his crippling depression. On this morning, however, he was up even earlier than usual. It was dark out and he no longer had a job to which to report. Back in 2000 he’d been laid off from Fairway, where he’d worked as a warehouseman for over twenty years. Through the years he’d moved from floor to floor—grocery, produce, freezer, billing.
By all accounts he’d been great at his job. He had the highest production with the lowest rate of error of any man in the warehouse. Efficiency became the backbone of his character, not listed in the skill sets on his résumé but tattooed into his identity. His job gave him a sense of purpose. But Fairway closed its Fargo location because it wanted to invest in sporting goods, and when it took the jobs away, Fairway pretty much killed the Wilkens and everyone like them.
Mark tried to get a job at SuperValu, a wholesale grocery distributor, but he couldn’t pass the step test. Step test is the sort of term that most people never hear but when you want to work in a warehouse it’s the only thing on your mind. The procedure involves the subject stepping up and down on a platform at a rate of twenty-four steps per minute, using a four-step cadence, up-up-down-down, for three minutes. The subject stops as soon as the test is over and his heart rate is checked to see if he might be a candidate for an on-site heart attack.
Every day Mark and Arlene would go to the skating arena where Maggie had lessons and take the steps up and down hundreds of times. For a full year they practiced. He kept going back in to retest and failed every time. At the end of this demoralizing year a cog took pity and pushed his application through. SuperValu hired him part-time, on an on-call basis, which meant every evening at six Mark would need to call to see if the store wanted him to come in the following day. This meant the family couldn’t plan to go anywhere, not even to the Cities for a long weekend. At first he worked a couple of days a week, and then he was cut down to a couple of days a month, until finally he was getting called only once a month for a couple of hours. Toward the end he barely worked at all but spent every day of his life thinking he might have to work tomorrow.
In this way Mark Wilken was effectively forced to retire. One bright spot was that he’d won his full pension for twenty-two years of labor, but with that he was barred from working at a for-profit company. It was as though the company was saying, We will give you this bit to survive, but you must stay where you are, in your place. Get drunk if you must but do it with cheap beer. So he took a position as a courier at a hospital, hallwaying around interdepartmental mail, manila envelopes with red string. Before taxes, he made $7 an hour.
Nobody knows exactly what he felt, because he didn’t share the dark bits. But the dissipation of dignity can drive even the strongest men mad. He didn’t sleep and went to a lot of AA meetings.
On this morning, Arlene woke and focused her eyes on Mark’s. He looked exhausted. His eyes were glazed over. She looked at the clock and back at her husband.
Boots? she said. It was her nickname for Mark. He called her Lene.
He walked over to the bed and sat beside her.
You know I have always loved you, he said.
Arlene nodded. I have always loved you, she said.
She had not grown weary of his mistakes, either the ones he did not choose, like losing his job and the depression that followed, or the ones that he did—smoking marijuana and drinking. Even if the addictions were a disease, she saw the precise moments he chose them over her and what she needed. She did not enable him but neither did she badger him about his transgressions. It was not her way.
She rose and began to get ready for work. Mark hovered near her. The truth was she liked how he needed her. It was one of the ways she felt loved.
Do you think you could stay home with me, he asked, and go out for breakfast?
She looked at him. Her husband’s flesh had sunk below the piers of his bones. The last few months