Fox Run College Preparatory is uniforms, leafy walkways between old stone buildings, dowdy teachers, a mutli-million-dollar endowment, a competitive student body in love with Weejuns and bent on trying to appear indifferent. It is a private school as rich in tradition as it is in collective student body wealth, counting a U.S. president, fourteen senators and countless CEOs as alumni. Friendships forged in the dining hall were lifelong and tangled in well connectedness. Its hallways reeked of the carelessness that comes from knowing money will never be far out of reach. Few in Henry’s class knew that the bloat of money filling up the pockets of, say, the Sandersons or the Childers offset the relative obscurity of funds in the Powell family. But Henry knew. He felt it when Kevin Douglas drove his sixteenth birthday present to school. Or when tags appeared on zippers after winter break. Tags reading Aspen, Stratton, Snowbird. Or when January sunburns started to peel. His academic scholarship was, he felt, a form of parole. Should some felony be committed, Henry sensed he would be the first one called up for a police lineup. When the headmaster called an assembly to lecture the upperclassmen about pranks and threatened to keep all the seniors from graduating if those responsible for the burning effigies meant to represent himself and his deputy did not step forward, Henry was sure the remarks were directed at him. The scholarship felt creaky, impermanent.
“You understand this is a temporary job,” Mr. Beardsley says. His porkchop sideburns impress Henry.
Henry wore his hair long, below his ears—an unspoken uniform at Fox Run. But he made a mental note to aspire to Mr. Beardsley’s choice of sideburn design. Henry was conscious of his looks but not sorry for them. In other towns, in faraway regions, the Powell nose, for instance, would be attached to adjectives like huge. But in their Northeastern town Henry’s facial centerpiece might be referred to as patrician. Befitting his angular, oversize features. Gangly. His limbs long, all muscle and sinew. He had seen pictures of his father in his teens and knew this was just a phase: someday he, too, would grow into his face and body. The cheekbones that jutted out, the chin that pointed from his neck and, yes, the nose, they would all make sense someday. He told himself the girls would be sorry and until then he tried to look at people head-on, postponing the profile view as long as possible.
“We’ll see how well you do but I can’t promise anything past the winter sale. This fall you’ll get a lay of the land and then it’s trial by fire. But after the sale I can’t promise anything,” Mr. Beardsley is saying.
“No, no, that’s totally fine,” Henry says.
“You make good eye contact,” he says, scribbling something on his clipboard. “I like that.”
“Thanks,” Henry says. The mumbling, though, appears to dent Mr. Beardsley’s smile. Another mark goes onto the clipboard.
“You’d be available for overtime work during sale week, right?” Mr. Beardsley peers up at him. Suspicious. The look of a man who has been the brunt of one too many crank phone calls, Henry thinks. A bolt of imaginary lightning illuminates Mr. Beardsley: “I think my refrigerator is running …”
“Yes, sir,” Henry says. “Absolutely.”
The Baxter’s sale, heavily advertised in the County Register, begins every year on New Year’s Day and lasts one week. The towns that circle this one like a skirt invade the store during the weeklong event—an event as much about acquiring new clothes as it is a hibernation hiatus. A chance to compare Christmas gifts and vacations. Henry and his brothers had gone with their mother every year when they were little. They would run through aisles with friends while their mothers chatted and picked through bins marked by sizes.
Between working the stockroom in the fall, on the floor during the holiday season and then during the sale, Henry hopes to save enough money for the used Jeep he has his eye on. A CJ-7.
“Those suck,” Brad said to Henry just before he left home for good. Henry, ripping out a picture from Car and Driver, said, “No, they don’t,” and regretted it because it had made him sound like a baby.
Sure enough: “No, they don’t,” Brad whined back at him.
“The thing is, it pays well,” Henry says to his father a few hours later. “And Mr. Beardsley says I could make a schedule work around football practice and all. So I could work Thursdays when he stays open later anyway—after practice till close—and Saturdays. And days we don’t have practice. Yeah, I’m pretty sure about that.”
Henry has not quite thought it all through, this job at Baxter’s. He pauses to check his father’s reaction and to figure a way to spackle up the holes in his speech. His father’s tie in muted diagonal stripes of pale yellow and brown is barely back in fashion after two decades off. In the dim light Henry can hardly see the frayed flecks of pulled silk.
“The away-game days, though, I know Mr. Beardsley won’t mind,” he says as much to himself as to his father. “He said so, actually. Oh yeah, I remember he said he wouldn’t mind if it was different week to week. So then it’s fine with the away games. And it pays well.”
Henry stops there as he notices his father’s spoon has stopped circulating in his coffee mug. He has made a bad choice in ending with the pay factor. He knows that now and knows his father knows. But it is too late to rectify so Henry remains quiet, watching his father’s wrist resume the trips around the perimeter of the chipped mug they had picked up on a family road trip to Vermont in the summer.
It is the great unspoken understanding in the Powell house that any discussion that points to their lack of fortune would be in bad form. In theory the Powells came from money. In theory. Their name a good, solid-sounding name sure to be connected somehow to English nobility somewhere deep in the rings of the trunk of the family tree. But in actuality Henry Powell’s parents were Brontë penniless. A small trickle of money from a family trust fund kept them above the below, but the fact of the matter was they were below the above. Still, his mother’s grandfather had had a lot of money that was to be stingily disbursed “in perpetuity” and that enabled them to continue the illusion—with manners and bearing—that they came from old money. They surrounded themselves with wealthy friends. They wore shabbily preppy clothing. But most of all, they wore their lack of great fortune proudly. And so they were accepted into society.
It was just not done in the Powell circle, the speaking of money. A previous mention had ended badly, with Edgar Powell crying a single, solitary Native-American-looking-out-at-a-now-littered-land tear. Henry had only heard about the heartbreaking spectacle from his cousin, Tommy. Henry Powell had never seen his father cry. But he suspected seeing someone perpetually on the brink of crying is worse. The way nausea makes its victims pray for vomit. To be rid of the sickness. “How come your father cried?” Tommy had asked, unaware that he would now be eternally disliked for his Holy Grail sighting. From that point forward Henry refused to allow Tom into his fort. Henry sometimes imagined it was he who had seen his father show such emotion. He even concocted a scenario that entailed him offering his father a tissue, a kind pat on the head thanks for the thoughtfulness of the gesture. All fantasies ending with Henry and his father in a loving embrace, Henry inhaling the wet-dog tweed of his father’s clothes, his father—eyes closed in reverie—inhaling his son’s smell, the smell of childhood.
“So? Can I tell him yes?” Henry asks.
The spoon resumes clinking against the rough-hewn pottery, its surface purposely uneven in that craft-fair style.
“You can tell him yes,” his father answers after a moment. Henry has no way of knowing that these would be five of only a dozen or so words ever spoken by his father about his job at Baxter’s.
“Thanks, Dad,” Henry says, already backing out of the room. He is eager to get out of his father’s dark, tiny study, to get back out into the sunshine of the day. He would not know that his father will continue stirring and stirring his coffee until it grows cold and undrinkable. Obsolete.
In the two weeks that follow, Henry and his father do not see much of each other as his summer vacation gives way to football practices twice a day.