And the most horrible thing of all was that without realizing he was doing it, Ryan had sidled over to the corner of his family’s side of the house and was surreptitiously watching them haul their suitcases up the walk. As if he were spying.
Naturally, Bizzy spotted him. “Come on, Ryan Burke, man up and carry one of these suitcases, okay?”
He did. But from that moment, he knew that his chances of actually having a real girlfriend in high school had just disappeared. He wasn’t ever going to be her fant, because she had just appointed him her bellboy.
3
Ryan phoned his dad. Dad actually answered. “Everything okay?”
“I got something I need to talk to you about.”
Dad told him where his job was that day.
“Can you come by after work?”
“Not happening,” said Dad.
“Mom can’t take me, you know she won’t.”
“Such a dilemma. Good thing you’re not a smart kid, or you’d figure it out for yourself.”
“The bus?”
“Charlottesville Area Transit allows poor people to get where they need to go. You’re poor.”
“I didn’t used to be,” said Ryan.
“You were always poor,” said Dad. “You were born poor. You still live completely from the charity of others.”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
“Well, poor relative of mine, do what poor people do when they need to talk to somebody with a job. Go to his place of work. On your own dime.”
“If I had a Youth Smart Card, I could ride for free.”
“You can only get those at the Downtown Transit Station on Water Street.”
“I’d have to pay to ride the bus there, too, and you’re the one I need to talk to.”
“Break open your piggy bank, lad. A one-way ride only costs seventy-five cents. An all-day pass is a buck fifty. Come before quitting time or I won’t be there.”
“When’s quitting time?”
“When I tell the guys we’re done for the day.”
“When will that be?”
“With luck, not till after you get here.”
So Ryan looked up bus routes and schedules online and found that to get to Dad’s actual job site would take two buses, and he’d arrive around seven p.m. if traffic didn’t suck, which it would at that time of day, or he could ride one bus for a much shorter distance, but the nearest stop on that route was a half mile away.
Google told him he could walk half a mile in about twenty minutes. Ryan realized that this meant he only lived a quarter mile from school, because it always took him about ten to get home on days Mom came late because Dianne had some kind of practice or after-school activity or detention or whatever.
Ryan caught the one bus, which took him to a neighborhood where actual sidewalks led all the way to Dad’s job site, except for the last block, which didn’t even have a paved road yet.
Ryan walked onto the site, and somebody yelled, “Hard-hat area, moron!” and Ryan said, “I’m just here to see my dad,” and the guy who yelled said, “Okay, all you hammers and boards and other junk that might drop from above, be really soft when you hit this clown in the head, because he’s here to see his dad.”
Another guy walked over and lifted a yellow hard hat off a small stack in the garage of the house they were putting a roof on. Ryan put it on. “My dad is—”
“Your dad’s the only guy on this job who has a kid your size,” said the man. “He’s in the office.”
Ryan looked around.
“This is a half-built house. It doesn’t have an office,” said the guy. He gestured toward the street. “Guess you don’t come here often,” he said, “or you’d know.” Then he went back to whatever he had been doing with a nail gun. Reloading it, Ryan guessed.
The “office” was the camper on the back of Dad’s pickup truck. Ryan knocked and Dad’s voice said, “It isn’t locked.” Ryan climbed up into the thing and realized that it really was an office, every inch of it. Nowhere to sleep, except if you dozed off sitting at the worktable and dropped your forehead onto a blueprint.
“So you came,” said Dad. “Bus, or did you wangle a ride after all?”
“No wangling,” said Ryan. “Feet, then bus, then feet.”
Dad reached over and pressed a button. While he was pressing it, a loud blat came from a horn on top of the camper. “I arrive, you end the workday?”
“It’s four forty-five, that’s the fifteen-minute horn. It means, Finish up and pack up, boys, we’re walking off in a quarter of an hour.”
“Very eloquent horn,” said Ryan.
“It’s a message they’re always glad to hear, so they remember the meaning. I’ve got fifteen minutes till I drive away, and a lot of guys will be coming by to sign out, so what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“My driver’s license,” said Ryan.
“We couldn’t do this on the phone?”
“You would have told me no because, you know, insurance rates, and hung up on me.”
“So you still get the no because, you know, insurance rates, but I can’t hang up. Very clever.”
“Without a driver’s license, I’m going to look pretty stupid for buying a car, aren’t I?”
“Can’t drive it without insurance, if you can actually afford to buy a car that runs.”
“Can’t drive it without a license,” said Ryan. “And if I can buy the car and pay for gas, I can pay for insurance.”
“Not necessarily. How well is McDonald’s paying these days?”
“Better than no job at all, thanks for asking. But I have a plan.”
“How much does having-a-plan pay these days?”
