* * *
—
Now, in George and Faye’s guest room, Sam lifted the cover of a green file folder. It contained an assortment of news stories—some clipped from actual papers, others printed out from online. She scanned the headlines:
A DRIVER’S SUICIDE REVEALS THE DARK SIDE OF THE GIG ECONOMY.
GNAWING AWAY AT HEALTH CARE.
MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILIES INCREASINGLY LOOK TO COMMUNITY COLLEGE.
THE END OF THE AMERICAN DREAM.
Each article was highlighted and underlined, with handwritten notes in the margins.
The folder beneath that one held only a yellow legal pad, every line filled. At the top of the first page were the words MY STORY (for Lizzy).
Sam started reading:
NOTES ON THE HOLLOW TREE: The idea that while America might seem to be progressing as ever before, in fact, all the support of decades past is gone.
You’ve heard all this by now in bits and pieces. But I wanted to get it down on paper, in one place. In case you ever take me up on writing the book…
The thing I should say to start with is this—ever since I was a teenager, my favorite thing to do in the world was drive.
Most guys in my position would have given up the actual driving part a long time ago. Not me. When the company was still alive, I ran a staff meeting on Thursdays, stopping on the way to pick up coffee and doughnuts. But outside that one hour a week, I was driving. I ate my meals in the car, logging a good twelve hours a day at least. I loved it.
But let me back up. For a while after high school, I worked in the paper plant like everyone else I knew. When the plant closed, I was twenty-eight, four years married, with a two-year-old kid. After that, I drove a cab, among other jobs—stock boy at Elmer’s hardware, seasonal work making Christmas deliveries for the post office, you name it. I was a moving man, a summer janitor at the middle school, and sometimes an electrician. (I had no formal training, but luckily no one ever asked.)
I split the cab with three other guys. It was white and smelled like someone else’s cigarettes. One day when I’m thirty-one, I pick up two women at the airport, dressed in black, clearly coming from the city. (No offense.) They were bone thin and they left their sunglasses on when they got in, even though it was raining. One of them barked an address at me, without saying so much as hello, and for the rest of the ride they pretended I wasn’t there, like the car was driving itself.
“The cabs here are gross,” one of them said. “Have they never heard of a car service? Town Cars. Your name on a sign. A guy to carry your bags. Decent air-conditioning. How hard is that.”
They were bad tippers, but I have to credit them with giving me the idea that would keep our family afloat for the next thirty-five years. I saved up, buying one Lincoln, used. I had business cards printed with our home phone number, and asked the nicer hotels and restaurants for fifty miles around if I could leave a stack at the front desk.
I made Faye answer the phone in the kitchen, “Riley’s Car Service. We’ll get you there.” You can imagine how much she loved that.
After a couple years, it started to pay off. I had accounts, entire companies, who worked exclusively with me. I rented that small storefront in town. I bought more cars, and hired help. From then on, I had at least four guys driving for me, a part-time bookkeeper, and a girl who answered the phones.
You know how the story ends. Two and a half years ago, I’m on an airport run. I pull up to the curb outside Terminal B and see Rocky, one of my guys, on his day off. He’s wearing jeans, standing by the open trunk of his own car, an old Toyota. I honked the horn and waved, then pulled up alongside him. I made a joke about him taking a busman’s holiday.
Then I noticed the couple in the back seat. I watched them climb out. The guy pulled two suitcases from the trunk, and handed Rocky some cash.
I wondered: Were they friends of his? Cousins? If so, why were they giving him cash?
I thought it over and I figured it was probably for gas.
I didn’t think about it again until I ran into Rocky at the car wash a few days later.
He said to me, “Listen, boss. I know you know what I’m up to. I hope you know I never used the Lincoln for that.”
Never used the Lincoln for what? By then, I’d forgotten all about the airport.
My mind wandered straight to drug deals, bank robberies. I asked what he was talking about. He got this look on his face, and said, “I’m driving for Uber on my days off.”
I said, “What the hell is Uber?”
After Rocky filled me in, I told him it was fine. I didn’t care if my guys had other jobs on the side. And this Uber, some online thing where a driver could be anyone, no permits, no experience, just a guy in jeans driving his own car? I couldn’t see that taking off with the sort of clientele we served.
I told Rocky Uber had nothing to do with me.
He seemed surprised. He thanked me for being cool about it. He said he made good money doing it, too good to pass up.
“How much?” I asked.
It was three dollars more per hour than I paid.
A few months later, by the time I had to fire all my guys and the bookkeeper and the girl who answered the phones, Uber wasn’t paying their drivers shit anymore. (Pardon my French.) But passengers had gone nuts for the convenience, and now they refused to do it any other way.
As you know, I kept the company going in name only for a while. Pathetic. I was the only driver, and even so, my days were maybe half booked at best.
That’s when Faye suggested I start driving for Uber myself. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, that kind of thing.
I’ll admit to you, I was mad at her for saying it, even though I’d already had the same thought.
