The Grandfather Clock (3 page)

I got in a cab.

“
Where to?” the cabbie
asked.

Where to. Good question.

2

After the humid night in Orlando, Los
Angeles felt like autumn. The evening air was dry and felt foreign.
My mood was improving by the mile. On the flight in, I decided I
would stay as close to the beach as I could, without getting too
expensive. I asked the driver to go to Newport Beach. I was wishing
I had a smartphone. We drove up and down a stretch of Pacific Coast
Highway and I had him drop me off at a decent hotel that was within
sight of car rental place. I walked in and got a room for $100 per
night, breakfast included.

“
You’re looking at $900 to
rent this vehicle, if you aren’t returning it here,” the agent told
me.

“
And what would it cost if
I were to return it here,” I asked, just so I knew exactly how much
this clock was costing me.

“
$450.”

Ouch.

“
And we’ll have to get the
Suburban from the John Wayne Airport location,” he said. “Another
$69. Unless you want to go there and get it.”

Thirty dollar cab ride,
maybe.

I walked back to the hotel and took
their courtesy shuttle to John Wayne. I called my office and told
them I was sick. I hadn’t filed for vacation with H.R., so I needed
to get creative with how to deal with my absence. Lying in the
hotel bed the night before, I tried to figure out how to make my
$5,000 last. I wanted to quit my job and start new, but I wasn’t
ready to pull the trigger.

With five rental desks lined up at the
airport, and a quiet Monday morning, I hopped from desk to desk
trying to get a good deal.

One place was offering an SUV that
would fit the clock for $900. The next desk wouldn’t
compete.

I approached a bargain brand who’d
opted to share their space with a brand I’d never heard of. “I need
a vehicle that is long. SUV or van. I need it for a week and I’m
returning it to Tampa, Florida. The big guy down there is at $900.
What can you do?”

Omar tapped away at the keyboard. I
marveled at the number of keystrokes he was hitting, when it was
usually just a few little mouse clicks. He frowned.

“
$842,” he said. “For an
Expedition.”

“
That’s a lot of gas,” I
said. Ten miles per gallon all the way across the
country.

“
Let me see, let me see,”
he tapped away again. “I might have a Grand Cherokee coming
in.”

“
Come on,” I encouraged
him. “You know you have some vehicle back there that you’d just
love to dump on the guys in Tampa. Something people come back to
the desk and ask for something else.”

A light bulb went on. “You know. It’s
not in our inventory.” He tapped some more. “I’m gonna need a
manager.” He picked up the phone.

Ten minutes later I was behind the
wheel of a big white van. It looked like an unpainted church bus.
It hadn’t been rented in two months, and they’d taken it out of
inventory to use as a courtesy van in the event theirs broke down.
It set me back $408. The seats rearranged so that the clock could
fit snuggly in the center aisle. I hoped.

I met Vince for lunch at a taco stand
in Fullerton. He was on a job with his tiling business.

We exchanged a bro-hug. “Nice ride,
Mikey,” he said.

“
Hey, man. You’d be
impressed. I bargained like I was in Tijuana to get that
thing.”

“
Don’t try to go to
Tijuana with that thing. They’ll think you’re into human
trafficking.”

I was starving and ordered two extra
tacos with my two taco combo.

“
So,” Vince said, trying
to break the ice over the head of the elephant in the room. “You
left Christie.”

“
Yep,” I said with a mouth
full. “I don’t even want to get into it. We were at a wedding in
Orlando on Saturday. She just pissed me off. It was petty, but it
was the culmination of things.”

“
The proverbial straw that
broke the camel’s back,” he said. “So, totally over. Not going to
try to ‘work on it’ when you get back.”

“
Over. Done.”

“
Well, good. Good for
you,” he laughed, and added, “Thank god.”

“
What the hell? Sam said
the same thing! If everybody wanted me to break up with her, why
didn’t someone say something?”

“
You know the answer to
that, dude. Then if you stay with her...”

“
Yeah, it would be all
weird,” I said.

“
Yep.”

“
Kind of like when you
dated Tanya,” I said.

“
Hey, at least I didn’t
propose to her. And I knew she was a train wreck, Mikey. Or is it
‘Michael?’”

My family always called me Mikey, but
I’d gone by Michael since I started college. Mostly because it was
written in construction paper on my dorm room door.

“
So, what’s the plan? Get
the storage unit cleaned out, drive the white whale back to
Florida?”

“
Yeah. I guess that’s a
start. I want to quit my job, but I don’t really have a plan. I
have grandma’s money. Not much else.”

“
I thought you bankers
were rolling in it.”

“
Not quite,” I
said.

“
Well, come over tonight.
Sara’s making ribs. She’s excited to see you. With the twins we
haven’t gotten out much. The key to the storage unit is at the
house. Come over early. We’ll eat at 6:00.”

Vince had a modest, ranch house, but
with lots of space, in the Tustin foothills. I kept expecting Kevin
Arnold to walk down the street in his New York Jets jacket. Vince
had been in the tiling business since high school, and he’d spun
off on his own. He now had four separate crews working for him. His
floors were beautiful, to say the least.

Sara had lost the baby weight, and
little Vince Junior and Jessica were as cute as advertised. Sara
made dinner and I fed pureed carrots to both kids while Vince
showed me pictures of his latest tiling jobs. We each hauled a kid
outside and he showed me some stones he’d laid, as practice for an
upcoming bid for Disney.

“
You talked to Mom
lately?” I asked, sipping a cold Sierra Nevada.

“
I talked to Dad. Not
Mom,” he said.

“
Same here,” I
said.