“I apprentice construction, I work my way up to journeyman, I make twenty bucks an hour, and—”
“That’s twenty-one thirty for a journeyman electrician, twenty-three fifty for a journeyman plumber, twenty fifty for a drywall finisher, sixteen seventy-seven for a carpenter. There’s no such job as ‘construction.’ But you won’t be a journeyman anything till three or four years after you start your apprenticeship, and that’s a long time to wait for a car, especially considering you’ll be going to college long before your apprenticeship ends.”
“I thought maybe working for my dad, it might not take as long.”
“Sure, I can start paying you like a journeyman right away, except for the part where all my other journeymen quit on me, and you aren’t worth anything because you’re completely unskilled, and I’m not hiring you anyway, because you’re lazy and irresponsible. I’m not sure this is better than hanging up on you.”
Ryan felt slapped. Punched. He actually had to take a couple of deep breaths before he could speak. “I’m not lazy. I work hard.”
“You work hard at whatever you feel like working at. Because you’re a kid. I get it. I was a kid once. ‘Lazy’ is just redundant, talking about a kid.”
“I work hard at school.”
“You fall asleep in class whenever you feel like it, because school comes easy to you.”
“Not math.”
“And you’re getting a B-minus in Calculus first quarter, according to your teacher’s email, so yeah, you’re sleeping there, too. And besides, that’s school, where you do have skills. At construction, you’ll be worthless.”
“I can drive a nail.”
“With a hammer. We almost never use hammers anymore. Ryan, skill doesn’t matter if you don’t show up at work every day, on time, and do whatever job you’re assigned to do, and do it with energy and commitment and concentration, and don’t stop till it’s finished. Guys who lean or sit or stand around and take breathers on my site don’t have a job the next day.”
“I can do that.”
“How do you know?” asked Dad. “You’ve never tr
ied it. It’s hard. Most grownups do it, but they had to train themselves to. Force themselves to. Most of them because they have babies to pay for and it keeps them concentrated. Your imaginary car costs as much as a baby, but it doesn’t smile up at you and say ‘Da-da,’ so it’s not enough of an incentive.”
“So I’m the only kid in the world whose dad is the boss of his own company and I can’t get a job with you.”
“You can get a job with me,” said Dad. “Just show me that you’re worth hiring.”
“How can I show you if you won’t let me on your job site to prove it?”
“Money is at stake every single day here, Ryan. I’d be insane to let you on the job site, even with a hard hat, because anything you did wrong—which would be everything at first—would cost me money to undo or redo, and there goes my profit margin, which is, by the way, the only source of income for the family.”
“Mom has a job.”
“Fascinating. Her lawyer says she doesn’t, so my child support and alimony provide the entire household budget for you.”
“It’s not a household,” said Ryan. “It’s a half-household.”
“You’re eating half as much, because you live in a duplex now? You’re wearing half as many clothes? That must be getting chilly, what with the weather turning.”
“You’re just being snotty and mean,” said Ryan. “I’m asking what I can do, and you’re telling me . . . nothing, really, except no, no, no.”
“On the contrary. I have observed your character for almost sixteen years—”
“Minus the past six months,” said Ryan.
“Sixteen damn years,” said Dad, “and I have never seen you take on a responsibility and carry it out like a grownup.”
“I do my homework. I study for tests!”
“When you feel like it, but that’s not what I’m talking about. You do that stuff to impress your teachers and your friends and make a name for yourself at school. I’m talking about onerous responsibilities. Physical labor responsibilities.”
“Like what?” asked Ryan.
“The fact that I have to tell you is a complete proof of my point. Who takes out the garbage at your house?”
“I do,” said Ryan.
“When?”
“Every week.”
“You mean the kitchen garbage takes a whole week to fill up? The bathroom trash cans? The recycling?”
“I don’t know,” said Ryan.
“Why don’t you know?”
“I take the big can to the street every week and the little can every other week, no earlier than six p.m., and I take them back within twelve hours of collection the next evening, which means as soon as I get home from school.”
“Really,” said Dad.
“Those are the city rules, by law, and I don’t want to go to jail for doing it wrong.”
“And you think that’s ‘taking out the garbage.’”
“That’s all Mom ever asks me to do.”
“So you’re blind. You can’t see when the kitchen garbage is full. You can’t pull the bag out, tie it off, take it out to the big can, then replace it with a clean bag.”
“Nobody ever told me to!”
“And that’s why you’ll be worthless to any employer on God’s green Earth.”
“People get trained when they get a job. McDonald’s trains their people!”
“People keep a job and get raises when they show initiative, when they take responsibility. Once a week, when your mother asks you—Once? Twice? Eight times?—to take out the garbage, you go take the cans to the street. They have wheels. This is a job you did as a toddler, pulling that stupid quacking duck toy around the house. Pulling wheeled cans! So once a week, you save your mom a ten-minute job. But every week, how many times does she have to take garbage bags from inside the house out to the wheeled vehicles you deal with? How many minutes, while you’re playing video games or texting or reading or watching TV or—”
“Doing homework or studying—”
“I’ll tell you when you’ll be ready to get a job—not with me, with anybody. It’s when your mother never needs to think about the garbage. She never has to remind you to take the cans to the street, because it’s already done. She never has to take a bag out to the cans, because it’s already done. She never has to put a new liner in a trash can, because it’s already done.”
