Job's New Job

By Neil Hetzner

Kevin Speer’s wife, Rita, is killed by a hit and run driver in a stolen truck. Months later, Kevin is fired from his job. His reputation is attacked. As the middle-aged statistician stumbles through the days and months that follow, he is presented with possibilities to make a new life to replace what has been lost. He’s always been a food truck lover and there’s a hotdog truck for sale. There appears to be an opportunity for a warming to the distant relationship he has with his mysterious daughter Billie. There’s a disconcerting attraction to Ruthie, a bantering waitress who is not much older than his daughter. Finally, and most confusingly, there’s an opportunity for romance with Millie, a cupcake-baking widow who is convinced she should be in his life. Should Kevin grab hold of any or all of those possibilities, or should he keep holding on to a complicated but familiar grief? He doesn’t know.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Neil Hetzner
• Release date: May 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215059159

Neil Hetzner

Neil (aka C.N.) Hetzner is married, has two children, and lives a mile from the edge of the continent in Rhode Island. Since his inauspicious birth in Indiana in 1948 he has worked as a cook, millwright, newspaper columnist, business professor, vacuumist, printer's assistant, landscaper, railroader, caterer, factory worker, consulting editor, and, currently, real estate agent. In addition to working, which he likes a lot, and writing, which he likes even more, he enjoys reading, weaving, cooking, and intrepidly screwing up house repairs. His writing runs the gamut from young adult futurism to stories about the intricacies of families; however, if there is a theme that links his writing, it is the complicated and miraculous mathematics of mercy.

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April 10

Day 1

The homeless person, whom Kevin Speers had named Dogman, looked up from slurping water from the dog bowl at the bottom of the water fountain to growl at him as he hurried along the sidewalk that cut a diagonal path across Farragut Square. Although the blooming cherry blossoms and the balmy DC air called for a languorous walk, the tall, heavy-footed and heavy-breathing fifty-seven-year-old was lumbering along faster than his regular rush-hour pace because he had left the office a few minutes later than he had planned. He and Rita, his wife of thirty-one years, had agreed to meet on the southwest corner of the square at five-forty-five after she had viewed some new exhibit, he couldn’t remember what, at the Renwick; however, the recent rise in confrontations between those who were passing through or eating something on one of Farragut’s benches and those who were trying to live there, made Kevin want to meet Rita before she sat down on a bench and was accosted.

As Kevin neared the spot where they were to meet, he was happy not to see Rita already there. Instead of claiming a bench for himself, he decided to walk south on 17th and meet her as she was walking north. When he came to I Street, the light was red. As he waited for it to change, he turned around to check out one of the remaining food trucks parked along the west side of the square. Most days, Kevin walked the three blocks from the DataPlexus office on L Street to get his lunch from one of the many food trucks doing business along Farragut. The truck that had his attention was one he had first noticed the week before. The signage for Turkish Deli-Lite had pictures of a salad with olive and feta, something with cucumbers and tomatoes he guessed was a kind of fattoush, and kebabs of glistening chicken. What caused Kevin to walk away from the intersection and approach the truck was a picture of a bowl, colored the red of the Turkish flag, that had something white in the bottom, which Kevin assumed was yogurt, and two objects, which, because they seemed so out of place, took him a moment to realize were poached eggs topped with a red powder. Since there wasn’t a queue, Kevin walked up to the window and after being greeted by a heavy-set man, whose thick salt and pepper mustache was matched by his eyebrows, asked about the dish. Two minutes later as he walked back to I Street, the devoted food truck patron repeated the dish’s name, cilbir, which the owner said was a common Turkish breakfast of garlicky yogurt, poached eggs, and Aleppo-flavored butter. Kevin knew what he would be eating for lunch the following day.

