Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 69858 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69858 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
“Then let’s not bother with conversation. I’m good with silence.”
“Fine,” I snap. “Can I at least turn on music?”
He gestures to the touch panel. “My phone’s connected. Have at it.”
After a moment of fiddling with the options, I bang my head on the headrest. “You might have mentioned you only have classical music downloaded, grandpa.”
“Sorry it’s not Van Halen,” he says in a bored tone, as he merges onto the West Side Highway.
I look over in surprise. “You know what music I listen to?”
“We’ve shared a tight office space. Those headphones you wear constantly have a lot of sound leakage.”
I roll my eyes, not the least bit sorry. He should be so lucky as to enjoy my music. Van Halen’s “Unchained” beats the pants off Mozart.
But since it’s only Mozart or silence . . .
I pick up his phone again, hitting play on the one he’s labeled Favorites.
I . . . don’t hate it. The flute is actually kind of soothing, maybe this ride will pass in no time at all . . .
I stare out the window, proud of how calm and zen I’m being. After a while, I turn to glance at the clock. Surely we’re at least an hour in . . .
It’s been seven minutes.
I sigh. Bored. I pivot a little further in my seat towards Thomas, unabashedly studying him.
“So. How’s the life of leisure?” I ask. “Or have you already found another job?” I’m guessing it’s that. He doesn’t strike me as the type to tolerate unemployment for more than a day. I’m still shocked that he quit in the first place.
It seems so very un-Thomas.
He maintains his silence for a moment, and I worry he’s going to make good on his threat to avoid conversation all the way to Vermont, but he finally relents.
“I’m going to take a few months before jumping into anything.”
I fiddle with the blue streak I’ve wound up into a bun today as I continue to look at his profile, which is blatantly tense.
“The not jumping into something, I see. You being okay without a paycheck for a couple months? Harder to wrap my head around,” I tell him.
He glances over briefly, then back at the road. “When I was nine, my dad lost his job—nothing dramatic, just a round of layoffs, but it caught him and my mom by surprise. After that, they always made a point to maintain what they called the Ripcord Fund.”
“So, like a savings account?” I ask.
“Sort of, but this was in addition to their regular savings. This was money specifically set aside for times when they were without work, either planned or unplanned. They instilled the importance of such a fund in my brothers and me, though I’ve never had cause to use it until now.”
“I can’t believe Elodie was that bad.” Or that working with me was.
“It wasn’t,” Thomas says, and the way he glances over at me makes me think he heard the silent addendum. “It was more . . .” He drums his thumbs on the steering wheel, as though gathering his thoughts.
“There were a couple of reasons for me quitting,” he says finally. “But one of them was that conversation you and I had the first day in the satellite office. We were talking about being a middle manager, and I heard you describing it, I heard myself describing it . . .”
“I never meant to belittle it,” I say softly. “Really, I didn’t.”
“I know. But the conversation planted a seed of realization. I’m thirty-one. I’m not married, I don’t have kids, and maybe that would chafe less if I’d been devoted to a career that I loved. But . . .”
He shrugs his shoulders.
I think on this as I turn and look out the window. “You feel stunted.”
“Yes,” he says, sounding surprised. “Yes, exactly. That’s the perfect word.”
I nod. I know it’s the perfect word, because it sums up how I’ve been feeling as well. For different reasons, obviously. But neither one of us is where we expected to be by this point in our life. I’d always sort of imagined that I’d be a vagabond, maybe working in Bucharest at a stationery store, then moving on to owning a surf shop in the Caribbean, or becoming a street artist in Paris.
Instead, I have a 401k at a company whose products I can’t afford myself, and even as much as I genuinely love what I’m doing, I can’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that I’m too comfortable. It’s like I feel stuck, but not because something is holding me back, but because I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.
My situation isn’t exactly like Thomas’s, but I feel what he’s feeling. It’s unnerving when you wake up one day and look around to realize your life is nothing like you envisioned, yet any new, revised vision seems just out of reach and completely shrouded by impenetrable fog.