The Futures(15)

“British Columbia—near Vancouver?”

“In the interior, actually, about seven hours away.”

“Small town?”

“Yes, sir.”

Michael crumpled up the résumé. “Tell me about yourself.”

I launched into the routine I’d been perfecting the previous few months. My experience was thin, with none of the internships that everyone else had done, but I had other talking points. An economics major interested in the efficiency of the free market. A varsity athlete who knows the value of teamwork and discipline. So on and so forth. But Michael interrupted me before I was even halfway done.

“No, no, I already got all that from your résumé. Tell me more about where you’re from. Your hometown. How’s the economy doing out there?”

“My hometown?” I said, scrambling to rearrange the words in my head. Michael nodded. “Well. It’s really small. There’s not much to do. We like to joke that there are more bears than people.”

Michael smiled. He nodded again for me to continue.

“Everyone who can plays hockey. That’s the main source of entertainment.”

“You played? You must have been pretty good to get to Yale.”

“I’m all right.”

Michael barked a short laugh. “You’re all right,” he repeated. “That might be the first humble sentence ever spoken in this office. What do people do for work?”

“My parents run a grocery store. There’s some tourism a few towns over, so some people commute to that. And logging is pretty big in the region.”

We went on like that for a while. To my surprise, Michael seemed engaged. Some transformation had happened. Maybe my lack of experience wasn’t such a bad thing.

They didn’t seem to think it was, in any case. Two days later, I got the call from Spire. The job paid more than any of the others I’d applied to, a six-figure sum that I couldn’t quite believe. I accepted on the spot. I’d be the only person from Yale joining Spire that year. I was certain the old small-town Evan Peck was gone, once and for all.

I was assigned to sit next to Roger, another analyst, a former tight end at Stanford with a thick Alabama drawl. We didn’t have much to do early on. When we weren’t in training sessions, we wasted a lot of time on ESPN or skimming the news, only jumping into action when the higher-ups staffed us on something. But it looked bad to leave before 10:00 p.m., so none of us did, no matter what. There were five analysts in total that year, all of us men, which wasn’t that remarkable—Spire overall was mostly male. Roger was our ringleader, the one who stayed latest and arrived earliest and generally assumed authority. He led the charge every night for postwork drinks at a bar called McGuigan’s near the office, and already it felt like a mandatory part of the routine.

“So how was the first week?” Julia asked. This was Saturday morning. We’d brought bagels to the park along the East River. Every night that first week, Julia was already asleep when I got home. It annoyed me a little, that she couldn’t bother to stay awake. Her job ended many hours before mine did. This was the first time we’d really seen each other since the weekend before.

“Good,” I said. “I think. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell what it’s really going to be like. It’s all just training sessions for now.”

“What about that guy—Michael? The one who interviewed you. Have you seen him yet?”

“I passed him in the hall, but he was talking to someone else. We didn’t say anything.” Truthfully, I wasn’t sure whether he even recognized me.

Julia nodded. She was quieter than usual. She seemed to be gazing at the buildings across the river in Astoria, but her eyes had that glassy quality of staring at nothing in particular. There was a poppy seed stuck to the tip of her nose. I leaned over and brushed it away. She turned and then smiled. Back to normal.

“Everything okay?”

“Fine,” she said. “Just distracted. Thinking about work.”

“What’s up?”

“Nothing worth talking about. Tell me more about your week.”

It was a relief to have Julia there, to have a partner in the minor struggles: how to decipher the Con Ed bill, where to find the nearest Laundromat, what to do about the noisy neighbors and the leaky faucet. She always knew exactly what to do. I was acutely aware, that summer, of how alone I was in the world. My parents had gone back to Canada right after the graduation ceremony, and I wouldn’t see them again for months. This never bothered me in college, when the proximity of your family only mattered when it was time to travel back and forth. But being in the real world seemed to emphasize how far I was from home—something I hadn’t felt in a long time. And moving to New York had highlighted certain differences between me and Julia, too, things I’d never noticed before. The advice and money and connections she took for granted. How she was never limited to this place. She could always take the train to Boston, or hop on a plane to Nantucket. Even though she made less than a fifth of what I did, she had money from her parents. We’d agreed to divide the rent in line with our salary discrepancy, so I paid two-thirds, although sometimes I wondered how fair that was. My money came like water from a pump, flowing only as long as I kept working. Hers came like a spring whose source was bountiful and deep. We never talked about this.