In retrospect I’m sure he meant this literally, that he was asking how he
could help, but my ears, solitary and suspicious, heard something else: What
do you expect me to do? I began to shake; I felt light-headed. Tyler had been
my lifeline. For years he’d lived in my mind as a last resort, a lever I could
pull when my back was against the wall. But now that I had pulled it, I
understood its futility. It did nothing after all.
“What happened?” Tyler said again.
“Nothing. Everything’s fine.”
I hung up and dialed Stokes. The assistant manager answered. “You done
working today?” she said brightly. I told her I quit, said I was sorry, then put
down the phone. I opened my closet and there they were, where I’d left them
four months before: my scrapping boots. I put them on. It felt as though I’d
never taken them off.
Dad was in the forklift, scooping up a stack of corrugated tin. He would
need someone to place wooden blocks on the trailer so he could offload the
stack. When he saw me, he lowered the tin so I could step onto it, and I rode
the stack up and onto the trailer.
My memories of the university faded quickly. The scratch of pencils on
paper, the clack of a projector moving to the next slide, the peal of the bells
signaling the end of class—all were drowned out by the clatter of iron and the
roar of diesel engines. After a month in the junkyard, BYU seemed like a
dream, something I’d conjured. Now I was awake.
My daily routine was exactly what it had been: after breakfast I sorted
scrap or pulled copper from radiators. If the boys were working on-site,
sometimes I’d go along to drive the loader or forklift or crane. At lunch I’d
help Mother cook and do the dishes, then I’d return, either to the junkyard or
to the forklift.
The only difference was Shawn. He was not what I remembered. He never
said a harsh word, seemed at peace with himself. He was studying for his
GED, and one night when we were driving back from a job, he told me he
was going to try a semester at a community college. He wanted to study law.
There was a play that summer at the Worm Creek Opera House, and
Shawn and I bought tickets. Charles was also there, a few rows ahead of us,
and at intermission when Shawn moved away to chat up a girl, he shuffled
over. For the first time I was not utterly tongue-tied. I thought of Shannon
and how she’d talked to people at church, the friendly merriment of her, the