More time passed. No money to show for it. So I gave in.
My first day driving for Uber, my very first customer was Victor Winslow, the head of an insurance company based in Albany. Victor lives on the West Coast. He contracted with me fifteen years ago to be the company’s official transportation in the area. I gave him a great deal. I made sure to drive him myself when he came to town.
“George,” Victor said when he saw me. “This is a treat.”
“Isn’t it,” I said.
I didn’t say another word after that.
In the Uber, I do everything as nice as I did when I was driving for myself—the suit, the mints, all of it. Watching in the rearview mirror while Victor chugged two bottles of Poland Spring, I had to hold tight to the steering wheel to keep from punching him.
At the end of every Uber ride, I’m supposed to give the passenger a star rating between one and five and, if I want, a brief explanation of that rating. The passenger does the same for me. If a passenger gets a low rating, it’s harder to get picked up.
Here’s what I wrote for my pal Victor Winslow. One Star—AVOID. Passenger was intoxicated and belligerent.
At this, Sam laughed out loud.
The baby stirred, but a moment later, he was still.
As she turned back to the legal pad, she heard a soft knock at the door.
Sam closed the folder and returned to the bed. She was sitting there, staring at the wall, when George opened the door a crack and whispered, “You want some lunch?”
She looked at him.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll set up the baby monitor and be right out.”
“Meet me in the kitchen. Turkey and Swiss okay?”
“Sounds great,” she said.
Sam found him at the kitchen counter, spreading yellow mustard and mayonnaise onto slices of wheat bread. News radio played in the background.
“Gil sure does love you,” he said.
“He’s such a good baby,” she said.
“He is. But you’ve got a way w
ith him. I can tell. I’ll bet you come from a big family.”
“I’m the oldest of four,” she said.
“Faye had four in her family too,” he said.
“Where is Faye?”
“She’s off with the realtor, talking about ways to spruce this place up for cheap. Did Andrew and Elisabeth tell you we’re selling?”
“No,” she said.
She wondered if it had to do with him losing his job. She remembered now how Elisabeth had said once that George and Faye were penniless. What exactly did that mean?
“Just after Turkey Day, this old place will be on the market,” he said. “It hasn’t hit me yet, but Faye says it’s happening. Nothing’s selling around here, though, so we’ll have to wait and see.”
He brought their sandwiches to the table.
“You want a soda?” he said.
“I’m fine without,” Sam said. “Thanks.”
George opened a large bag of potato chips and set it down between them. He sat across from her.
He asked where she grew up and what she was studying and what her dad did for a living.
“Samantha O’Connell,” he said. “A good Irish Catholic, I’m assuming.”
She hadn’t been to Mass for three years, other than on Christmas. But Sam said yes.
“We raised Andrew in the Church. He made his communion and confirmation and all that. Are you religious?”
“Not really,” she said.
“No, neither is he.”
“But my parents are. I have a lot of respect for religion.”
There were people, lots of them, most of them maybe, whose personalities were fixed, who seemed as though they’d act the same in front of their own brother or the president. Sam envied them. She had always been a chameleon, programmed to change as needed in order to be liked. Had George presented himself as lapsed, she would have listed all the reasons why she never went to church anymore.
“That’s good,” George said. Then he shook his head and said, “Sorry for the third degree. I used to run a car service. I talked to my passengers all day long. I asked people everything about themselves. I could tell right away if someone didn’t feel like talking, and I respected that. But most wanted to chat, at least. Spill their guts to me sometimes too.”
“I’d love that job,” she said, before wondering if it sounded silly or condescending.
“I still drive people around, but not as much as I used to.”
She nodded. She thought he sounded wistful, but it was possible she was making it up.
“What’s it like, going to an all girls’ school?” he said. “How do you meet a decent guy when you go to a school like that? I can just feel Faye telling me to mind my business.”
Isabella would have corrected him: It’s not a girls’ school, it’s a women’s college.
Sam said, “I have a boyfriend, but he lives in London.”
“London, England?”
“Yup.”
“How do you make that work?”
He really seemed to want to know. Something about this endeared him to her.
“It’s hard,” she said. “I miss him a lot. But we talk on the phone. We write letters.”
“Letters!” George said. “That’s refreshing.”
“He’s better about it than I am. We talk over Skype and Snapchat, mostly. And we see each other in person more than you’d think. His sister-in-law works for an airline, so she gets us good deals. He visited me here in early October. He’ll be back again for Valentine’s Day. In between, I’ll see him in London, during winter break.”
It made her feel kind of fancy, saying it. In years past, her friends went somewhere exotic over school vacations. Sam never went anywhere but home. Her first year here, when everyone returned from winter break with a tan, Sam wondered how it was possible that so many of her fellow students were from Florida.
Isabella sometimes met up with her friends from boarding school for a long weekend away. She had admitted more than once to Sam that she didn’t actually like them much. They could be mean and shallow. They had never been there for her in a crisis. “You’re probably the first real friend I ever had,” Isabella said.
