Restart

“Zap! Crash!” Dead again. Theo Fenton died. Not actual Theo, but his avatar, StarWarzPizzaKid4658. Theo tapped buttons on his controller until StarWarzPizzaKid4658 was back up and running. 

“Theo, could you turn that down, please?” Theo didn’t hear his father, standing ten feet away in the kitchen of their apartment. To be fair, Theo didn’t hear much of anything when he was playing. He was in the game when it was on. 

“Theo!” 

StarWarzPizzaKid4658 was on a roll. He’d never made it this far. Stars were flashing as he collected points. The controller shook gently in Theo’s hands giving him a direct connection to the obstacles StarWarzPizzaKid4658 was facing. Theo couldn’t look away now. 

“Theodore Thomas Fenton!” His father stood between him and the television. And… “Zap! Boom! Crash!” StarWarzPizzaKid4658 was dead again. 

“Dad! You can’t do that! You killed me!” Theo was shrieking in a nails-on-chalkboard pitch only prepubescent boys can hit. He threw the controller at the floor. It bounced up and hit his father in the shin. 

“Shit!”

Theo lunged for the controller but his father grabbed it before he could get to it. 

“I’m on a call with my boss over there. You gotta keep it down. You’ll get this back after I’m done. Go read a book or something.” 

His dad stalked back to the kitchen. 

Theo hadn’t asked to be shut up in this apartment with his parents for months on end. He hadn’t asked for schools to switch to a virtual model that made learning hard and amped up his burgeoning screen addiction. Theo’s dependence on screens was a function of bad luck and bad timing. It was COVID’s fault. 

He pouted on the couch until he remembered he had his dad’s old iPad stashed in his bedroom closet. Theo shut himself in the closet chopping fruit and shooting birds at little green pigs until his father’s call was done. 

Steve Fenton worked in advertising. He moved to the city when he got hired at a major ad agency. Steve was single then, and pulling in a great salary. He never cooked. He paid someone to do his laundry. He had the world on a string.

Then he met Anita. Anita was smart and strong and she thought Steve was hilarious. She had all the warmth and kindness necessary for her job as a kindergarten teacher. After years of terrible dates with women who were hardened by the city, Anita was a breath of fresh air. He was in love.

They had dated for six months when Anita asked him where their relationship was headed. 

“What do you mean?” 

They were holding hands walking through the park on a sunny Saturday morning with people all around them. 

“What are we doing here Steve? I love you and you love me. Are we going to take this to the next level or are we going to be one of those couples that date for eight years and then break up?” He hadn’t realized kindergarten teachers had to be organized, no-nonsense, and direct. 

He proposed a month later. 

When Anita moved into his studio apartment, Steve began feeling the pressure of someone depending on him. Anita’s salary was abysmal, which was sadly typical for her profession. Steve’s income paid for rent and kept them eating out and enjoying the city’s nightlife on the weekends. 

Then Theo came along and the stakes were raised. There were daycare costs to consider and they needed a two-bedroom apartment. Gone were the days of sending laundry out. Anita started cooking dinner a few nights a week too. 

Steve climbed the ladder at the ad agency but he knew his position would become precarious as he aged in an industry that always asked, “What have you done for me lately?" 

Now they were living through a pandemic and trying to work from home while Theo was there 24/7. Theo did classes in his bedroom on his school laptop. Anita taught from their bedroom. Steve got the kitchen. The upside was a never-ending coffee supply but that was about the only upside. 

Theo came out when he was frustrated with school and started playing video games on the television. Anita took her breaks in Steve’s “office.” While she sipped coffee out of her favorite mug she casually mentioned how nice it would be if they had a house with more space. Maybe they could move out of the city. Maybe Steve could commute when the pandemic was over. Steve ignored her. 

Anita and Theo had different lunch times so it seemed that someone was always interrupting him asking, “What’s for lunch?” A question Steve never seemed to know the answer to. Steve usually wound up making stacks of grilled cheese or peanut butter and jelly for the three of them to eat at their staggered lunches. 

But Steve couldn’t deal with interruptions today. Rumors about a shake-up were circling the virtual water cooler. His boss, Rick Ardent, had set up a call for ten. When Theo’s game restarted for the third time, Rick noticed the sound. 

“It sounds like a zoo over there! It’s amazing you can get any work done with that going on around you.” Rick’s kids were grown and when the pandemic hit he and his wife split time between their three-bedroom apartment in the city and their house in the Hamptons. 

“It’s my son. Can I call you back? I’ll get him set up in his room.”

“Sure. Sure. Take your time.”

“Rick. Sorry about that.” Steve tried to look natural and relaxed when Rick answered the video call. 

“No problem.”

“So we were talking about the cat food client.”

“Oh right. But Steve, that’s not really the point of this call.” Rick became serious and Steve felt his stomach drop. 

“It’s not?”

“No.” Rick sighed and bent his grey head. “Steve, you’ve always been one of the first guys I staff on my projects. I respect you and I think you do great work. But we can’t keep you. COVID messed everything up and so we have to downsize. You’ve got a month and then you’ll have to make your exit. If you find something before the end of the month, let us know. You can count on me for references.”

