that, we listened to the radio. My father settled back. “We’re going to the plant, Luca. In case you’re wondering. We’re going to Vanderbruek.”
It wasn’t entirely a surprise, though my mother said he’d been fired. Vanderbruek was at least familiar ground. They made tiny machines—my father used the word “coordinates”—that were used in aircraft and, no one was ashamed to say it then, in bombs. This was peacetime, 1962. The Russians were the only threat, but if the Russians attacked, it was important to have bombs. That was the simple justification my father had given for his work, though it had hardly needed justification. He was an accountant, one of many. But he was in charge of a group. The plant was vast, the size of a small town. The parking lot was like the parking lot of an airport.
He stopped at the side of the main road, near one of the lesser parking lots. You could not get into it unless you showed your ID. There were uniformed guards. The guard leaned out of his booth and stared suspiciously at my father, but my father waved to him, and the guard let him stay.
“You’re probably wondering what we’re doing,” he said after a moment. It was that eerily silent time at the end of the day in a factory, just before everyone quits work.
My father took out a cigarette and lit it. The way he did it seemed slow and pleasurable, and after he’d taken his first drag he looked down at his fingers holding the cigarette and scratched one of them. “See, I don’t work here anymore.”
He squinted through the smoke out the window. His lips had thinned and gathered into what you could almost be fooled into believing was a smile. “You want to know why?”
And suppose I didn’t?
He leaned slightly toward me. “I’m going to tell you this, but I’m going to try to tell you in such a way that you believe I feel no rancor toward your mother. I’m not telling you this to turn you against her, okay?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because she told them something about me. She’s angry at me, so she called this place and told them something she shouldn’t have. Someday I’ll tell you what that something is, but not now. So I had to quit. They couldn’t exactly fire me, but they made it clear it would be better if I didn’t stick around. So I quit.”
For a while then, my father watched me not asking the next, obvious question. I sensed that he liked it that I wasn’t asking, but who could tell? I felt his eyes pass over me a long time.
Soon the cars started coming out of the lots. It was quitting time. My father stopped looking at me and started looking at the drivers. His face was very serious, mildly recessed, anticipatory. He looked the way a man looks when he expects to be slapped but has already decided he will not slap back.
Some of the men and women in cars returned his stare. Not all of them. There were too many workers at Vanderbruek for him to know all of them. But some of the ones who did know him stared and did not greet him. They might even have looked a little frightened of him. I saw one woman who looked that way, and she stepped on the gas as she drove past him. Then a big heavy Oldsmobile pulled up next to us and my father’s friend Vinnie Fratolino rolled down his window. “I got the air conditioner on, Lou,” Vinnie Fratolino said. Still, there was sweat on his massive face. My father leaned across me, so that our bodies were touching. He appeared glad that someone had stopped to greet him.
“What did they do to you, Lou?” Vinnie Fratolino asked. Behind him, the line of cars had stopped in the heat.
My father shrugged. “I had to quit. No other choice.” Now his hand was on my knee.
“Assholes,” Vinnie Fratolino said, and shook his head from side to side. “Excuse me, I should watch my language,” he said, noticing me. His head was large and doughy, like a man’s head in a cartoon. He seemed to have parts missing—vital lines and pockets—as if he’d been drawn lazily, all cheeks, with a big affronted expression pasted on.
“It’s all right,” my father said.
My father’s gratefulness seemed to make his skin warm. He looked alert and happy, but Vinnie Fratolino stared at him with mild alarm. “So what’d you come back for, clean out your desk?”
“No, I promised somebody a ride.”
Vinnie Fratolino nodded, then looked at me, and back to my father. “You need anything, Lou?”
“I’m fine,” my father answered. “Hey, you better go, you’re holding up the works.”
Vinnie Fratolino turned around and seemed to be noticing for the first time the cars behind him. He lifted his hand and rolled up the window.
“Nice guy,” my father said.
Before long, Bob Painter came out of the building behind the guard’s booth, walking with his lunch box. When he saw my father, he didn’t hurry, as I expected him to, but slowed down, and even stopped at one point to watch the cars going past. It was clear he’d have preferred no one see him get into the car with my father.
Finally, though, he had to. He sat heavily in the backseat and the car felt immediately full of him, his weight and his scent and his peculiar breathing. He sucked in air heavily, slurped it.
“You remember Bob, Luca?” my father asked.
Bob Painter’s brow was lowered. He seemed a little shamefaced, as though all power was on my side, and after we nodded to one another, he looked out the window.
“The Inca boy,” he said, and smiled in a crooked manner.
“Who spoke to you?” he asked my father.
“Just Vinnie, that’s all.”
There was a silence after that; it meant something.
Bob Painter had said to me, on the night of the cookout, that he lived in Woburn with his three little girls. There is a moment, before you know anything for sure, when you dare to imagine things: that we were going there, to Bob’s house, for dinner, after which we would drive to wherever my father lived now. Bob was his loyal friend, a buddy. The gathering of inferences was like a storm that would pass over us. My father’s life would be white and clean, a state of unspoken confusion and quiet.
The truth was, instead, that my father and Bob Painter lived together in a rooming house in the working-class section of our own town, a place I could have walked to, easily, on any of those endless summer afternoons of his absence. They had one room, twin beds. This was where they were taking me, this was the there my mother had been referring to. My father showed me around, the hall that smelled of disinfectant, the bathroom down the hall. As soon as we were in the room, Bob Painter sat in a chair and opened a beer, drank one after another, quietly, contemplatively, the sedateness of his behavior a kind of nod to my being here. On top of the bureau sat a bottle of Old Grand-Dad, but he did not touch it that night. My father kept an eye on him, then snuck me into the hall. “Don’t worry about Bob, Luca. We’re going out to eat. Then a movie. All right?”
It was what we did. In the diner, Bob Painter began to slur his words, and he looked at me, once or twice, angrily. My father kept his eyes on me, as if to reassure me of something—that Bob Painter’s behavior could not crack the fragile vessel we needed to create. It was like he was putting his hand on my brow and saying: Don’t consider this man.
We got
