THE INTERVIEW

8: The Father Emerges

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Q35. "What did your father do for a living?"

The question pulled Dale out of the blur of the birthday party, back into the cold clarity of the conference room. His father. Walter Kinney. Dead six years now, but still taking up space in his head, still casting a shadow.

"He worked tobacco warehouses, mostly. When I was young. Back when there were still tobacco warehouses to work." Dale heard the echo of his father's voice in his own, the flat Piedmont vowels, the cadence of a man who'd spent his life giving and taking orders. "Then he moved to furniture. The plants around High Point—there used to be dozens of them. He was at Thomasville for a while, then a couple smaller operations. Whatever was hiring."

"A working man."

"That's all he knew how to be. That's all any of us knew how to be."

"Us?"

"Men like him. Men like me." Dale spread his hands, looked at them. The age spots. The calluses worn smooth by years of office work after the floor work, but still there, ghost calluses, the memory of labor. "We weren't raised to think about careers. We were raised to work. Find a job, keep a job, support a family. That was the whole plan."

"Did he support his family?"

"He did. Until he couldn't." The old bitterness crept in, the resentment he'd never quite resolved. "The warehouses closed. The plants closed. Everything he knew how to do got shipped overseas or automated away. He ended up doing odd jobs, handyman work, whatever he could find. Died in a Walmart parking lot in Kinston."

Ms. Vance was still. Her pen rested on the legal pad, unmoving.

"That must have been difficult."

"Which part? Watching him struggle for years, or finding out he died with the engine running in a parking lot outside a store that sells things made by people earning a dollar an hour?" Dale heard the anger in his voice and pulled back. "Sorry. It's an old wound."

"It doesn't sound old. It sounds fresh."

"Maybe it is." He took a breath, let it out slowly. "He was seventy-one. Heart attack. The doctors said it was probably quick—he was gone before he knew what was happening. We're supposed to be grateful for that, I guess. That he didn't suffer."

"Are you? Grateful?"

"I'm—" He stopped. The question had hooks in it, pulling at something deeper. "I'm angry. I've been angry for six years. At him for dying. At the world for making him into what he became at the end. At myself for not—"

"For not what?"

"For not being there. For not fixing it. For not somehow making his life mean something more than it did."

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Q36. "Tell me about your relationship with him."

Dale laughed, short and humorless. "That's a big question."

"We have time."

The silence stretched. The fluorescent lights hummed their constant note. And Dale found himself reaching back, past the death, past the decline, past the long slow fade of Walter Kinney from working man to odd-job man to ghost of a man—reaching back to something earlier, something that might still be clean.

"When I was a kid," he said slowly, "I thought he was the strongest man in the world. He had these hands—" Dale held up his own hands, as if demonstrating. "Thick fingers, calluses on the calluses. He could lift anything. Fix anything. I used to follow him around the house on weekends, watching him repair things. The screen door that stuck. The faucet that dripped. The lawnmower that wouldn't start. He'd work on it until it worked, and then he'd move on to the next thing."

"You admired him."

"I worshipped him. The way sons do, when they're young enough not to know better."

"What changed?"

"I grew up." The words came out flat, factual. "I started to see who he really was. A man who worked too hard and drank too much and never said what he was feeling. A man who showed love through labor because he didn't know how to show it any other way. A man who was so afraid of being useless that he worked himself into the ground, and then when the work ran out, he didn't know how to be anything else."

Ms. Vance was watching him with that absolute attention, that stillness that seemed to drink in everything he said. Her pen hadn't moved. She wasn't writing.

"You're describing yourself," she said quietly.

Dale felt the words land like a physical blow. He wanted to deny it, to explain the difference, to insist that he was nothing like his father. But the denial wouldn't come. Because she was right. She was exactly right.

"I know," he said. "I know I am."

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Q37. "Were you close? You and your father?"

"Define close."

"Did you talk? Share things? Know each other?"

"We—" Dale searched for the honest answer. "We worked together sometimes. Side by side. He taught me how to use tools, how to fix things. We had that language, the language of work. But talk? Share things?" He shook his head. "Men like him didn't do that. Feelings were for women and children. You showed up, you did the job, you came home tired, you got up and did it again. That was the whole vocabulary."

"Did he ever tell you he loved you?"

The question was quiet, almost gentle. But it hit Dale like a fist.

"No." The word came out rough, scraped. "Never. Not once."

"Did you tell him?"

"I—" He stopped. Rewound the years. All those days, all those hours, all those moments of proximity without connection. Had he ever said the words? "I don't think so. I don't remember ever saying it."

"Not even at the end?"

"The end was a phone call from a stranger. The police, calling from Kinston. They found my number in his wallet." Dale could still hear the voice, flat and official, asking if he was the next of kin. "He was already gone by the time I got there. Three hours on the highway, and he was already gone. I never—there was no chance to say anything."

"Do you wish you had?"

"Every day." The admission surprised him with its force, its rawness. "Every single day. I had fifty years to say three words, and I never said them. And now he's gone, and I'll never know if he wanted to hear them. If it would have mattered. If he ever wondered why his son couldn't—"

He stopped. His throat had closed around the words. His eyes were stinging.

