Дуглас Кеннеди - Five Days

I knocked lightly on her door, then opened it an inch to see that she was still very much asleep. Good. I decided to let her have another fifteen minutes in bed and went downstairs to make coffee. Dan showed up a few minutes later, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, his gym bag in hand.

‘Heading off to work out,’ he said, avoiding my line of vision.

‘That sounds like a good idea.’

He moved towards the front door.

‘See you tonight.’

‘I’ll be home at the usual time. But you know I have my weekly book talk with Lucy at seven. And tomorrow—’

‘Yeah, you’ll be heading to Boston at lunchtime.’

‘I’ll make all your dinners for the weekend tonight.’

‘You don’t think I can cook?’

‘Dan. ’

‘I’ll take care of the dinners myself.’

‘Are you angry I’m going to Boston?’

‘Why should I be angry? It’s work, right?’

‘That it is.’

‘Anyway, if I were you I’d want a break from me.’

‘Dan. ’

‘Don’t say it.’

‘You have me worried.’

He stopped and turned back, still not able to look at me directly. Then, in a half-hushed voice, he said one word:

‘Sorry.’

And he was gone.

Now, nearly eleven hours later — turning down my road after having spent much of the working day trying to keep the entire unsettling aftertaste of the morning somewhat at bay — a certain dread hit me. A dread that has been so present since that day twenty-one months ago when Dan walked in from work and said that he’d just been laid off. The economic downturn had meant that annual sales at L.L.Bean had fallen by 14 percent. The people on the executive floor decided that they could shave some excess off the info tech department — which handles all the online sales and marketing for the company — by cutting the two people in charge of ever expanding its sales capabilities. One of these people happened to be my husband. He’d put in twelve years at L.L.Bean — and was floored by such a summary dismissal, just four days after New Year’s Day. The look on his face when he came in through the front door that night. it was as if he had aged ten years in the ten hours since I’d seen him. Reaching into his back pocket he pulled out a letter. The letter. There it was, in hard typography. The notice that he no longer had a job, the regret of the company at ending such a long association, the assurance that a ‘generous termination package would be offered’, along with ‘the services of our Human Resources department to help you find new employment as quickly as possible’.

‘What a joke,’ Dan said. ‘The last time they laid off a bunch of people from my department none of them found any work for at least two years. and the only people who did find new jobs had to go out of state.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, reaching for his hand. But he pulled it away before I could touch it. I said nothing, telling myself at the time the man was so understandably floored by what had happened. Even if Dan was never the most tactile or outwardly affectionate of men, he still had never pulled away from me like that before. So I reached out again for his outstretched hand. This time he flinched, as if I was threatening him.

‘You trying to make me feel bad?’ he said, the anger sudden.

Now it was my turn to flinch. I looked at him with shock and just a little disbelief.

I quickly masked it by changing the subject, asking him about the sort of ‘package’ they had offered him. As these things go, it wasn’t too mean: six months’ full salary, full medical insurance for a year, plenty of free career counselling. At least they had the decency to wait until after Christmas before delivering the terrible news — and it wasn’t just the IT department that had suffered cuts, as around seventy employees across the board had been shown the door. But as soon as Dan said ‘six months’ full pay’ I could almost hear what I was thinking simultaneously: We’re just a bit screwed. Only three months earlier we’d taken a $45,000 home-improvement loan to reroof our house and deal with a basement that was riddled with damp. As home upgrades go they were hardly sexy — but absolutely necessary. We took them after much dinner-table discussion and scribbled calculations on the backs of assorted envelopes. Our roof was leaking, our basement was wet. We were filling the space between these two encroaching molds. We had no choice but to borrow the money, even though we knew it would strain our already stretched household budget. Between our $1,200 mortgage per month, the $15,000 it cost to send Ben to U Maine Farmington (and that was a bargain, compared to a private college like Bowdoin), the $250 lease on the car that Dan drove to work (my vehicle was a twelve-year-old Camry with around 133,000 miles on the clock and in urgent need of a new transmission), and the $300 in essential monthly premiums to cover Ben and Sally under my hospital insurance scheme, the idea of burdening ourselves with another $450 per month for ten years was disheartening. Add all these essential outgoings together, and we were already spending close to $3,500 per month. Now Dan earned $43K per year and I earned $51K. After tax we had a combined net income of $61K — or $5, 083 per month. In other words, this left us with just under $1,600 after our main outgoings to pay for all our utilities, all our food, all our clothes, all Ben and Sally’s additional needs, and whatever we could squeeze out every year to fund a one-week vacation.

I knew many families around us who were making do on far less. Even though Sally did complain that we always seemed to be counting pennies she finally got wise and started using her weekend babysitting money to buy all the iPods and funky earrings and the butterfly tattoo (don’t ask) that she came home with after a day out with some girlfriends in Portland. Ben, on the other hand, never asked us for a penny. He had a part-time job at the college, mixing paints and stretching canvases in the visual arts department. He refused anything more than the room and board we provided for him in addition to his annual tuition.

‘I’m living la vie de bohиme in Farmington,’ he said to me once when I tried to press $100 into his hand (I’d done a week’s worth of overtime). ‘I can live on air. And I don’t want you to lose the roof because you slipped me a hundred bucks.’

I laughed and said:

‘I doubt that is going to happen.’

Actually we decided to pay off part of the new roof loan with Dan’s severance. The basement was now dry. And Dan turned in his leased car and used $1,500 to buy a 1997 Honda Civic that never made it above 60 mph. But at least he had wheels while I was at the hospital. The one-salary situation meant that money was ferociously tight. We were just about making all our bills every month and had absolutely no cash to spare. Dan had knocked on every door possible within the state. Perhaps the most terrible irony of his story was that, around eighteen months after he’d lost his job at Bean’s, he discovered that they were readvertising his old post. Naturally he contacted the head of personnel. Naturally the guy spun some yarn about sales upturn allowing them to re-expand the department they had just reduced. Naturally the guy also told Dan he should reapply for the job. Then they went and hired someone else who was (again according to the head of personnel) ‘simply more qualified’. Shortly after that Dan also lost what seemed to be that shoo-in position in the State of Maine’s IT department in Augusta — and the outbreaks of rage really started, perhaps augmented by the fact that, just two days ago, the head of personnel at Bean’s called and said they did have an opening — but it was in the stockroom. Yes, it was an assistant supervisor’s position. And yes, after six months he would be back in their health insurance system. Yet it only paid $13 an hour — but, hey, that was almost twice the minimum wage — and just about $15K a year after taxes.