Still, her boarding school classmates had travel budgets similar to hers, and so they continued to meet up, at hotels Sam’s parents could never afford, let alone Sam herself.
“The cab ride from the airport to campus isn’t cheap,” George said now. “You have a car?”
“No. I used to. Bessie. She was a seventeen-year-old Cutlass Supreme, previously owned by my great-aunt Dot.”
“A Cutlass Supreme, that’s no joke,” George said.
“My mom always said it was like driving a Sherman tank. You should have seen me parallel park that thing. I got so good at it. But Bessie died officially last summer on my brother’s watch.”
“Oh no.”
“I cried,” Sam said. “Anyway. When Clive visited last time, I borrowed a friend’s van to pick him up.”
“I’ll tell you what. Whenever he comes back, I’ll pick him up and drop him off in the Town Car, free of charge.”
“No,” she said.
“For my grandson’s best friend? Of course I will.”
Sam grinned. “Thank you. That’s so nice.”
A voice on the radio was talking about the nation’s crippling levels of student loan debt. She introduced Randy, a man in his thirties who still lived with his parents because of it.
“Hope you’re not caught up in that mess,” George said.
“The crippling-debt part, yes,” Sam said. “The living-with-my-parents part, no. They’ve got a strict policy that once we move out, no one’s allowed to move back in.”
“Smart parents,” George said.
He shook his head. “It’s hard to know how anyone makes it anymore. The odds are against the people, I can tell you that.”
Sam recalled the humiliated look on her father’s face when they discussed her college loans, the way he said, “I wish we could have done better by you.”
“I know what you mean,” she said now.
“I’m glad Gil’s got an influence like you in his life,” George said. “Has Elisabeth ever mentioned the Hollow Tree to you?”
The words were familiar. Sam had to think a second. Then she remembered: she had seen them written on George’s notepad.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
The sandwiches were finished. George stood and cleared their plates. He pulled two Klondike bars from the freezer, and handed one to her.
“It’s this pet theory of mine,” he said.
She could tell he wanted her to insist that he go on.
“Tell me about it,” she said.
Sam unwrapped the foil and bit into the ice-cream bar. The thin chocolate shell gave a satisfying crack against her teeth.
“I could give you a million examples,” he said. “I collect them. You might have seen all my folders in the office.”
She wondered if he knew what she’d been up to in there. If this was his way of telling her.
Sam didn’t respond, only leaned in to show that she was interested.
George began to rattle off the evidence.
“Faye got a bill for some blood work. Six grand. It was a mix-up with the insurance, but she has since wasted weeks of her life trying to clear it up, waiting on hold, never reaching a real person, getting nowhere. Her sister called here all upset one day because she’d gone to the bank to apply for a mortgage, and the loan officer said those things could be tricky with low-income applicants. Betsy was so mad. ‘Low income,’ she said. ‘When did I stop being middle class? And why did no one tell me about it?’ My brother got fired from his job as a prison guard when the state decided to privatize the jails. Then he was hired back, with less pay a
nd without his pension.”
This reminded Sam of her friends in the dining hall. She almost said so, but George wasn’t done.
He told her he talked to the Mexican kids who worked at the car wash a lot. One day, one of the regulars wasn’t around, and George asked after him. The others said he’d gotten sick from the fumes. He had no sick leave or workers’ comp. Those kids made half the minimum wage, which was somehow legal, the thinking being that customers would make up for it in tips, which they didn’t.
A few months ago, George said, he started attending a discussion group made up of concerned local citizens.
“It’s helped me,” he said. “These guys get it. After my business went under, I felt like a failure. But then I started to see the patterns. Now I know that the failure is much bigger than me. They want us to think it’s our own problem. To feel like shit about ourselves. Then we won’t fight back.”
Sam felt her face grow hot at a memory from childhood: She, Brendan, and Molly in the back seat of their mother’s station wagon, on the way to pick up their father at the train. From the driver’s seat, their mother said, “You three need to be extra good and quiet on the ride home. Dad got a pink slip today.”
It was one of those moments when the adult was too caught up in her own concerns to translate. They didn’t know what a pink slip was, only, from her manner, that it was bad. When their father got in the car, he wasn’t his usual playful self. He sat, stone still and silent. Sam found it terrifying. They all did. Molly started to cry, and Brendan gave her the meanest look to shut her up.
The next morning, their father didn’t get out of bed. Their mother said they weren’t allowed to tell their cousins what had happened.
“Did Dad do something wrong?” Brendan asked.
“Of course not,” their mother said.
Sam understood why he had asked. There was so much shame in the air.
“I like your theory,” she told George. “So you have a whole discussion group dedicated to talking about this?”
“Technically, discussion group isn’t about the Hollow Tree. These guys have been getting together for years to talk. But it does all seem to come back around to the Hollow Tree sooner or later.”
Friends and Strangers Page 20