The Grandfather Clock Read online

  “You are broken up. For good. Like,” he searched for words, “she knows this.”

  “She knows,” I said.

  More silence.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s just that, you’ve done this before. Said you were leaving.” Sam was treading lightly on very worn turf.

  “No, seriously,” I said. “I’m at the god-damned airport.”

  “Yeah,” Sam laughed. “This is definitely a new development. But I don’t want to say anything until it’s, I don’t know, official.”

  “It’s official,” I said.

  “Well,” Sam said, “it’s about time. So, you’re getting a clock?”

  “Yeah. It’s over a hundred years old. It’s going to get sold if I don’t take it,” I said. “And it’s a good excuse to get away.”

  “I get it, man. Christie was a nice girl. But she can wear you out.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well,” Sam hesitated. “Just that...it takes a lot of energy to be around her. She’s always busting people’s balls for no reason. She never stops.”

  “Thanks for telling me how you feel now. Seven years later.”

  “What am I gonna say about my buddy’s girl?”

  He was right. “Shit, dude. Say something to save me next time,” I said.

  “Next time I will,” he said.

  “The plane is boarding.”

  “Go have fun,” Sam laughed. “You need to.”

  I had almost two hours to kill in Atlanta. Flying west is no picnic, and if I had planned the trip I would have taken the earliest flight. Fortunately, the A terminal has the Budweiser Brewhouse. The busiest bar in the south. It’s like a bar in a time machine. What takes three or four hours in a normal bar happens in twenty minutes. Normally, you’d hang out in a bar for two or three drinks and watch a girl have a cocktail and read her phone. In the Hartsfield Budweiser Brewhouse, there’s no time. So you immediately attempt to talk to her. Everything is happening in fast motion. If you make an interesting connection, you’ll have a phone number or business card within a few hours, and still never set eyes on the person again.

  Since it was a Sunday, there were weekenders mixing with business travelers getting an early jump. I ordered a 23 ounce beer and talked to a pair of saintly young women from St. Louis who worked for the American Heart Association. They were on their way to Miami for a conference. They were passionate about their work and for an instance I wanted their life. There was nothing curious or benevolent about my work. The best I could hope was that the telemarketers I trained would move on to success somewhere else. My boss actually encouraged me to look for less ambition in new hires so that I wouldn’t have to replace them. I was able to recommend a couple of Miami restaurants. Then they had to catch their plane.

  I decided finally that I should call Vince and tell him that I was coming. It made it clear that I was not planning on crashing at his house, with two babies. Vince was excited that I was coming, but wary. Ever since my grandmother died, our mom had been seriously depressed. She almost never came to the phone when I called. Breaking off my engagement and coming to California looked like an irrational act. He’d borne the burden of my grandmother’s failing health and our mom’s decline. Now another family member was going haywire.

  “I’ll get a hotel,” I reassured him.

  “You can stay here,” he said, unconvincingly.

  “Vince. I want to sleep,” I said with levity.

  “Can’t wait to see you.”

  I had always idolized Vince, and he had never let me down.

  I dozed off on the flight. We were over the desert when I woke up. Bare brown mountains reflected the late sun. We crossed the border between Arizona and California. The Arizona side was green, irrigated farmland. The California side was dry, all the water diverted to Los Angeles. The desert gave way to city lights almost an hour before landing. Grids of streetlights and strands of roads went on infinitely. It was an intimidating sight. The sprawl stopped only when the mountains became too steep, islands in a sea of city.

  I turned on my phone when we landed. I was one of the last holdouts, using a flip phone when everyone else had smartphones I checked my email at home or at work. I texted sparingly on my nine-digit keyboard. Part of the reason for my technological rebellion was that the bank had offered to pay for a new phone, but that would require that I get work emails. That wouldn’t have been a big deal, but I’d recently been promoted. I not only oversaw the call center in St. Petersburg, but I supervised three managers in India. I didn’t want to see their emails at four in the morning. I didn’t take my job home and I was clear on that matter with management. I had trained employees in both inbound and outbound call centers. I had reduced employee turnover and increased credit card sales while reducing costs. In my little world, I was good at my job and the bank, which my colleagues and I referred to as “the mother ship,” left me alone.

  My sturdy flip-phone’s message light blinked. It was a voicemail from Christie. She was crying, telling me to take some time and she hoped we could talk when I came back. I was beginning to feel guilty, but not regretful. I was so mad at myself for proposing. Part of the reason I proposed was my mother. After living with Christie for two years, my mother was beginning to frown on the situation. Three months after my grandmother died, I thought the proposal would brighten my mother’s spirits. And it was also a relatively good time for Christie and me. She’d taken a new job, with better hours and pay. We were house hunting. It seemed right. Once we were engaged, a fear crept in. The things that bothered me really started to bother me. She had a confidence borne in insecurity. She was queen of the good put-down, but often found herself dishing out awkward insults masked as jokes.

