Lawn Boy(20)

“Okay.”

“Good,” he said.

“Dad?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Okay, but what about Nate?” I said. “Shouldn’t he know?”

“He probably wouldn’t understand. But you tell him if you want.”

“Okay.”

Then my dad tossed the bag of food onto my lap and turned the ignition.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let’s go. You can eat that on the way home.”





Do the Math Just when things were coming to an impasse on the home front, I got a callback.


“You Mike?” a voice said.

“Yeah.”

“This is Chaz Linford. You applied for a production job with me.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re hired.”

“I am?”

“It’s a competitive position. I’m looking for a motivated candidate. It’s yours if you want it.”

“You’re sure?”

“What about you? You sure you want it?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said, though I wanted to ask him how he arrived at the conclusion that I was a motivated candidate. Surely, it wasn’t my four and a half years of landscaping experience. Could this be the opportunity I’d been pining for? A job whose only requirements were that I was strong, bright, willing, and motivated to learn? The sort of job the politicians were always yammering about creating? The job that paid seventeen bucks an hour?

The place is called Chaz Unlimited Limited, which sounds ambiguous, I get that. Anyway, we’re in the business of “production and assembly”—as in, we assemble promotional crap for other companies. By crap, I mean bobblehead dolls, novelty key chains, posters, and weird little Japanese dolls with puckered lips that sing “On Top of Old Smokey” when you squeeze their bellies. Think of me as a machine but human. I repeat the same tasks over and over, some days a thousand times. I didn’t even know this sort of job existed anymore this side of China.

Chaz Unlimited Limited is located on Bainbridge in a chichi new business park called Copper Top, across the street from the middle school. Our production warehouse and home office is surrounded by a boutique coffee roaster, a boutique brewery, a charcuterie slash deli, a wine-tasting room, and a yoga studio. Not a single nail studio or minimart. I guess that’s the difference between a business park and a strip mall.

My work station is the only one with a window. The other two employees, both long-term temps, are conscripted to the corner of the warehouse under the central heating unit. As far as I can tell, neither one of them speaks or goes to the bathroom. I’d put them both in their midthirties, a pale, weak-eyed tandem, slump shouldered and indistinct. I call them Thing One and Thing Two. They work always with their heads down, moving with a mechanized efficiency, the trebly blare of their earbuds a constant.

Every afternoon as I piece together bobbleheads, I watch the coffee roasters convene on the lawn and eat their lunches, which they invariably procure at the charcuterie slash deli, sandwiches wrapped in butcher paper. They’re all guys around my age, all scrawny as hell. They wear big beards and skinny jeans and boots and T-shirts that are too small. The T-shirts are always something random: DICK’S TOWING SERVICE, PETE’S AUTO BODY, BUSY BEAVER SEPTIC CLEANING. Usually, they sit in a circle staring holes in their phones for a half hour, but sometimes they talk to each other in a lazy, impassive way. Eventually, I get bored watching them and start thinking of other stuff. Like what I’m going to do with all this money. Not only am I making five bucks an hour more than I was with Lacy, I get a solid forty-hour week with overtime possibilities—at time and a half! Let me do the math for you: that’s $25.50 an hour—cha-ching! And no picking up dog shit!

Sometimes, though, as I’m looking out the window at the business park, my fingers employed thoughtlessly, I get a little wistful for landscaping. I miss the fresh air. I miss the satisfaction of pruning hedges and raking out flower beds. Hell, even deadheading rhodies. Don’t even get me started on topiary. If Copper Top were my account, I’d tidy up those edges in front of the yoga studio and contain that unruly salal around the front entrance. I’d also get that laurel hedge in shape and cut back that ivy before it took over the southeast corner. Whoever installed the sprinkler system left a few blind spots, which are beginning to turn brown. That row of arborvitae along the back edge would make a nice Greek colonnade. Everywhere I look, I see room for improvement, and I wish I could do something about it.

But forget all that, I’ve got key chains to assemble, paychecks to cash.

On Friday, at the end of my first week, I decided to buy lunch at Provence, the charcuterie slash deli. Freddy and Nate had eaten all but one slice of the ham I’d left in the fridge, and it’s the Buddig brand, so one slice is about as thick as a skin graft. I took one look at the Provence menu and was about to walk out. Thirteen bucks for a BLT, and it didn’t even come with chips and a Sprite! They didn’t even have Sprite! I would’ve bolted right then and made a run to Mickey D’s, but the coffee roasters were in there with their pet beards, and I didn’t want to look like a cheapskate.

“Cool shirt,” one of them said flatly.

I had to look down to see what I was wearing: TIDE’S INN, SUQUAMISH, WASHINGTON, a T-shirt my mom gave me.