"Take your time," Ms. Vance said.

Dale shook his head, pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. He would not cry. Not here, not in an interview, not in front of a stranger with a legal pad and questions that cut too close to bone.

"I'm fine," he said. "I'm sorry. This isn't—this isn't what you asked about."

"I asked about your relationship with your father. This is exactly what I asked about."

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Q38. "Tell me about his workshop. The smell. The sounds. What do you remember?"

The question was unexpected—a sideways turn into sensory territory. Dale let it carry him, grateful for the shift away from the emotional cliff he'd been approaching.

"It was in the garage," he said. "Or what used to be the garage—he'd converted it, years before I was born. Workbenches along the walls. Pegboard with tools hanging from hooks, each one outlined in marker so you knew where it went back. A vice mounted to the main bench, the big cast-iron kind he used for everything."

"The smell?"

Dale closed his eyes, reaching for it. The workshop. His father's domain. The air in there had its own character, its own weight.

"Sawdust," he said. "That was the main thing. Sawdust and machine oil. He kept the tools oiled, always. Said a dry tool was a dead tool. And underneath that—cigarette smoke. He'd quit by the time I was in high school, but the smell never left. It was in the walls, the wood, everything. You could still smell it years later."

"What else?"

"The sound of the radio. He always had the radio on. Country stations, mostly. Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard. The old stuff. He'd hum along while he worked, never singing the words, just humming."

"What did his humming sound like?"

Dale tried to hear it. His father's voice, low and rough, following the tune of some country song while his hands moved over the work. The memory was—

The memory was—

"I—" He frowned, concentrating. "I can picture him doing it. Bent over the workbench, hands busy, mouth moving. But the sound—"

"Take your time."

"I can't quite—" He shook his head. "It's there, I just can't—it's like hearing something through a wall. Muffled."

"Memory does that," Ms. Vance said. "The visual stays clear. The auditory fades faster."

"I could hear it this morning." Dale opened his eyes. "When I was getting ready for the interview. I thought about him—about what he'd say if he could see me now—and I could hear his voice. Clear as anything. But now—"

"Now?"

"It's not gone. It's just—" He searched for the word. "Distant. Like it's moving away from me."

"That must be unsettling."

"It is." He pressed his fingers to his temples again. The headache was still there, a dull pulse behind his eyes. "I don't know what's wrong with me today. First the birthday party, the colors going soft. Now my father's voice. I feel like I'm—"

He stopped.

Losing things, he'd been about to say. Losing things I should be able to hold onto.

But that was crazy. You didn't lose memories in the middle of a conversation. You didn't forget the sound of your father's voice because someone asked you about it. That wasn't how memory worked.

"You've been under a lot of stress," Ms. Vance said, and her voice was kind, reasonable. "Eleven months of job searching. The pressure, the uncertainty. It takes a toll. The mind protects itself by—by softening things. Blurring the edges."

"Is that what this is?"

"I'm not a psychologist." She smiled, that professional smile that revealed nothing. "But I know that stress affects memory. Affects cognition. It's nothing to be alarmed about."

Dale nodded. The explanation made sense. Stress. Pressure. The mind under siege, doing triage, deciding what to protect and what to let go.

But when he reached for his father's workshop—the sawdust smell, the machine oil, the ghost of cigarette smoke—he found it harder to grasp than it had been a minute ago. The image was still there, the visual: the workbenches, the pegboard, the vice. But the smell was—

Was it sawdust? He'd said sawdust. But when he tried to summon it, to actually smell it in his memory, there was only a vague impression of wood. Some kind of wood. Some kind of smell.

---

Q39. "What would your father think of you now? If he could see you?"

The question cut through the fog of lost sensations, sharp and immediate.

"He'd be disappointed," Dale said. "The same way he was disappointed when he was alive. I never measured up. Never worked as hard, never endured as much. He'd see me sitting here, begging for a job at fifty-four, and he'd—" He stopped. "He'd think I was weak."

"Do you think you're weak?"

"I think I'm tired." The words came out quiet, honest. "I think I've been tired for a long time, and I don't know how to stop being tired, and somewhere along the way the tiredness started to look like weakness. Maybe they're the same thing. Maybe he knew that, and that's why he never stopped working. Because stopping meant being what I am now."

"And what are you now?"

"I don't know." He looked at Ms. Vance, at her patient eyes, her still face. "I don't know what I am anymore. I used to be a warehouse manager. A supervisor. An operations guy. I had titles, responsibilities. Now I'm just—" He spread his hands. "A man in a room, answering questions, hoping to be chosen."

Ms. Vance was quiet for a moment. Then:

"Let's move on. I'd like to ask you about identity. About who you are, outside of work."

Behind him, the door waited. The door he hadn't looked at since he sat down.

"Okay," Dale said. "Let's talk about that."

But somewhere in the back of his mind, he was still reaching for the sound of his father's voice. Still trying to hear the humming, the low rough tune that had filled the workshop all those years ago.

It wouldn't come.

He kept reaching anyway.