Steve had stopped listening after, “But we can’t keep you.”

Rick stopped talking and they both sat staring at Steve’s image on the screen: a frozen smile, glassy eyes, tension in his shoulders. 

“Steve, you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I’m okay.” Steve shook his head. 

“I don’t want there to be bad feelings. We had to cut people. You’re not the only one getting this news today. You understand I’m sure.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Totally.”

Totally?

“If you have any questions, you can email or call me any time. And hey, HR will be in touch with the details of your package and to do a quick exit interview. The whole thing should be pretty straightforward.”

“Great, Rick. Great.” Steve was blinking a lot at this point. 

“Bye, Steve.”

Steve clicked out of the call and folded over crying with his head in his hands. 

“What’s going on?” Anita came out of the bedroom after Steve had composed himself, but she had heard him wailing.

“Rick fired me. Downsized. I’ve been downsized. I don’t have a job.”

“What?” Anita’s eyes were huge. 

“Some bullshit about COVID and making cuts. What are we going to do?”

“I don’t have time for this. I left a room full of kindergarteners in there.” Anita went back into the bedroom. 

For the rest of the afternoon, Steve sat at the kitchen table running through hypotheticals while the dishwasher ran in the background. 

What if the company picked up some big projects before the end of the month? Would they keep him then?

What if he couldn’t find another job? The job market was shit. 

What if they had to live off Anita’s salary? They couldn’t. They’d have to move. 

He should make a list. He should make a plan. 

He tried but he couldn’t. He needed to talk to Anita. 

After school finished they put a movie on for Theo and went out on the balcony to talk. Before COVID they would have sent him to a neighbor’s apartment to play but that was out of the question now. 

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to find something else. I’m getting old. There are too many kids fresh out of college who understand TikTok better than I ever will.”

“You have to try, Steve. We can’t stay here without that money.” Anita looked pressed herself against the railing, into the late afternoon sun. Steve thought she couldn’t bear to look at him. 

“I’m sorry.” His eyes were rimmed in red and his voice caught in his throat. 

“It’s not your fault. But we need a plan.” 

For the next week, they dreamed up possible futures. Steve spruced up his LinkedIn profile and started reaching out to other ad agencies in the city. Anita encouraged Steve to think outside of the ad agency box. 

“What would you do if you could do anything,” she asked one night in bed with the lights off. 

“I don’t know.” Steve looked up at the ceiling as if the answer might be written there.

“Well, think about it.”

A day later he came up with something. 

“I know this is insane, but I’ve always been interested in working with my hands. Building something. Creating. My dad and I built a bookshelf and a breadbox when I was a kid. I loved that. I think if I could do anything, I’d be a carpenter.” 

Anita smiled. It didn’t sound like an exciting profession to her or one that would make them rich. And he probably wouldn’t be able to chase that dream in this city where the cost of living was crippling, but his face lit up for the first time in a long time. 

“We could move. It would be good to be out of the city. To have some room to breathe. Theo could play in a yard where no other kids could cough on him.”

“What?”

“I can teach anywhere. Theo’s young.”

“It’s insane. We’re in the middle of a global pandemic.”

“I think you should give it a go. You only live once.”

Steve had always known Anita had a rebellious, wild streak. Her mother often talked about finding Anita sneaking in from the fire escape late at night when she was a teenager. He chalked her dare up to that and went back to his job search.

A month later school was out for the summer and Steve still hadn’t found a job. At night he tossed and turned. He carried antacids with him and he had begun snapping at Anita and Theo. The proximity and the job hunt were getting to him. 

After a dinner of boxed macaroni and cheese and frozen chicken nuggets, Anita told Steve she had found a job in Windom, Minnesota, a small town where they could live on a teacher’s salary. 

“Theo and I are moving there in August. You could come too. If you want.”

“What? You did this behind my back?” He was enraged. It seemed as though she had found a job just to spite him, just to show him how ineffectual he was. 

“We can’t keep living here. I’m going to do some virtual home tours next week. I’ve talked to a realtor.” 

“You’re kidding? You have to be kidding.”

“I’m not. Theo and I can’t sit around here and watch you fall apart.”

“I don’t think there are many jobs for an ad man in rural Minnesota.”

“No. I can’t imagine there are. But you could be a carpenter. Start your own business. Make things. Start small.”

“I’d be starting over. Completely. I’d have to learn everything.”

“You could, though. It’s possible. I can support us in a place like Windom. And it would be good for Theo. He needs to run around outside, dig in dirt, and have some space to really play.”

“What about your mom?” 

“We don’t live in the 1800s, Steve. There are cars and planes and trains and FaceTime. COVID will go away someday. We’ll all have vaccines and travel will be easy again.”

“You’re really doing this?”

“I’m really doing this.”

Steve couldn’t believe her. He couldn’t believe she had cooked up this plan without him knowing. He couldn’t believe that she was okay with him going back to square one, that it seemed like exactly the thing she wanted. But he could tell from the look in her eyes that she was doing this, with or without him. There was only one thing he could say. 

“When do we leave?”