench?” I ask.

He laughs again. Dad doesn’t laugh much anymore, and if I were him, I’d feel the same. He’s lost his job, one of his daughters and he’s hanging on to his house by his grease-stained fingertips. My dad can fix about any machine or finish any crossword, but he can’t repair his broken family or his busted American dream. His life has sometimes been too hard and for a while, maybe too soft. One day soon—the day that I bring Caitlin home to him—maybe Dad’s life will be just right.