“Everyone’s fine,” I said. “But Dad says I can’t stay here unless I
work in the junkyard, and I can’t do that anymore.” My voice was
pitched unnaturally high, and it quivered.
Tyler said, “What do you want me to do?”
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