  We’d started spending less time together. She was having drinks after work with her people on one side of the bridge in Tampa, and I was on the other side, hanging out at the beach. We just started developing different lives, and I was happier in mine when she wasn’t around. I hoped she could be happier in hers. If I was right to leave, the way I left was bad. But I feared we were doomed and it was better than a divorce. I sent her a text. “Landed safe. Got your voicemail. I will be in touch.”

  I got in a cab.

  “Where to?” the cabbie asked.

  Where to. Good question.

  2

  After the humid night in Orlando, Los Angeles felt like autumn. The evening air was dry and felt foreign. My mood was improving by the mile. On the flight in, I decided I would stay as close to the beach as I could, without getting too expensive. I asked the driver to go to Newport Beach. I was wishing I had a smartphone. We drove up and down a stretch of Pacific Coast Highway and I had him drop me off at a decent hotel that was within sight of car rental place. I walked in and got a room for $100 per night, breakfast included.

  “You’re looking at $900 to rent this vehicle, if you aren’t returning it here,” the agent told me.

  “And what would it cost if I were to return it here,” I asked, just so I knew exactly how much this clock was costing me.

  “$450.”

  Ouch.

  “And we’ll have to get the Suburban from the John Wayne Airport location,” he said. “Another $69. Unless you want to go there and get it.”

  Thirty dollar cab ride, maybe.

  I walked back to the hotel and took their courtesy shuttle to John Wayne. I called my office and told them I was sick. I hadn’t filed for vacation with H.R., so I needed to get creative with how to deal with my absence. Lying in the hotel bed the night before, I tried to figure out how to make my $5,000 last. I wanted to quit my job and start new, but I wasn’t ready to pull the trigger.

  With five rental desks lined up at the airport, and a quiet Monday morning, I hopped from desk to desk trying to get a good deal.

  One place was offering an SUV that would fit the clock for $900. The next desk wouldn’t compete.

  I approached a bargain brand who’d opted to
share their space with a brand I’d never heard of. “I need a vehicle that is long. SUV or van. I need it for a week and I’m returning it to Tampa, Florida. The big guy down there is at $900. What can you do?”

  Omar tapped away at the keyboard. I marveled at the number of keystrokes he was hitting, when it was usually just a few little mouse clicks. He frowned.

  “$842,” he said. “For an Expedition.”

  “That’s a lot of gas,” I said. Ten miles per gallon all the way across the country.

  “Let me see, let me see,” he tapped away again. “I might have a Grand Cherokee coming in.”

  “Come on,” I encouraged him. “You know you have some vehicle back there that you’d just love to dump on the guys in Tampa. Something people come back to the desk and ask for something else.”

  A light bulb went on. “You know. It’s not in our inventory.” He tapped some more. “I’m gonna need a manager.” He picked up the phone.

  Ten minutes later I was behind the wheel of a big white van. It looked like an unpainted church bus. It hadn’t been rented in two months, and they’d taken it out of inventory to use as a courtesy van in the event theirs broke down. It set me back $408. The seats rearranged so that the clock could fit snuggly in the center aisle. I hoped.

  I met Vince for lunch at a taco stand in Fullerton. He was on a job with his tiling business.

  We exchanged a bro-hug. “Nice ride, Mikey,” he said.

  “Hey, man. You’d be impressed. I bargained like I was in Tijuana to get that thing.”

  “Don’t try to go to Tijuana with that thing. They’ll think you’re into human trafficking.”

  I was starving and ordered two extra tacos with my two taco combo.

  “So,” Vince said, trying to break the ice over the head of the elephant in the room. “You left Christie.”

  “Yep,” I said with a mouth full. “I don’t even want to get into it. We were at a wedding in Orlando on Saturday. She just pissed me off. It was petty, but it was the culmination of things.”

  “The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said. “So, totally over. Not going to try to ‘work on it’ when you get back.”

  “Over. Done.”

  “Well, good. Good for you,” he laughed, and added, “Thank god.”

  “What the hell? Sam said the same thing! If everybody wanted me to break up with her, why didn’t someone say something?”

  “You know the answer to that, dude. Then if you stay with her...”

  “Yeah, it would be all weird,” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “Kind of like when you dated Tanya,” I said.

  “Hey, at least I didn’t propose to her. And I knew she was a train wreck, Mikey. Or is it ‘Michael?’”

  My family always called me Mikey, but I’d gone by Michael since I started college. Mostly because it was written in construction paper on my dorm room door.

  “So, what’s the plan? Get the storage unit cleaned out, drive the white whale back to Florida?”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s a start. I want to quit my job, but I don’t really have a plan. I have grandma’s money. Not much else.”

  “I thought you bankers were rolling in it.”

  “Not quite,” I said.

  “Well, come over tonight. Sara’s making ribs. She’s excited to see you. With the twins we haven’t gotten out much. The key to the storage unit is at the house. Come over early. We’ll eat at 6:00.”

  Vince had a modest, ranch house, but with lots of space, in the Tustin foothills. I kept expecting Kevin Arnold to walk down the street in his New York Jets jacket. Vince had been in the tiling business since high school, and he’d spun off on his own. He now had four separate crews working for him. His floors were beautiful, to say the least.

