Beyond the trees is a room with glass windows on three sides, a big table, and lots of chairs. Important meetings probably go on in there. To the right are more cubicles and more glass offices along the south wall. The Herald-Gleaner is a very active, important-looking place.
“Edward, my boy!” The booming voice of Mr. Withers comes at me from behind the glass. I would recognize it anywhere. He pushes open a door and tells me to come in.
“How are you, Edward?” he asks, offering a handshake, which I accept.
“I’m doing well.”
“Excellent, excellent.”
I have seen Mr. Withers only a few times since I graduated from Billings West High School twenty-one years ago. Back then, he was probably younger than I am now, perhaps around thirty-five or thirty-six years old. Now he’s in his mid-fifties, the reddish-brown hair that I remember gone fully gray. He’s a little heavier and a little more crinkly around the eyes, but the voice and the manner are the same.
“Edward, again, I was so sorry to hear about your dad. He was a good man.”
“Yes.”
He claps me on the shoulder. “Well, my boy, come on upstairs with me. We have a lot to talk about.”
On the walk up the stairs, Mr. Withers is telling me about his job at the Herald-Gleaner.
“I’m the operations director,” he says. “That means, essentially, that I keep things running around here. That has to do with mechanical things, like the press, and the maintenance of the offices and the grounds. It’s a lot of responsibility. It’s a big place. I’ll show you more of it in a bit.”
“Why did you leave Billings West?”
“I’d been there thirty-three years. It was time. I had my full pension, and the principals and regulations were getting harder and harder to deal with. I felt like it was time for a change. You know that feeling, Edward?”
“Yes.” I have been experiencing it a lot lately.
“Anyway, here’s my office,” he says, ushering me into a small room that overlooks Fourth Avenue N., one of the busier streets in Billings. “Have a seat.”
I sit down, and Mr. Withers settles in behind his desk.
“The reason I wrote to you, Edward, is that I want you to come work for me.”
I had not expected this, and so I can come up with only one word.
“Why?”
“I need someone like you. You’re good with your hands, and you can figure out anything mechanical. This place is forty years old. It needs a lot of maintenance. I figure you’re the guy who can help me.”
“When?” I am simultaneously excited and scared. It has been a long time since I worked anywhere.
“I’m thinking I’ll have you work what’s called the swing shift. It’s from the late afternoon until around midnight,” Mr. Withers says. Then, his voice gets a little lower and more serious. “Edward, I know about how you need to be left alone to do work. I know why. This job, you’ll be allowed to do that. You’ll report to me, but when you’re here, you’ll be working on tasks that I assign and that you’ll be able to do yourself. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he says, reverting to his usual cheer. “What do you say we take a look around?”
Mr. Withers takes me all over the Herald-Gleaner and explains to me what each part of the building does.
The north side of the building, he says, is where the advertising and marketing staffs work, selling ads for the newspaper and its website and working on promotions and such. He introduces me to a lot of people, and I can’t remember all of their names.
On the south side of the building is the editorial staff—the reporters and editors and photographers who cover the news and make a newspaper every night. I expect a frenzy of activity, like you see in movies about newspapers, but it’s a quiet place at this time of day. A lot of people are on phones.
It turns out that the indoor tree is real. Mr. Withers smiles when I ask about it and points up to the ceiling, where there is a massive sunroof. “It’s a real pain to keep the leaves swept up,” he says.
He also shows me the press and the new packaging center, where the newspaper is merged with ads from department stores and other inserted items, like Parade magazine in the Sunday newspaper. Mr. Withers explains that the press is running much of the time—not just with each day’s newspaper, but also with specialty magazines and jobs for other publications around the region. The packaging center is vast, an addition to the building that went up just in the past year or so.
“It’s an exciting time around here,” Mr. Withers says.
It looks like a nice place to work.
On the way up the stairs, Mr. Withers tells me that he can give me about $12 an hour to start, and that sounds good to me. It’s more than I have ever made, except for when my father gave me $5 million.
Back behind his desk, Mr. Withers says, “So, my boy, will you come to work for me?”
I don’t hesitate. “Yes.”
“Excellent, excellent.”
“When do I start?”
“Come on in Monday morning at nine, Edward. We’ll get your paperwork filled out, show you what you’ll be doing, and hit the ground running. How does that sound?”
“Good.”
“All right,” he says, standing up and clapping me on the shoulder again. “I’ll walk you down.”
A few minutes later, I’m back behind the wheel of the Cadillac. My father told me in my dream that it would take me anywhere I wanted to go. I never would have expected that it would be here.
I drive the Cadillac the short distance home, and my mind is swimming. I never thought I would be going back to work, but I trust Mr. Withers to take care of me. The hours he has in mind may lead to some changes in my routine. My 10:00 p.m. viewings of Dragnet will have to be moved. Maybe I can watch it after I get home at night. That means I won’t be going to bed at midnight sharp anymore. My common wake-up time of 7:38 a.m. will probably change, too. Between getting home after work and watching Dragnet, it will be close to 1:00 a.m., at the earliest, before I get to sleep.
My 10:00 a.m. Tuesday appointments with Dr. Buckley are safe. We will have much to talk about in just a few days.
And the grocery store can be visited whenever I need to. My new job won’t affect that.
I saw in the Billings Herald-Gleaner yesterday that Barack Obama, the new president, says “change is coming.” I wonder how he knew.
At home, I’m retrieving the mail—all advertisements—when I spot the envelope taped to my door. It says “Edward,” but it’s not the precise block writing of my father. Instead, it’s a pretty cursive. Whoever wrote this probably got good penmanship marks in school.
I set the mail on the stoop and tear open the envelope. Lined notebook paper, the kind I had to write on in school, is inside.
Dear Edward,
This is a letter of complaint. The difference between your letters of complaint and mine is that mine get delivered.