The Job Read Online Free PDF Page B

how.”
    “Can’t disagree with that.”
    “Listen, I’ve got to fly back into this meeting. Patroon is one-sixty East Forty-sixth. The table’s reserved for nine-fifteen. Bye.”
    And she was gone.
    Leave it to Lizzie to snag a table for four at the hottest restaurant in town. Then again, if Lizzie puts her mind to something, she inevitably achieves results. Because, like me, she is the sort of person for whom results mean everything.
    She, too, is a hick from the sticks. Ever heard of the town of Utica, New York? Smack dab in the middle of the snowbelt. The sort of place where there’s a virtual whiteout six months a year, and where the best civic amenity is the road out of town. Her dad was a sergeant on the local police force, a depressive prone to pitch-black moods that he drowned with cheap Utica Club beer. Her mom was the sort of Suzy Homemaker type who always had a smile on her face as she busied herself with a thousand and one domestic details, yet also chased Valium with Bailey’s Irish Cream.
    “We weren’t exactly the happiest of families,” she confessed shortly after we met.
    “Once I hit seventeen, all I could think about was eettine the hell out of Dodge.”
    I certainly understood such sentiments-I hadn’t been back home once since leaving Brunswick in the fall of ‘87. Not that there was any home to go back to. By then my dad was newly dead, my mom had remarried a golf pro and moved to Arizona, and my older brother Rob had lost his heart to a Filipina bar girl named Mamie while stationed with the navy at Subic Bay.
    We weren’t exactly the happiest of families. No-that really wasn’t us. We were the sort of folks who seemed reasonably content, never acknowledging any difficulties on the home front My dad was a military lifer-a guy from Indianapolis who saw the navy as his way out of the landlocked Midwest. He enlisted at the age of eighteen-and until his death twenty-nine years later, the navy was his Great White Father, who provided him with direction and dealt with all his essential necessities. Having been something of a screw up in high school (as he was fond of telling us), he got “discipline” and “focus” and “pride” from the navy. He rose quickly to ensign, then spent four years in training as a mechanical engineer. Two years into his Uncle Sam-backed studies at San Jose State, he met my mom (she was an English major)-so, as he was also fond of telling us, the navy found him a wife as well. They were married a week after graduating in 1962. Rob arrived the next summer; I showed up in January of ‘65. Our childhood was a string of tract houses in assorted naval air stations around the country: San Diego, Key West, Pensacola, and finally eleven years in Brunswick, Maine, where my dad was in charge of maintenance for “airborne operations.” It turned out to be his last posting. He died on January 2, 1987. He was only forty-seven, a victim of a lifelong attachment to cigarettes.
    Just as I can’t picture my father without a Winston gripped between his teeth, I can never recall my parents fighting with each other. You see, my dad really bought into the idea of living a “shipshape” life.
    “You play the game well, and the game will always treat you well”-another of his pet expressions, and one that summed up his belief that the team player, the good guy, was always rewarded for his loyalty and service. But besides being a good officer, he also worked hard at being a good father and provider. Of course, from the time I hit my teens I began to sense that there was a certain going-throuph-the-motions” qualitv to my narenlV marriaap-that my mom wasn’t exactly thrilled with her permanent housewife status, that she found base life confining, and that she and my dad had possibly fallen out of love with each other years ago. But my old man’s “code of duty” meant that the family had to be held together. It also meant that he could never show favoritism toward any one