Kevin was almost to H Street when he saw Rita—she was easy to pick out of the uneven stream of people walking toward him because she was wearing her canary yellow leather jacket. She was a dozen steps back from the crosswalk on the far side of the 17th Street’s intersection with H Street. He waved, but she didn’t see him because she was looking at her phone, which she held in front of her in a way that reminded him of scientists in old movies holding Geiger counters. She didn’t see him, and she was so engrossed she also didn’t seem to notice her fellow pedestrians slowing down as they approached the red light. She didn’t see him as he waved again, nor as he suddenly rushed forward. She didn’t hear him shout because his experiences of being embarrassed when Farragut Square’s denizens shouted at passersby kept him silent. Rita was so engrossed with her phone that she didn’t hear the deep rumble of a white box truck advertising moving services speeding up 17th Street before careening around the corner onto H Street.

Day 58

Despite his oft-repeated vows to abstain, Kevin once again awakened Rita’s I-pad and went to her Netflix account. Once there, he whispered, Yes, when it asked if she wanted to continue watching Love, Actually, where she had left off. He stared at the screen and, Molly Bloom-like, repeated that single, hopeful syllable. Because he did want her to continue watching, he had not been able to hit the button that would restart the movie. He hadn’t wanted that hopeful, continuing question to disappear and the screen to revert to asking, Who’s watching? a question that had such a hopeless answer.

Kevin Speers carefully slid Rita’s I-pad, that tenuous, spiritual connection, back into its sleeve.

It was approaching two months since he had watched Rita’s sudden flight. Even before the truck launched her, he knew she was gone, knew that wherever the body landed, Rita would not be in it. In moments that were scary, Kevin thought that in her last instant, as she had awkwardly lurched through the air with her yellow coat making her resemble a warbler, she had noticed him running toward her and the erratic, gangling, movements of her shattered arms were meant to be a farewell.

Kevin pushed his chair back from the kitchen table and, carrying his plate and coffee mug to the sink, wished it was a Monday or a Wednesday, really any day but a Sunday. Although he had spent several hours in the yard the day before, he hoped that there was something in Rita’s perennial gardens that needed weeding or deadheading.

Day 98

Kevin slowed his pace so he wouldn’t be early. He looked ahead to see if there were any groups of pedestrians who might keep him from the spot where he needed to be at the moment he needed to be there. Solo walkers were rarely a problem. It was the couples or the trios of friends or fellow workers who could divert him from his path. Most days his eyes sought out women across the H Street intersection who appeared to be distracted. Occasionally, he would look at the faces of those walking closest to him and fight the urge, or seek the courage, to ask if they once had seen a woman hit by a dirty white box truck on a balmy April night. The first time he had returned, the day after she had been killed, it was after spending two hours in the mortuary confused about what he had purchased. His confusion had continued as he tried to pinpoint his exact location on the sidewalk when Rita was hit. It was not until his visit on the day of Rita’s services that Kevin became sure that he was standing on the exact spot where he had seen his wife taken away. Every day since that day, he had stood still on that spot at 5:41 equipoised between accepting the climax of the story, their story, as it happened and awaiting, anticipating a slight revision: the easing on a shoe sole on an accelerator, a stranger’s shoulder bag bumping against Rita in a way that caused her to look up from her phone to notice the danger, a tourist from someplace where the landscape was mostly corn and soybean fields, a timid tourist alert to urban dangers, snatching Rita as she, oblivious, walked toward oblivion.

All of Kevin Speers’s pilgrimages were the same and each was different. The lushness of the cherry blossoms turned to mush, the slant of the sun as it rose to its summer height and then began its fall, pedestrians’ footwear changing from boots to sneakers to sandals, the color of their clothes changing from grays and blacks to brighter hues, the city’s smell growing more redolent of diesel and rotting food as the day’s heat grew and humidity lingered. Always different and always the same. Rita, broken Rita, in flight. An unknown killer careening on with his life.

