Part 2

Caitlin looked down at her casserole.

Alexis was sixteen, and her eyes were going back and forth between us like she was watching a tennis match.

Justin kept eating.

Mom said, “Martin.”

Very softly.

Dad held up one hand, and she stopped.

“You’re smart enough for engineering,” Dad said. “You’re choosing to be less. Do you understand how that looks to my colleagues? To this family?”

“I don’t really care how it looks,” I said.

That was the wrong thing to say.

I knew it the second it came out.

He set his fork down. He wiped his mouth with his napkin. He folded the napkin in half.

Then he said, “Then you’re a disgrace, and I won’t have a disgrace living under my roof while I pay for it.”

I thought he was bluffing.

I went up to my room, sat on my bed, and waited for it to blow over.

Two hours later, I heard the front door open and close a few times.

When I came downstairs, Mom was standing in the kitchen with her arms crossed so tight her knuckles were white.

My two duffel bags and my laundry basket were sitting out on the porch swing.

Dad was in his recliner reading.

“You’ve made your choice,” he said without looking up. “Go make it somewhere else. And when you come back asking for money, and you will, we can talk about engineering again.”

I stood there for a second.

Then I walked out onto the porch, picked up my bags, and carried them down the steps to my truck.

That truck was a gray 2007 Toyota Tacoma with a cracked dashboard.

I’d paid for it myself with two summers of mowing lawns, and it was in my name.

Dad couldn’t take it back, and he knew it.

Alexis came running out right before I left.

She was barefoot and crying, and she shoved a phone charger and a peanut butter sandwich through the half-open window, because that’s what a sixteen-year-old thinks you need when you get thrown out.

I still think about that sandwich.

I drove to Newton in the dark.

I parked in Harvey’s gravel lot at eleven at night because I didn’t know where else to go, and I fell asleep in the truck.

At six the next morning, somebody knocked on the window.

It was Harvey, holding two cups of gas station coffee.

He didn’t ask me what happened. He looked at the duffel bags in the passenger seat and the laundry basket in the bed of the truck.

Then he handed me a coffee.

“There’s a room above the shop. It’s got a cot and a hot plate. Rent’s two hundred a month. You start today instead of June.”

“I can’t pay you yet.”

“Then it comes out of your first check. Drink your coffee.”

I still had two weeks of high school left, so I drove forty minutes each way and worked at the shop until dark.

On graduation day, I found my mom in the very top row of the bleachers, by herself, in her library cardigan.

She waved at me with both hands.

Nobody else from my family came.

She didn’t come down to the field afterward. I figured out later that she’d told Dad she was going to the grocery store.

The room above the shop had a cot, a hot plate, and a window over a soybean field.

I loved it.

For the first time in my life, nobody was grading me.

Harvey was a widower with no kids.

The shop was him, a part-time office lady named Arla, who did invoices three mornings a week, and a big, quiet electrician named Kirby, who said maybe twenty words a day.

Houses, farms, churches, the grain elevator outside of town.

Thirty-four years.

He was the best teacher I’ve ever had, and he never once made me feel stupid.

When I got something wrong, he’d just say, “Well, now you know two ways it doesn’t work,” and hand me the wire again.