Country Boy

Work had been hell all week, and Andy was glad to get a little break. The beginning of the week was so busy that he usually worked through lunch. It was like that every Monday and Tuesday. He could barely keep caught up, and he was the best in the warehouse. It wore him out quickly, and he always seemed tired at the end of the day. He hated that feeling because he never had the energy to do anything when he got home. He never got to do anything he enjoyed. Work and sleep had become his life. He hated that job, hated his coworkers, and hated what his life had become. Work hadn’t been hell all week; it had been hell since day one.
Wednesday was an oasis in the isolated desert of boredom. Wednesday was just slow enough to sneak off for lunch. The city held many restaurants and fast food joints. Andy had been to quite a few, but there were many more that he hadn’t even heard of yet. He would go out on the weekends or a night after work if he had the energy. Being a single, young man, his fridge was never very full. If he wanted a meal that didn’t consist of Raman noodles and hot dogs, then he went out. Wednesdays were different though. Andy only went to one place every Wednesday, and it wasn’t for the food.
His rusty Dodge pickup pulled into the parking lot. It had been a gift when he had moved out. It was about as old as he was and had just about as many collisions, but it got him to work on time. The lot was full of wrecked cars and the trucks that towed them. Cars packed the street behind him, honking, sputtering, and generally ruining any peace Andy could have found in the overcast day. There are too many cars in the city, he thought with disdain. Why did I move out here? There are too many people, too much noise, and no peace whatsoever. People put their brains in the trunk when they got into their cars. Andy wished he had an indestructible car he could use to run into people who were acting stupidly on the road. He never had these thoughts in the country, where he could drive all day without seeing more than a dozen other cars. In the city, the streets were busy even at 2 a.m. As he opened the door to the office, he felt that it was going to rain soon, a talent he had learned on the farm.
There was a steady rhythm of a phone ringing, being answered, being put on hold, and being hung up only to ring again. A girl who was a few years older than Andy smiled as he walked in the room. “Hi, Andy. How was your weekend?” she chirped. Andy smiled back politely and told her that it was fine, though sitting alone all weekend was not even close to his definition of fine. He wasn’t sure, but he always felt that she might have been flirting with him. Maybe if he was better at those sort of things, then the city might not have seemed so lonely, but he wasn’t, and it was.
The girl who smiled at Andy when he came for lunch wasn’t answering the phones. He could hardly remember the last time he saw the office phone in her hand. The fact was Andy didn’t really know what she did there besides smile at him and collect rent money. The man sitting on the opposite end of the front room very rarely answered the phones as well. He sat in a high backed, leather office chair that was too professional looking for him and made him look more ridiculous when he sat in it. He wore a vacant expression with eyes that didn’t see anything, and his mouth hung open waiting for the next gulp from his giant plastic cup. His thinning hair stood up at odd angles and his shirt was wrinkled. Andy would have safely bet that the owner had just awakened from a nap in his office and decided to purvey the action in the front room which was nil and, therefore, the perfect job for his abilities.
In a small room at the back of the building was a desk cluttered with important-looking papers and a phone that was ringing nonstop. At the desk there was a small, cloth-backed chair with patches and squeaky wheels. In the chair sat a middle-aged woman with thick bifocals on who seemed to have the phone permanently attached to her hand. She was a tall blonde with a strong jaw and well-defined nose. She had not taken care of herself in her youth, but, sitting there, only the eyes gave it away. She had not noticed him walk into her room.
“Hi, Mom!” He said with a big smile. Andy looked as he should, a younger, slimmer, more energetic version of his mother. As much as he tried to deny it, Andy was a “mama’s boy” and was grateful for the opportunity to sit and talk with her, if only for a short time once a week. He knew it helped ease her worrying too. Good mothers worry, and having her first-born son out on his own for the first time in a large and dangerous city only multiplied that worry. Wasn’t it just last week someone was shot a block away from you? was one of the questions that she wouldn’t ask but already knew the answer to.
She held up her finger that simultaneously said “Hi” and “I’ll be with you as soon as I get this jackass off the phone.” Andy took a seat opposite of her while she rattled off some numbers that meant nothing to him but were probably from some licence plate. She hung up the phone and warmly asked how Andy’s day was going. That was how every conversation started. It was easy, mindless, and usually entailed the same responses. Andy would give a heavy sigh and ask the same question back; His mom would roll her eyes and jerk her thumb at the all-knowing dumb-shit in the leathers chair who couldn’t see her and was constantly yelling orders to her that, if he hadn’t been too lazy to turn the rotating chair around, he would have seen she had already done what he was asking.
“ I went to the doctor yesterday,” his mom said after the usual song and dance was over. “Remember I told you that I couldn’t see out of my right eye?” Andy nodded as his heart began to beat a little quicker. “ Well, the doctor says that I’m not losing the ability to see, but there is something blocking the nerves to my eye. Hopefully it is nothing major, and it will go away after awhile.” she said with a half-hearted smile. Andy nodded again and secretly said a silent prayer to the God he didn’t believe in that it was something stupid and not what the both figured it was.
“ Let’s walk outside while we can,” his mom said reaching for her purse, “I need a cigarette.” They walked across the front room unnoticed because nothing needed to be done at that moment. Andy’s mom smoked with the front door open so she could run inside in case the phone rang. It was getting colder outside, and the wind had started to pick up. Andy tried to hide his disapproval while his mom puffed her life away. She was a grown woman who could make her own decisions, but he still wanted to tear that damn thing out of her hand.
She began to talk about Andy’s dad, and he tuned out. She never had anything good to say about him, and Andy would have rather pretended that they were happily married. Andy blamed Halmark for his need to pretend. They said normal people have a loving family that doesn’t fight and plays monopoly after dinner, when the truth was most people were divorced, unhappy, or both. Nobody wanted to think that way, and they sure as hell didn’t want to talk about it.
While his mom went on about how lazy his dad was, he thought about the last time he got laid, which was tough because he had trouble remembering that far back. His mom’s sudden fit of coughing brought him back to the present. She was doubled over and pointing back to her small room. Andy didn’t have to think twice before he dashed inside, past the two stone sentries who guarded the empty, quiet front room, and into her office where he dug into to his mom’s purse to find her inhaler. He was spurned on by the memory of the time he almost didn’t find it. He had become quite fast at finding his mom’s inhaler after that incident. He had never seen that shade of purple and never wanted to again.
It took all of 30 seconds for Andy to put the life-saving inhaler in his mom’s hand. When the oxygen hit what was left of her lungs, she made that sound heard on the TV when they bring somebody back from the dead. She used the inhaler twice more before her shoulders relaxed and her eyes stopped bulging out of her head. Andy stayed on edge, ready to help, but there was nothing more he could do. The inhaler was the only weapon he had between him and seeing his mom cough her lungs out. If that failed, he had nothing. That is why he stayed on edge.
“That was a close one, eh?” Andy’s mom said with a chuckle.
“Yes, it was.” Andy said without a chuckle. At that moment the phone rang. His mom looked back at her little office sadly and said, “Come on Andy, back inside.” Andy looked at his watch; there was 20 minutes left for lunch.
“Sorry, Mom. I have to get back to work early today. I’ll see you next week.” His mom smiled and said she couldn’t wait. He leaned in for the usually hug and kiss he received at the end of his visit. His mom went back to the phones while Andy walked across the lot to his pickup. The rain on the hot pavement made everything a little misty. He let the city envelope him once more, wall him up, isolate him. He was safe for another week.