- Bryce called on the Monday before Thanksgiving, while I was standing in my kitchen in Rockford, Illinois, still wearing my work boots.
- I’d spent the whole day on a ladder inside an old storefront on East State Street, pulling out wiring that had been put in sometime around the Eisenhower administration. Cloth-covered. Brittle. The kind of wire that crumbles in your hands and makes you wonder how the building never burned down. My shoulders ached. There was plaster dust in my hair and a cut on my left thumb from a junction box with a sharp edge.
- My tool bag was sitting beside the back door where I always drop it. Upstairs, a clean blouse was hanging on the closet door. Blue, with little white buttons. I’d bought it on Saturday at the Kohl’s on East State for a visit I thought we were still planning.
- The phone buzzed on the counter. BRYCE. I smiled before I picked it up. I always do.
- “Hey, sweetheart.”
- “Hey, Mom.” He sounded distracted. “Caroline and I want to come by Wednesday. Talk about wedding stuff.”
- “Of course,” I said. “Should I make dinner? I could do the pot roast. Caroline liked the pot roast.”
- “Maybe.”
- Behind him, glasses clinked. Somebody laughed. A man’s voice, deep and pleased with itself. Then a woman’s laugh, higher.
- “Where are you?” I asked.
- “Madison,” he said. “We just had dinner with Caroline’s parents.”
- I reached for the calendar on the wall beside my refrigerator. The free one from the hardware store. November was a photo of a red barn in the snow.
- “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know you were meeting them this week.”
- A pause.
- “Dad and Whitney came up too.”
- My finger stayed on Wednesday’s square.
- “Your father and Whitney?”
- “Mom, please.”
- “Why wasn’t I invited, Bryce?”
- I heard him moving. The noise behind him faded. A door closed. Now it was just him, breathing, somewhere quiet. A restaurant hallway. A bathroom.
- “Her parents care about appearances,” he said.
- “I own clothes that don’t have paint on them, Bryce.”
- “It’s not just clothes.”
- “Then what is it?”
- He sighed. The long, tired sigh. As though I were making him explain something obvious to a child.
- “The truck,” he said. “The boots. The way you talk about work. The way you talk, period. They’re Madison people, Mom. Her dad’s on the board of the art museum. Her mom does charity galas. You’d have shown up in your Silverado and started talking about conduit.” He paused. “You’re an embarrassment, Mom.”
- I looked down at the dried plaster dust along the stitching of my left boot.
- Red Wings. Steel toe. I’d had them resoled twice.
- “I understand,” I said.
- “Good,” said my son. “Let’s not make Wednesday awkward.”
- He hung up before I could answer.
- I stood in my kitchen for a long time with the phone in my hand.
- My name is Joanne Hollis. Everybody calls me Jo. I was fifty years old that November, and I’d been a union electrician for twenty-eight years. IBEW Local 364. Journeyman since 1999. Foreman since 2011. I’ve wired hospitals and schools and churches and a minor league ballpark and half the bars on the east side of Rockford. When the river flooded in 2007 and the lights went out in the whole south side, I worked thirty-one hours straight getting a nursing home back on generator power.
- I’m not ashamed of any of it. I never have been.
- Until that phone call, I didn’t know my son was.
- Bryce was twenty-six. He was born when I was twenty-four, the same year I got my journeyman’s card. I worked until two days before he was born, wiring an elementary school in Loves Park, with a belly so big I had to stand sideways on the ladder. The guys on my crew used to joke that the baby would come out with a wire stripper in his hand.
- His father, Victor, sold medical equipment. He was charming and good-looking and always well dressed, and in the beginning, I thought he liked that I was different from the women he usually dated. He’d tell people at parties, “My wife can rewire your whole house,” like it was a party trick.
- That stopped being charming to him somewhere around year eight.
- We divorced when Bryce was fourteen. Victor had been seeing a woman named Whitney for almost two years by then. She was a dental hygienist at his dentist’s office. Blond, pretty, soft-spoken, always perfectly put together. She never once in her life had plaster in her hair.
- Victor kept the house near Bryce’s school. Bryce wanted to stay there, near his friends. I didn’t fight it. I wanted him to be happy. I bought a little ranch house about twenty minutes away, on the northeast side, with a big garage for my tools and a yard with a maple tree.
