Iz.” My brother answered on the first ring, which he almost always does. He’s one of the few people I know who actually answers their phone on a consistent basis.
“What are you doing? Want to take a walk in the park or something?”
“Yeah, meet me at Mom’s. I’m over here, using their printer.”
“Are they home?” “They” was my mother, Victoria McNeil Calloway, and her husband, Spence. The two were mostly joined at the hip, and mostly at home now that Spence had retired from his business—a real estate development company that provided consulting around the country.
I loved being with my mom and Spence, but I wasn’t ready to see them now. You couldn’t just waltz up to someone on a beautiful Monday afternoon and say, “Hey, any chance your husband, who died two decades ago, is alive?” I could barely ask myself that question. It was really too ridiculous. But Charlie was hard to fluster.
My mother lived on State Street in an elegant gray-stone house, a few blocks north of Division Street. Charlie was waiting for me on the steps, his tall frame leaning back casually on his elbows. His loose, curly brown hair glinted in the sun with a hint of red I’ve always told him he got from me.
He came down the steps and we hugged, then wordlessly started walking down State Street to Lincoln Park. We wandered behind the Chicago History Museum, crossing the street and passing by the entrance to the zoo.
When we reached Café Brauer, we went behind it to the small pond, where paddleboats were rented by tourists or families. Some of the boats were forest-green, others white and shaped like huge swans.
Charlie pointed. “Remember when Mom used to take us on those?”
I nodded. “Mom and I would paddle and let you think you were doing all the work.”
Charlie shook his head. “Yeah, and being the sucker I am, I believed it. Thought I was the man of the house.”
“You were the man of the house.”
We both laughed. Charlie has always possessed a lazy streak. It’s not that he’s stupid. Quite the contrary. Charlie is a reader of history, a lover of art and music. And trumping those things, Charlie is a lover of red wine and naps.
In fact, most of his friends—and sometimes even my mom and I—had taken to calling him “Sheets” because he spent much of his time in bed, a trait that had intensified after college. Charlie had graduated with a degree in English and a desire to do absolutely nothing. A friend’s father took pity on him and gave him a job driving a dump truck to and from work sites, which Charlie liked just fine because during down times, he was allowed to doze in the trailer. He might have gone on like that for decades, but one day the truck turned over on the Dan Ryan Expressway when a semi cut him off. He broke his femur, screwed up his back and ended up with a fairly hefty settlement from the semi’s insurance company. In his usual cheerful way, “Sheets” took it as a windfall and had spent the last few years sitting around, reading, getting the occasional physical-therapy session and, yes, drinking red wine.
“Let’s sit.” Charlie pointed to a bench at the side of the lagoon that was shaded by a patch of vibrantly green trees.
He took a seat, his long arm on the top of the bench. I arranged myself cross-legged and looked at him, trying to figure out how to tell Charlie what I’d heard, or thought I’d heard, last night. I stared across the pond at a bridge that spanned one edge of it, at the Hancock building and the skyline beyond that.
Ever since Charlie and I were little, I was the more serious, the one who worried enough for everyone, the one who analyzed a situation ten ways before deciding what to do, while Charlie mostly rolled along. I needed him to analyze this one with me, though. I wouldn’t tell him about working for Mayburn, but I had to tell Charlie that I thought I’d heard our father’s voice.
“So I was on Mom’s computer,” Charlie said, before I could form my words.
“Working on something for You Tube?” Charlie produced funny little movies filmed on the streets of Chicago. He shot them in black and white and set them to old-fashioned French music. It was kind of hard to explain, but they were really quite charming, and he had developed a coterie of people, mostly female college students, who loved them and as a result, loved Charlie, as well.
“I was working on my résumé.”
“Really?” I tried not to sound surprised. Charlie had talked about looking for a job—after years of living off his settlement check, it was starting to dry up—but somehow it was impossible to imagine him getting up and doing something besides deciding between merlot versus cabernet.
“Yeah. Actually, I think I already have the job. They just need my résumé for office purposes, to put it in my file.”
“What’s the job?”
“An internship at WGN. The radio station.”
“The one with the glass studio on Michigan Avenue?”
He nodded.
“Wow.” I couldn’t hide my astonishment. “That sounds like a big gig.”
“No, it’s being an assistant—or intern or whatever—to the producer for the midday show.”
“So you’ll be going there every day?” Somehow this concept seemed impossible.
“Yeah. I’m going to be working, Iz.” There was a note of pride in his voice I didn’t recognize. He studied my face. “I mean, c’mon, I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Actually, I wish everyone would stop asking me what I want to do with my life. What does that even mean?”
I shrugged. I couldn’t be of any help there.
“But it’s time to do something,” he continued. “Maybe this radio thing could be for me.” He shrugged, too. “You know Zim?”
I nodded. “Zim” was Robby Zimmerman, a friend of Charlie’s from high school.
“Well, his dad is in radio sales, and he got me the job. There’s no money in it, like no money, but—”
“You’re going to work for free?” Financially, I was appalled, but this sounded more like the Charlie I knew.
“Yeah. At least at first. Because I have to try something, Iz. I’m twenty-seven.” He said this like, I’m eighty-three.
Charlie’s birthday was just a few days ago, and he was taking it even more seriously than I was my upcoming thirtieth.
“I can’t sit around on my ass forever.” He frowned and looked out at a duck being chased by a toddler who was being chased by her mother.
“Why not? You do sitting on your butt better than anyone I know.” Somehow, this whole notion of Charlie as a member of the working class freaked me out, made me feel as if my world was shifting even more. Things in my life kept skidding around, and I hated the fact that I had no idea where they would all land.
Charlie laughed. “You don’t want me to get a job, because you don’t have a job.”
“Exactly.
