January 1958
My father, most likely at my mother's suggestion, sometimes took me to work with him on Saturdays. He would wake me up early, hours before the store opened. "We have work to do before the work begins," he was fond of saying. But a couple of Saturdays after he broke my mother's tooth, he drove silently. I sat in the front seat of our old Chevrolet as he navigated through snowy streets to the Sears store several miles away. Though he worked in the appliance department, he had been in the store long enough to have worked, as he said, "everywhere but where they keep the women's unmentionables."
I watched the snow fall. I watched a rabbit run race along beside the car before it darted left and into a snowbank. I usually looked forward to going to work with him, but this time there was so much tension between us that I wasn't looking forward to doing anything. My parents, my sister and I had barely spoken to each other since that night at the dinner table. My father seemed to be spending more time at work, staying later than he normally did and often returning home after dinner time.
"We should go on a vacation this summer," my father said so abruptly that I flinched. "I was thinking we could drive to Michigan. I spent a few weeks there when I was a kid. I don't remember where. But I remember we swam a lot, so there must've been a lake."
He might have wanted a response, but I wasn't sure. So, I stayed silent for the rest of the ride. At the store, my father unlocked the door, and I followed him into the dark store. We made our way to the small warehouse at the rear of the building. "There isn't much stuff," I said. On other visits, the shelves and floor had been stacked with boxes.
"Still stocking up after Christmas." He turned on the lights and gestured to the shelves. "They'll be filled again in a week or so. I don't have much for you to do today, so you can wander around the store, if you want. Nobody else will be here for a couple of hours, so you should be fine." He sat down in a large chair and started reading notes scattered across a metal desk.
I never tired of walking through the quiet store. I would lie on the beds and test each for comfort, then look through the tool department for a collection of wrenches that I thought I'd buy my father for Christmas when I had the money. I was in the toy department when my father called me. "I'm over here," I yelled.
"I need your help for a few minutes. Appliances." He had used a hand truck to haul new washing machines from the warehouse to the showroom. "Help me with these."
We positioned the units side by side. "Mom would like one of these," I said. "A new one."
He stared at me for just long enough to make me anxious, and then he ran his hand across the top of one of the machines. "Yeah. She would."
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