BooksBarbecue
Back At Dawn
Chapters (39)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
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  39. Copyright

AT THE END OF February the workload had worn me to a nub. In addition to my job, I worked on the book every night when I got home. It took everything I had to keep going. I wasn’t tired of the story, or even the writing itself. Quite the contrary. I was tired of working eight passionless hours and then coming home to write for another three, four, sometimes five, tired of waking at five fifteen after going to sleep past midnight. Same shit, day in, day out. All I wanted to do was come home and fall straight into Carolyn’s arms, and of course that was the whole point of finishing the book, to make that very idea a reality. I felt the possibility of this life, and in the way I had idealized being with women I adored when I was younger, I knew that any other life that strayed from this would feel like prison.

When I wrote, my mind wandered. I thought of everything to keep from starting. And eventually I’d picture Carolyn sitting in our shitty little apartment, happy to be there, to be with me. During the times I wasn’t overly insecure or in the throes of a bout of jealousy—bouts that were becoming more and more common—I felt an intense desire to give her the life I thought she deserved, the life we talked about during the late nights when neither of us felt like sleeping. I wanted to give her the things she never had. She deserved that brand of happiness. That’s how I’d start, telling myself that I’d finish this book and sell it and we’d finally live this idealistic dream we both created. To hell with the odds stacked against us.

2

I worked late every night the first week of March. The company’s biggest book of the year was coming out, and overtime was required from all employees to finish it. On Friday I didn’t get off the train until after seven. It was freezing out but the snow had melted the week before and the ground was dry. Gene stood outside gathering broken limbs and detritus that had blown into the small plot he called a yard. There were gaping holes in the apartment where entire sections of the vinyl siding had been ripped away.

“Hey kiddo, how goes it?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Work is really fuckin’ up my world,” I said, and then stopped dead in my tracks. My breath caught in my throat. My father’s words, what he had always said to justify being an asshole.

Gene looked at me as I stood frozen in silence. “What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”