The Loft Above the Shop
He was right. Jen and I have not had a calm phone call in three years. We do fine in person at games and school things, polite as strangers in a church line.
I set the phone face down on the dash. “All right,” I said. “I won’t call her. Not tonight.”
“Not at all,” he said. “Promise me.”
I didn’t promise him. I just put the truck in gear and drove him home, the long way, past the elevator and the ball field, with the radio low and neither of us saying much.
When I dropped him off, the porch light was on, and Kurt’s truck was in the driveway. Brody got out and walked up to the door with that envelope in his jacket pocket, and I watched him go in.
I drove back out to my place, sat in the shop with the lights off and a cold cup of coffee, and thought about what I could do that would not make my son’s life harder.
Some background, so you understand what I was working with.
Jen and I were married fifteen years. We split when Brody was thirteen. Nobody cheated and nobody drank. We just wore out on each other, the way two people can, and stopped being kind somewhere along the way.
She kept the house in town, the little ranch on Third Street where Brody had grown up. I took the shop. Dad and I put it up on five acres outside town when Brody was a baby.
The first year we did week on, week off. I rented a farmhouse down the road from the shop, and Brody had his own room there with a basketball hoop nailed to the machine shed.
Then the farmhouse sold. The only thing I could find close to the shop was a one-bedroom place, a little house with one bedroom, one bath and a kitchen you could touch both walls of.
So Brody went to every other weekend with me. Jen and I did that on our own, sitting at the Cenex with two cups of coffee, and the judge signed what we brought her. It was the most we had agreed on in years.
He slept on my pull-out couch. By the time he was fourteen, his feet hung off the end of it. He never complained once.
Then Jen met Kurt. He sells seed and chemical for the co-op, and he is good at it. Jen liked that about him, I think, after fifteen years with a guy who ran late for everything but a breakdown.
I didn’t dislike Kurt. I didn’t much like him either. We nodded at each other at games. He shook my hand at Brody’s confirmation. When they married, his name went on the refinance with hers, and he started calling it his house.
None of it fixed the actual problem. The actual problem was that my son had nowhere else to go. Every other weekend on a couch is not a home. It is a visit.
I looked up at the back of the shop. Years ago, I had built a storage loft over the back sixteen feet, on six-by-six posts, to keep tires and old parts and Christmas lights. It was dusty and dark and full of junk.
It was also sixteen feet deep and forty feet wide. That is six hundred and forty square feet of floor sitting over my head doing nothing.
I picked up my phone, and this time I called my dad.