an answer. Loose lips notwithstanding, Betty was a good cashier and he needed her.
She’d been one of the original cashiers at Zachary’s and had been forced into early retirement when the former grocery had closed. When she’d found out that Dev was opening a new one, she’d shown up to ask for a job. She knew everything about running a grocery store, had been a quick study on his higher-tech registers and inventory system, and she’d been the perfect person to train the part-timers who worked the other shifts.
“Call me if you need anything,” he instructed, shouldering the gray backpack that held his laptop and nutritional essentials: alkaline water, kale chips, and supplements for the rest of the day. Dev imagined what album he might put on as he climbed into his old pickup—the one he kept in Colorado and had owned since he was a teen. He was thirty seconds into Superstition when the first moment’s peace he’d had all day was ruined by the special alert on his phone.
I’ve gotta change these settings.
He’d thought it the last time, too. If the media ever wrote about John Hamren, Dev was the first to know. Only, the Google Alerts had become intrusive. He didn’t like that they came in at any random moment. He liked it even less that waiting to read the headline always made him hold his breath. The probability was increasing that, one day, the newspaper story about his biological father would tell him the septuagenarian was dead.
Once upon a time, following the man in the news had been simpler. Dev had been ambivalent about ever wanting to meet him back then. And he was wise enough to know that he didn’t need another father. He also didn’t need a scapegoat or a punching bag or some theatrical scene of reckoning. Only, somewhere along the line, things had changed. Dev had changed. And answers had become everything.
Jon Hamren to be honored by the Smithsonian Museum in November
That’s what the headline read. It went on to flatter the illustrious career of the architecture-world icon. Dev had consumed everything that had ever been printed or video recorded about John Hamren’s career: his rise, his fall, his redemption and everything in between.
It wouldn’t be like last time, he told himself.
The pep talk Dev seemed set on was one he’d given himself before. Showing up to see John Hamren was something he’d done in the past. Only, he hadn’t spoken a single word either time. The first, he’d been too filled with rage he hadn’t expected. The second time, he’d been too timid.
You don’t have time for this.
Dev took an extra second at an empty stop sign intersection to close his eyes against unwelcome thoughts—against the debate he couldn’t have with himself now. The meeting at Laura’s would be sobering enough. He needed the drive to bring him solace. He needed his breathing exercises and folic acid to keep his blood pressure in check. His birthday loomed and he didn’t want to end up like his mom.
“More layoff orders from corporate, those fuckers,” the mill supervisor, Cliff Dawson, reported grimly when the EDC meeting came to order. His voice was so deep, you had to listen hard to hear. He was tall like Dev, but burly. His beard was long and impressively groomed. And he cursed a lot when he was angry or needed caffeine.
A bad storm at the beginning of the season had put a tree through a section of City Hall’s roof. Said roof was still being fixed. Lack of official meeting space was why Dev and the others found themselves in the home office of Sapling’s mayor. Laura Peacock preferred to work from her yurt.
It stood at the edge of her property near the top of Caribou Hill and had been built as a space for her clients. A desk was set up at the base of the circle and a PhD in Consciousness Studies was hung behind it on the latticed wall. Next to said degree was a photo of Laura smiling and clasping hands with the Dalai Lama. Its wooden rafters drew attention to the circular skylight at the center of the roof, which cast good light into the space despite the canopy of forest.
“More layoffs? Are they serious? I thought the plants were doing better.”
Stanley Tran was a Member-at-Large. His comment earned a subtle eye roll from Janice Brewster, retired accountant, town Treasurer and conspiracy theorist at-large. Dev didn’t know why Stanley was surprised. Packard