It was on the ninety-eighth day that Kevin watched a distracted woman, distracted not by studying a small, brightly lighted phone screen, but rather by something buried deep within a large, navy-blue tote. His eyes darted from the woman, who was several steps short of the intersection’s curb, to the northbound traffic on 17th Street. Seeing a pick-up truck with its right turn signal blinking speeding toward the intersection caused Kevin to sprint past the spot where he always stopped. Flailing his arms, a semaphore gone berserk, yelling unintelligible sounds that were meant to warn, he raced toward the intersection. It seemed to Kevin that everyone on the sidewalk except the woman he meant to warn turned their attention to him. Another Farragut Square crazy person. Kevin ran fewer than a dozen steps before his chest burned so badly his yells were diminished to gasps and his steps to shuffles.

The woman was one step shy of the curb, the pick-up itself was panting in in its desire to swerve around the corner and destroy its prey. In a split-second Kevin realized the people who were stopping to stare at him and those who were veering off to avoid him, as he tried to prevent a tragedy, were making it more likely tragedy could occur as their attention was turned to him rather than the woman who was about to die.

It was too late. Still engrossed in rummaging through the entrails of her tote, the woman was off the curb and two steps into the intersection. The bones in Kevin’s body turned spongy. He slumped as if it had been he himself who had been knocked aside. The pick-up barreled around the corner with its horn suddenly bleating and slalomed past the woman, who had jerked backwards. As she stared at the truck that had just missed her, her hand snapped out of the tote empty except for the message conveyed to the truck’s driver by an extended middle finger.

Kevin shuffled over to the edge of the sidewalk and leaned against a street sign until the quivering in his legs and the wrenching of his lungs dissipated.

Day 99

Rather than standing keeping his vigil on 17th Street at 5:41, Kevin Speers was soaring over the Thames River on the Gold Star Bridge in New London, Connecticut. Forty-five minutes later, he was pulling down a narrow, cedar-lined, clamshell-surfaced driveway. Little Lark was a three-bedroom, gray-shingled, salt pond-front cottage in Narragansett, Rhode Island Rita had inherited from her parents, Nellie and Frank Whelan. Rather than opening his door and unloading the car, Little Lark’s newest owner sat still with his hands at two and ten on the steering wheel as if he thought he would help steer his mind where he wanted it to go.

Kevin stayed in his car for more than two hours. He watched a giant, pinkish-orange sun, Like the descent of an errant hot air balloon, settle onto the sharply pitched roof of a massive house on the far side of the pond. He watched as dark blue specters appeared, then lengthened and darkened. He watched as an unseen flame thrower shot long tongues of fire along the still surface of the pond, as color leached from the oaks and swamp maples, as the balloon slid down below the ridge of the roof and collapsed into nothingness.

Kevin Speers stayed still, except for the occasional correction of the steering wheel, as the day died its lingering summer death. He waited as wraiths of pond mist, tinged with a rising moon’s silver patina, began floating to shore, climbed the bank, and make their wobbly, stealthy ways toward him. He watched the naked branches of a long dead black pine bob up and down in a way that reminded him of a conductor’s baton bringing an orchestra to order before the first notes spilled forth. He thought, felt and waited until the incantatory bark and stutter of a night heron broke the spell.

The cottage smelled of must, mold, and summers gone by. Of the ten traps, all but two held mice, whose small, ignorant, desiccated bodies were long past the capacity to offend with their smell. Kevin thought that was what happened from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Paying attention to the wrong thing.

As Kevin removed and carefully folded the ancient, faded bedspreads he and Rita had used to cover the furniture on Columbus Day weekend, he realized, that, although the cottage smelled of must and mold, it was a different smell from what he remembered. It wasn’t until later, as he lay on his side of the double mattress, aware yet indifferent to the knowledge that sleep would not come graciously, he realized the smell was different because the time of the year was different. For decades, nearly a half-century, Little Lark has been opened on Memorial Day weekend. Tonight was July 18. Six weeks of summer had baked a different recipe of smells.

