The calls that wake you from sleep are those that can’t. Paul remembers his first middle-of-the-night call. His mother, a lifetime smoker and diabetic, was in the hospital for a routine operation for an infection on her leg, a gardening cut gone purple. Paul was a handful of weeks from high school graduation, sleeping over at a friend’s, planning a night of Boone’s Farm wine and girl-chasing, when his father called.
“The doc says it must have been a blood clot,” Paul’s father choked. “Somehow got dislodged. They couldn’t get her back.”
Two months later, the men of the family stumbled around in their grief, weeks of pizza, fried egg sandwiches, and ramen noodles, until Paul Sr. sat him down in the kitchen that held the smell of cooking grease and told him, “I’m making Ritchie a partner in the business.” It was the summer after Paul graduated from high school, all warm breezes from the gorge, clear sunshine and strangeness, the silence of their house in the mornings. Paul was working with his father full-time, and he took the news like a slap.
“Dad.”
“Paulie—” His father held up his hand, coughing.
“Dad. I’m a better worker than Ritchie. He’s never on time, he, he doesn’t even know how to pick up the goddamn voice mail, Dad!”
“Paulie—” His father coughed again, smacked his own chest with a fist. “Listen to me: you’re going to college. Ritchie is going to come on board with me, and you’re going to college.”
“Dad…” Paul faltered. He hadn’t thought…He didn’t think… SuperNova Electric and Sons?
“You’re too smart to be crawling around in people’s attics and basements, fishing wires your whole damn life. You’ll go to college and learn how to grow this business, get us a whole fleet of vans running around, other people doing the job for us, us managing the business. That’s the future of SuperNova. I’m bringing your brother into the technical part full-time, get his lazy ass working. Then I’m going to retire and make you partner in my place, okay? I’m going to move to Mexico and sip froufrou drinks all day, and you boys are going to do my dirty work, send me the checks.”
Paul had enrolled that fall at Portland State University, just across the bridge, despite worries about his father’s health, his older brother’s lack of responsibility. They sat down to dinner at night, the tabletop TV droning the news, with Paul Sr. eating less, coughing more, still smoking his Lucky Strikes. Ritchie would alternately make an effort at work, then fall back into bed for weeks, as though the weight of just doing what everyone else did on a daily basis, showing up and putting in eight hours, was too much for him.
But more than worrying about his father and brother, and his increasing anxiety that the freshman-year classes, all bullshit requirements, were doing nothing toward helping him learn to grow his father’s electrical business, Paul was being pursued by a girl, and he didn’t know what to do about that either. Eva Sunderland was the seventeen-year-old freshman who sat next to him in Introduction to Anthropology. She had waist-length, perpetually messy blond hair and wrote him funny notes in the borders of her binder, miniature sketches of her life as depicted with the Pygmies their professor droned about.
“Exhibit A: Pygmies wading with me through beer sludge at ATO house this weekend,” she would write, and pass him a lined sheet of paper, tiny stick-figure Pygmies sailing on a plastic cup next to the chunky sole of her ubiquitous brown hiking boots. “Exhibit B: Pygmies trying to tempt me not to write this stupid paper.” And there they would be, drawn pulling her hair, holding up ads for concerts, Gypsy Kings, 7:30, in the newspaper. There were Pygmies that got buried in her mountains of dirty laundry, Pygmies getting her out of a really bad blind date, Pygmies flying back east with her for Thanksgiving break, angry-eyebrowed Pygmies hating to be shuffled between her newly divorced parents, and finally, somewhere around Exhibit Q, a week before Christmas break, the Pygmies were smacking their foreheads and sharpening spears in outrage that Cute Guy next to her still hadn’t asked her out.
Paul turned red, thinking again, He hadn’t thought…He didn’t think…
So he took her home two nights before she left for Christmas break. The house was dark and quiet when they arrived, breathless from the cold. His father and brother were out pulling wires,