  Sara had lost the baby weight, and little Vince Junior and Jessica were as cute as advertised. Sara made dinner and I fed pureed carrots to both kids while Vince showed me pictures of his latest tiling jobs. We each hauled a kid outside and he showed me some stones he’d laid, as practice for an upcoming bid for Disney.

  “You talked to Mom lately?” I asked, sipping a cold Sierra Nevada.

  “I talked to Dad. Not Mom,” he said.

  “Same here,” I said.

  “Yeah. She was good at Fourth of July though,” Vince said. “Better anyway. You should stop by on your way back. It’s little out of the way, up to I-40, but it’s a good chance.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “She’ll be glad about Christie too,” Vince smiled.

  “Jesus, you all make her out to be horrible,” I laughed.

  “No, no. Sorry. Just not right for you. You’re too easy going. She made you stressed out.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I realized that I was becoming, I don’t know, negative. I felt hopeless. Everything started to bother me, but I didn’t have the energy to say anything. She was in her own world, and I didn’t dare enter. I was waiting for an excuse to leave. I guess I took it. I’m just glad it’s over.”

  “Let it all out, bro.”

  “And she was so competitive. Always trying to impress people, to the point of making them uncomfortable.”

  “Sara always said Christie would walk around and look at our stuff, and then say how she was getting one, but better.”

  I chuckled. “I know exactly what you mean. Half the shit she said to other people wasn’t true. We’d be at dinner and she’d tell someone about getting a new TV or some random thing and I’d think, well now we either have to go buy one, or never have these people over at our place.”

  “Insecure,” Vince said.

  “Whatever. Again, thanks for saying something before I did something dumb like get engaged,” I said. “Oh wait.”

  “Man, how much did you spend on that ring?”

  “$3,000,” I said.

  “Not bad.”

  “Not bad,” I nodded. “Not good either.”

  “What the hell are you going to do with that huge clock? You probably don’t have a place to live when you get back.”

  “Minor issue,” I mumbled.

  “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “Fly by the seat of your pants. First, it was when you went off to Florida for college. Then you move in with Christie. Now, you’re off to the next thing. I don’t know,” Vince shook his head, grinning, “What’s your goal?”

  “My goal?” That was a good question.

  “Yeah. What do you want in life?”

  I rubbed my forehead. “I know what I don’t want.”

  “There’s a start. What don’t you want?”

  “I don’t want to work at some meaningless job and go home each night to a colorless gray existence.”

  Vince’s face winced, and I could tell he thought I was talking about him.

  “No,” I jumped in. “I want what you have, only different. You have built something. You are out there every day working with your hands, with people, making things. That’s something. And it supports what is important to you.”

  “It takes work,” he said.

  “Do you know what I do?”

  “You run customer service for a bank.”

  “Wrong. My job isn’t to train people to help customers. My job is to train people to help the bank. A successful outcome is one that makes the bank money. Credit card holders who pay their bill in full every month? They are a bank’s nightmare.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “You only have yourself to blame. Back to my original question. What do you want? Not everyone gets a chance to start over. Don’t squander this opportunity.”

  I took a detour past my old high school on the way back to the hotel. I’m not the least sentimental about high school. I was eager to get far away when I graduated. Not because I’d had a bad experience. I had a good time. I just wanted something different. I wanted to be out of the city. There was something about the South that seemed foreign, yet welcoming.
Everything was familiar and different at the same time.

  Tustin High was a working class high school. Aside from baseball, the athletic program was pathetic. I played some organized volleyball and worked in a family-owned hardware store. I spent a lot of time on the beach, taking a short bus ride. The year I turned 17, I went from 5’11” to 6’3” and was no longer intimidated by the beach volleyball games. I could lay down a decent spike, and block well enough, but I was a finesse player. I had a knack for knowing where the ball was going and making a playable dig. I had a regular partner named Pick. He was a Vietnamese high jumper. He was cocky, and got under the other teams’ skin even when we weren’t winning. I was probably a better player at 18 than in my late twenties. Then I started playing a lot with Sam. We got good, but when I started dating Christie, I had less time for it.

  I spent almost all of my last year in Tustin out at the beaches. My dad was close to retirement and my parents were spending more time in Santa Fe. My grandmother still lived a half-mile away and would hear nothing of relocating. I think that my mother felt guilty for moving to Santa Fe full-time before my grandmother passed away. But once I was out of the house, their life in Santa Fe was fresh and new, and many of their Tustin friends had already left the area.

  The street names were all coming back. Santa Clara, Holt, Lucero, Pacific. The school looked the same, except for a couple dozen temporary classrooms that filled a parking lot. I noticed some graffiti that might not have been there 10 or 12 years before. I pulled the van on to the 55 freeway to the beach. I headed south toward Balboa. I recognized many of the beach cottages along the main boulevard. Not a lot had changed. I parked my giant van in a metered space on the street and walked down a brick street to Joey’s, a pizza bar that I used to hang out in. It was a slow Monday. I had been by the place a few times over the years when I was visiting, including the previous year for my grandmother’s funeral. I had seen a girl working there that I knew vaguely from growing up.