“I get it, yes, I can do that, I’ll do that.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“How will you see it, what with you not living there?”
“And it’s not just the garbage.”
“Of course not,” said Ryan.
“Why does your mother have to take dishes out of the dishwasher and put them away? How does she put away things that go on the top shelves? You can reach them without even standing on tiptoe. Why aren’t you already doing it?”
“I do it whenever she asks!”
“Why should she ask? Why should she ever take clean dishes out of the dishwasher?”
“Doesn’t Dianne come into this sometimes?”
“Dianne is fourteen and she isn’t asking me for a job so she can buy a car.”
“And I bet she gets her license at sixteen.”
“Of course, because you’ll be rich by then and you’ll volunteer to help her out by paying for her insurance yourself.”
“I’m not that nice a brother.”
“I know. Which brings me to another thing you have to do to make you employable.”
“Oh, man,” said Ryan.
“Your fighting with your sister makes that house a hellish place to be. No matter how annoying your sister is—and I know she is, but so are you—”
“I’m not the one who—”
“You’re annoying me right now by being deliberately stupid when I know that when you care about it, you can be resourceful and smart.”
“And you’re mad at me.”
“No, I allowed you to trap me into this waste-of-time conversation because you didn’t want me to have the option of hanging up and ending the irritation.”
“So this is all about persuading me never to bother you at work again.”
“When you get a job—and eventually you probably will, what with the college degree you’re going to get—you’re going to be working on jobs with real people working over you and alongside you and, God help us, under you someday, and they will all be irritating. Annoying. Many of them infuriating. Some people can be patient and kind in dealing with them, unfailingly polite, never talking bad about them behind their back, helping them when they need it even if they’ve been rude before. Those people are suited to becoming management. Leaders. But a kid who can’t let any annoying thing his fourteen-year-old sister does pass by without getting ridiculously, embarrassingly red-faced-and-screaming angry at her—that kid is not leadership material.”
“She’s my sister. I’m not her leader. She wouldn’t follow me out of the house if it was on fire.”
“Of course not, because you’d be carrying her,” said Dad. “Because you love her and you care about her.”
Ryan was stopped cold. It was a long time since he had even thought about whether he loved his sister. But yes, he cared about her, he had proof. He just didn’t like her.
“On the job, you need to treat your coworkers like family,” said Dad. “But, unfortunately, that’s what you would probably do—whining and moaning and disappointing your supervisors, and yelling and screaming at anybody else who annoys you. Just like you treat family.”
“I’m not that bad!”
“There are worse kids than you. But I don’t plan on hiring any kids. I plan on hiring men and women who behave like grownups, even in their own families.”
“You hire angels, apparently. How do you get them to apply for jobs?”
“I hire ordinary young men, mostly, who apply for jobs because they actually need the money—not for a car, but for a life. For food and rent for them and their family. Whom they love. Then I find out whether they’re worth keeping on, and whether they’re worth promoting. For instance, have we once been interrupted by guys signing out?”
“No,” said Ryan.
“Do you have any idea why?”
“They haven’t finished their jobs and put away their tools yet?”
“Seven guys have already signed out, Ryan. Because Niddy Adams is standing at the back door, signing them out on a random sheet of paper, because he can hear us talking, and he knows that family is the most important thing to me, as it is to him and all the guys on this site. So he’s telling them, ‘Boss is talking to his son,’ and handing them the sheet, and they sign out and put down the time and go on home. Do you know why that works?”
“Because you hire grownups.”
“Because they all trust Niddy. They know he won’t lose the sheet, they know it will be copied faithfully onto my master time sheet, they trust Niddy. He’s not a foreman, he’s just a guy, like them, but he saw a need and he took action without waiting to be asked, and the other guys know that Niddy is right as rain, that whatever he says he’ll do, he does, faithfully, every damn time. These are all good guys, but right now Niddy is showing me why I’m not going to have him working for me long—not because I’d ever let him go, because I’m not crazy. Not even because somebody else will hire him away, because he knows I’ll match their offer and top it. He won’t be here long, because he should be running his own damn company, and when he thinks it’s time to do that, I’ll help him finance the equipment he needs, and I’ll guarantee him with suppliers and rental companies, and I’ll let him know that he can offer jobs to a couple of my employees, and not the worst ones, and I’ll help him get set up in business.”
“In competition with you?”
“Ryan, nobody’s in competition with me. I’m the best. I get the best workers. I get the best jobs. And when Niddy starts up on his own, he and I will both be crushing the companies run by people who aren’t as good as their word, who inflate their charges, who don’t finish on time, who don’t provide as good a wage to their men, who yell and scream when things don’t go right. We’ll both crush those guys, and some of them will either wise up and get better at their jobs, or they’ll wise up and go work as Walmart shopping-trolley collectors.”
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