“
Yeah. She was good at
Fourth of July though,” Vince said. “Better anyway. You should stop
by on your way back. It’s little out of the way, up to I-40, but
it’s a good chance.”

“
I’ll do that.”

“
She’ll be glad about
Christie too,” Vince smiled.

“
Jesus, you all make her
out to be horrible,” I laughed.

“
No, no. Sorry. Just not
right for you. You’re too easy going. She made you stressed
out.”

“
You’re right,” I said. “I
realized that I was becoming, I don’t know, negative. I felt
hopeless. Everything started to bother me, but I didn’t have the
energy to say anything. She was in her own world, and I didn’t dare
enter. I was waiting for an excuse to leave. I guess I took it. I’m
just glad it’s over.”

“
Let it all out,
bro.”

“
And she was so
competitive. Always trying to impress people, to the point of
making them uncomfortable.”

“
Sara always said Christie
would walk around and look at our stuff, and then say how she was
getting one, but better.”

I chuckled. “I know exactly what you
mean. Half the shit she said to other people wasn’t true. We’d be
at dinner and she’d tell someone about getting a new TV or some
random thing and I’d think, well now we either have to go buy one,
or never have these people over at our place.”

“
Insecure,” Vince
said.

“
Whatever. Again, thanks
for saying something before I did something dumb like get engaged,”
I said. “Oh wait.”

“
Man, how much did you
spend on that ring?”

“
$3,000,” I
said.

“
Not bad.”

“
Not bad,” I nodded. “Not
good either.”

“
What the hell are you
going to do with that huge clock? You probably don’t have a place
to live when you get back.”

“
Minor issue,” I
mumbled.

“
I don’t know how you do
it.”

“
Do what?” I
asked.

“
Fly by the seat of your
pants. First, it was when you went off to Florida for college. Then
you move in with Christie. Now, you’re off to the next thing. I
don’t know,” Vince shook his head, grinning, “What’s your
goal?”

“
My goal?” That was a good
question.

“
Yeah. What do you want in
life?”

I rubbed my forehead. “I know what I
don’t want.”

“
There’s a start. What
don’t you want?”

“
I don’t want to work at
some meaningless job and go home each night to a colorless gray
existence.”

Vince’s face winced, and I could tell
he thought I was talking about him.

“
No,” I jumped in. “I want
what you have, only different. You have built something. You are
out there every day working with your hands, with people, making
things. That’s something. And it supports what is important to
you.”

“
It takes work,” he
said.

“
Do you know what I
do?”

“
You run customer service
for a bank.”

“
Wrong. My job isn’t to
train people to help customers. My job is to train people to help
the bank. A successful outcome is one that makes the bank money.
Credit card holders who pay their bill in full every month? They
are a bank’s nightmare.”

“
Fair enough,” he said.
“You only have yourself to blame. Back to my original question.
What do you want? Not everyone gets a chance to start over. Don’t
squander this opportunity.”

I took a detour past my old high
school on the way back to the hotel. I’m not the least sentimental
about high school. I was eager to get far away when I graduated.
Not because I’d had a bad experience. I had a good time. I just
wanted something different. I wanted to be out of the city. There
was something about the South that seemed foreign, yet welcoming.
Everything was familiar and different at the same time.

Tustin High was a working class high
school. Aside from baseball, the athletic program was pathetic. I
played some organized volleyball and worked in a family-owned
hardware store. I spent a lot of time on the beach, taking a short
bus ride. The year I turned 17, I went from 5’11” to 6’3” and was
no longer intimidated by the beach volleyball games. I could lay
down a decent spike, and block well enough, but I was a finesse
player. I had a knack for knowing where the ball was going and
making a playable dig. I had a regular partner named Pick. He was a
Vietnamese high jumper. He was cocky, and got under the other
teams’ skin even when we weren’t winning. I was probably a better
player at 18 than in my late twenties. Then I started playing a lot
with Sam. We got good, but when I started dating Christie, I had
less time for it.

I spent almost all of my last year in
Tustin out at the beaches. My dad was close to retirement and my
parents were spending more time in Santa Fe. My grandmother still
lived a half-mile away and would hear nothing of relocating. I
think that my mother felt guilty for moving to Santa Fe full-time
before my grandmother passed away. But once I was out of the house,
their life in Santa Fe was fresh and new, and many of their Tustin
friends had already left the area.

The street names were all coming back.
Santa Clara, Holt, Lucero, Pacific. The school looked the same,
except for a couple dozen temporary classrooms that filled a
parking lot. I noticed some graffiti that might not have been there
10 or 12 years before. I pulled the van on to the 55 freeway to the
beach. I headed south toward Balboa. I recognized many of the beach
cottages along the main boulevard. Not a lot had changed. I parked
my giant van in a metered space on the street and walked down a
brick street to Joey’s, a pizza bar that I used to hang out in. It
was a slow Monday. I had been by the place a few times over the
years when I was visiting, including the previous year for my
grandmother’s funeral. I had seen a girl working there that I knew
vaguely from growing up.

Erica was working the bar when I
walked in.

“
Mike Chance! What brings
you to town?” she greeted me without hesitation.

“
Just visiting my
brother,” I said, not about to get into it.

“
Nice. They were in here a
couple months ago. Twin babies, so cute!”

“
Yeah. They have their
hands full,” I said and ordered a beer.

“
Food?”

“
I ate. Just thought I’d
stop in. I don’t really know anybody out here anymore.”

“
Lucky. Danny McCoy was in
here last night. Guy still thinks he’s god’s gift,” she said.
“Beer’s on me.”