Page 19 of Engineering a Love Story

“Sure. Everywhere. That mouse gets around.” My father’s laugh has a rumble in it, one that can be menacing when he’s finding amusement at someone else’s expense. But he’s not doing that now, and I go on. “And I just got back from San Francisco.”

His laugh dies. “Way out there? What for?”

“I had meetings—”

“Isn’t that over now?”

“Over?”

“With all the news about those dot-coms, this whole internet thing is starting to seem like as much of a scam as your Y2K.”

I lean against the kitchen counter. “Y2K wasn’t a scam. As I’ve said before. Systems didn’t crash on New Year’s Day because people fixed the code. Lots of guys in the bowels of lots of buildings reprogramming systems. For days and days. Years.” Data expansion, compression, windowing—I could explain it all because I worked on those projects myself, but it won’t do any good. “Y2K isn’t anything like the internet anyway. That doesn’t even make any sense.”

My father is quiet, and I regret my tone. He isn’t stupid. Only uncomfortable with things he doesn’t understand and certain the whole system is rigged against him.

I work myself toward the topic I need to broach, but I dawdle, asking him how things are at the factory.

“Breathing its last gasps,” he says, though he’s been saying this for years.

“Have you spoken lately to Wade?”

“Nah. Your brother is too big for his britches down there now. He never calls.”

On another day I might defend Wade, but we’re already heading toward a difficult conversation and I can only argue about one thing at a time.

“Listen,” I say. “I need to tell you something. Things here lately have been a little … off.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“For a while now. Ash and I have been having a hard time.” This is true in a sense, and it’s the closest I can come to the truth. I’m not about to describe the tech conference. “We’ve decided to take a break.”

“A break? Christ.” I hear his loud exhale.

I close my eyes. “It’s just that—”

“People just cut and run at the first sign of trouble, don’t they?”

“No. It’s not like that.” Though maybe it’s exactly like that.

My father is quiet, then he seems to push out a question. “Does he hurt you?”

“What?” But I know what he means, and for a quick moment, I’m tempted. In my father’s worldview, some level of violence is unavoidable, but even he’d likely agree physical abuse is an acceptable reason to end a marriage. But I can’t do that to Ash. “No. Of course not. It’s not anything like that. We’re just, like, really good friends. But we almost never—”

“Christ, don’t tell me any of that. I think we’re past the point where I need to hear the intimate details, don’t you?”

If that point ever existed, I can’t remember it.

My father makes a sound somewhere between a grunt and a cough, a sound I know from watching the evening news with him, one he makes when he thinks something or someone is ridiculous. “None of this sounds like a good idea.”

I consider trying to explain myself, to articulate my realization that I may have sold myself short before I even realized what was for sale. But I can’t force any more ridiculous words from my mouth. I tell him someone is at the front door and that I need to go.

***

Talking to my father leaves me anxious and untethered. I go to the back deck for a few deep breaths, and from there I see that our lawn needs mowing. As far as I know, Ash hasn’t mowed it since I got back from The Symp, an untenable span when it grows so quickly this time of year. The grass is tufted now, like we might soon be able to harvest it as wheat.

I go to the shed, pull out the mower, and am relieved when it starts on only my third pull. Pushing the mower back and forth in lines that are surprisingly satisfying, I remind myself that my father’s emotions don’t have to be my own. This has been a difficult lesson to learn. From what I can remember, his default has always been anger and mistrust, but he got worse after my mother died—though I’ve never been sure if this was due to grief about the untimely death of his wife or frustration at suddenly having to be a single father. Because they’d been so happy together? I have a hard time believing happiness was ever factored into the equation.

Whatever the reason, in the months after my mother’s funeral, my father came undone. He stopped going to work, and I almost never saw him. I suspect he spent most of his time up at the campground where he went on stupid benders with his brothers, talking about hunting but not doing much of it.