Free Everything Changes by Jonathan Tropper Page B

as he ambles awkwardly back up the lawn, my stomach churning with the pure, pained love reserved only for him, pulling away only when I feel the tears threatening.
    I’m in the Sunoco station throwing the Tupperware of meatballs into the garbage when my cell phone rings. I can see on the caller ID that it’s Craig Hodges, no doubt calling to find out if I’ve made any progress on the Nike debacle since this morning. He’ll hound me until this thing gets resolved to his satisfaction. I have no further information for him, so I let the call go to my voice mail. If he thought about it, Craig would realize that I couldn’t possibly have any news for him yet, since China is just waking up now, but Craig has no mind for the details. Like the rest of us, he just desperately wants to be told that come what may, everything’s going to be all right.

Chapter 9
    When the divorce started to get nasty, Lela’s lawyer hired a private detective who secured testimony that Anna was not the first coworker Norm had slept with. This was supposed to somehow help Lela’s case, but what it did instead was get Norm fired, and his subsequent inability to stay at any job thereafter would become something of a dour family legend, referenced sardonically by aunts and grandparents in hushed kitchen conferences during holiday gatherings as Lela bemoaned his frequent failure to pay child support. What really infuriated her was that in most cases, Norm wasn’t being fired. He was quitting.
    “What do you mean, you quit?” we heard her through the walls, wailing on the phone to him. “You can’t afford to quit!”
    But he did, repeatedly, always believing he was being mistreated, or passed over, or disrespected, or, in one case, the target of a mob conspiracy.
    During this time, his visits started to become more sporadic, and more often than not we would find ourselves on Sunday mornings, dressed and waiting in the living room, awkwardly avoiding eye contact with each other while, upstairs, Lela desperately worked the phone, trying in vain to track Norm down. Eventually, I stopped expecting him, and Pete, as usual, followed my lead. But for a long time, Matt would get dressed every Sunday and sit sullenly in the living room, his jacket beside him on the couch, staring out the picture window and flashing accusatory glances at us when we padded by in our pajamas to get breakfast, as if our diminished expectations were the cause and not the effect of Norm’s negligence. He knew as well as we did that Norm wasn’t coming, but something in him, some incipient masochism, compelled him to relive the disappointment anew every week, as if he were consciously building a case to support the budding anger that would one day blossom like a mushroom cloud within him. After the vandalism began, Lela put him in therapy, but that seemed to make him only more sullen, and she could hardly be shelling out seventy-five dollars a session for something that didn’t seem to be having any effect.
    A little while later, Norm announced that he had accepted a position with a firm in Boston and, with a flurry of promises of a better life to come for us all, packed all his possessions into the run-down Nova he was driving and headed north. It was a small pharmaceutical company, but they were poised to take off, and he was getting in on the ground floor. And he wasn’t going to be an accountant; he was going to be a salesman—Massachusetts would be his territory initially—and it didn’t matter that he’d never been in sales before, that he’d taken some liberties with his résumé, because sales was all about forging relationships, about looking people in the eye and letting them know they could count on you, and that was Norm’s specialty. He was a people person, and who better than him to charm receptionists and lunch with doctors on the company dime? And after he’d proven himself in sales, he had his eye on a position with upper management. This was the start