As he awaited, resigned, for sleep’s eventual arrival, Kevin sorted through Little Lark memories with the same haphazard pleasure an auction goer might have thumbing through a weathered cigar box of old sepia photographs: In the years before their daughter Billy was born, he and Rita arriving late on Friday night of Memorial Day weekend to help Nellie and Frank get the place ready for the summer onslaught. Rita helping her mother brush down cobwebs and sweep up dead flies and the carapaces of other unnamed insects from the windowsills. Frank washing windows amid clouds of ammonia fumes while he himself scoured rust stains from the vanity sink and toilet bowl. All of them hanging Little Lark’s complete inventory of sheets, blankets, and towels on the clothes lines to freshen them. He and Frank feigning ease and suppressing groans as they dragged the three sections of dock into the water. He holding the ladder while an insistent Frank wrestled the hurricane shutters off the windows. All four of them drinking Yacht Club sodas as they policed the yard of three seasons’ worth of fallen branches, which Frank would snap or saw into kindling for the fireplace. Frank replacing a handful of cedar shingles torn free by winter’s wild winds, the yellow of the new an irritating contrast to the weathered gray that surrounded them. He touching up a door frame. Rita gluing a chair leg. All of their work rewarded Sunday evening with a premature Salty Dog followed by a meal of grilled haddock fresh off one of the boats docked at Blimey’s and grilled potatoes and onions topped with butter and a handful of chives from the patch Nellie had planted years before. Later, Billy, maybe four or five, her belly on the smoothly worn, wooden seat, corkscrewing the swing until the ropes were shortened so much her feet could barely touch the scalloped dirt depression that had been carved over many days of many summers. Finally, straightening her legs and stretching out her arms until her body was horizontal to the ground. Cackling louder and louder, their little hen, as the uncoiling swing spun her around faster and faster. Flying out of control, but not out of control, not like her mother’s flight. And once everything was dusted, swept, put in order, Kevin leaving before six on Memorial Day to miss some of the traffic as he made his way back to D.C.

A week or two later, after the school year ended both for Rita the teacher and Billy the student, the two of them would drive back to Rhode Island to spend the summer at Little Lark with Nellie, and, on weekends, with Frank. Kevin himself would stay in DC working hard during the day as a statistician at the Census Bureau and moping around at night and, weekends, missing his family. Later as seniority and promotions lengthened his leash, he would take a four-day weekend over the Fourth to crew as Biliy helmed the wooden Sunfish, to share meals and walks with Billy and Rita, to share a soggy bed with Rita before an interminable drive back to work and mopery.

Day 100

The morning after his arrival Kevin decided to do those chores with which he had a history. He started by picking up sticks, but he had far less than half the yard policed before his back began to ache. He moved on to the ancient wood-framed windows, but only removed two of the storm shutters on the pondside before deciding that, since he had no idea how long he might be staying, it made no sense to remove more if might be putting them back up again in a week or two. He approached the deck sections, which he and Rita barely had managed to pull just past the edge of the water on Columbus Day weekend, but he did no more than study them. He knew even if Frank or Rita were alive to help, with the way his back felt, it still would have been a Herculean trial to move them into place. He slipped off his sneakers, waded into the warm water, and used an iron ring as a step to mount the piling closest to shore. He sat atop the piling watching the five-mile-an-hour parade of power boats returning from their early morning fishing expeditions with each flying a ragged pennant of hungry seagulls behind them. The noise the boats’ engines carried across the water by a soughing breeze made their thrums and growls as raggedy and irregular as the breaths of a hospice patient.

It was almost noon before the need to urinate brought Kevin back from wherever his mind had been as his eyes had watched the pond’s traffic. Being careful of his back, he slid off the piling and walked through the water, deeper now from the rising tide, to shore and made his way to a vee-shaped gap in an ancient magnolia tree that had provided privacy for decades for Frank and Little Lark’s male guests, a category to which he had been allocated. After he finished, he realized that his stomach was as empty as his bladder had been full.

For a blue sky, mid-July day, Blimey’s was unexpectedly uncrowded. There were only two boats at the dock. As far as Kevin could see into the murky interior, there was no one in the bait shop except Tom Hatchett, Blimey’s owner. In the restaurant, there were just two customers sitting at the lunch counter’s twelve stools. Neither of the two inside tables, and only one of the three picnic tables was occupied. As Kevin paused to consider whether he wanted to sit alone at a table or the counter, Hatchett’s daughter, Ruthie, came out from the kitchen.

When Ruthie realized who her new customer was something complicated twisted across her face as she moved down the counter to where Kevin had taken a stool.

I’m so sorry.

Kevin had been the recipient of that sentiment so often over the previous three months that, even as he wondered how people knew what they knew, he nodded gravely as he murmured, Thank you. I appreciate that.

We worried when Little Lark didn’t get opened.

I couldn’t get away until now … until yesterday.

You here for long?

Kevin shrugged.

Sensing that any conversation about the consequences of Rita Speers’s death was finished, Ruthie asked, Do you know what you want?

Kevin felt an urge to yell, No, I don’t know what I want … other than to have things go back to the way they were, the way they should be. However, instead of making that plea, he said, Cream cheese and olive on whole wheat and a large, iced tea, lemon, no sugar, please.

Out in a minute.

Given the dearth of customers and the simplicity of his order, Kevin wasn’t surprised when Ruthie set his diagonally split sandwich accompanied by a scattering of potato chips in front of him in less than five minutes.

Kevin picked up his sandwich and studied it. Why had he ordered whole wheat? He didn’t like whole wheat bread. Never had. Not as a kid. Not ever. He had begun eating whole wheat in deference to Rita. He wasn’t sure whether Rita actually had liked the taste of wheat bread, or whether she had thought eating it, rather than white bread, would make their lives better … longer. Perhaps she had been right, at least for him. From all indications, as long as mental aspects were left aside, he was healthy… healthy enough to endure decades of widowhood. Perhaps not. Perhaps if Rita had made their sandwiches with white bread, she would have put on weight and that extra weight would have slowed her pace and the box truck would have hurtled around the corner while Rita was still on the sidewalk. Perhaps if ….

Kevin came back from one more expedition into the universe of alternative outcomes to realize that Ruthie, from four steps away, was staring at him.

Kevin brought the sandwich to his mouth, took a first bite, chewed, swallowed, and nodded in a way that he hoped reassured Ruthie, if not himself.

That hits the spot. It’s a rare treat. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a cream cheese and olive sandwich on a DC menu.

Ruthie laughed, a low chittering sound that might have caused a squirrel to perk up its ears.

I doubt you’d find it very often around here. When my grandfather, Handy Andy … did you know him?

I did.

When Handy Andy first started this, after he got hurt and couldn’t fish any more, it was strictly fuel and repairs. When guys started asking Andy, who could fix just about anything that had to do with a boat, for something to eat while they waited or refueled, they soon found out that he couldn’t fix hardly anything that had to do with food. Back in early days, the menu was pretty short and the service even shorter. Open a beat-up old fridge and decide whether you wanted peanut butter and grape jelly, cream cheese and olive, or a can of tuna fish. Moxie or Yacht Club orange.

But your grandmother … was her name Eileen?

Close. Arlene. Didn’t care about food. Except for what a fish might favor. Not that she cared about the fish itself. I’m not sure she ever ate anything that came out of the water. She cared about fishing. Tackle, bait, lures, and lines. Time and tide.

Ruthie cocked her head toward the bait shop, Dad was the one who decided to grow the food side. He says it came from desperation. Too much PB&J and CC&O growing up.

Kevin realized that, while Ruthie was talking, he had finished his sandwich and most of his chips.

I’m glad you’ve kept the … CC&O on the menu.

Ruthie lifted her chin in the slightest of nods before saying, And, I’m glad you’re here to eat it.

Kevin knew that Ruthie’s words were intended to convey more than a thank you to a seasonal customer, but he couldn’t bring himself to say more than, What do I owe you?

Later that afternoon, after