Seminar in Fiction Unit 3

For instance, here's my Unit 3 story. I am hoping that when people read it they don't want to choke the author. I wanted to choke three other students for making me read their drivel.

Matt Butcher Unit 3.1

I hated calling every week. Every Sunday. I didn’t know why. Only out of some sense of familial duty did I bother. I was two thousand miles away and I was all by myself in Seattle. Calling home was making stuff up, trying to make my week sound more interesting than it actually was. It felt like lying. I was trying to stay in Seattle when every lonely aspect of my body was screaming to move back to Chicago.
“No, Dad, it’s going well out here,” I said into the phone. “I’m going to get some kinda stock option through the mortgage company.” See, didn’t that sound impressive? It was, in actuality, a source of derision I would make fun of with a co-worker. There wasn’t going to be any stock options. The company was going under and it was their last ditch effort at acquiring some capital.
“I remember when I started working for the phone company out here in Chicago,” Dad said. He was born and raised in Blackpool, England, living there until he was sixteen. He tried American high school and dropped out, met my mother, who was a greaser back then if you can believe it (I can’t), and he got a job at the phone company that my Grandpa worked at. He’s been there ever since, 32 years.
I moved out here to Seattle in July 1999. I…needed a change. The divorce wiped me out. That was something my dad and I did not have in common.
“So really, Matt, how’s it going?” Dad said. He never got personal. This tone shocked me. It sounded genuine, with no mocking. I remember running the riding lawnmower into the car and him screaming, “Well done, Matt.” This was a friend’s tone.
“Good, Dad,” I said, trying to come up with something to squirm out of the call. Nothing.
“Matt, I moved thousands of miles away too.” The way he said it sounded like he had rehearsed it, yet it sounded sincere. “I moved to Chicago with me mum and dad. They moved back and I stayed here with your mum. I was alone too.”
Alone. Man, he nailed it right on the head. Bills were piling up. I think I had been on one internet blind date since moving out here and that went horribly. Everyone at the mortgage company was old compared to 26. The only one I talked to was Joanna, a married and pregnant 32-year-old. I came home at night to my loft apartment and stared at the Arby’s flashing sign while piling my books into a readable order or arranging my CDs by genre, or alphabetical order, or color. That would make for great Sunday family conversation: My CDs look cool colored like a rainbow.
Dad continued, “My mum and dad moved back without me after I met your mum. Did I ever tell you that me mum left before my wedding?”
“No, I didn’t know that,” I said and suddenly Dad was 18 years old.
“I was mad about that. They never got along, you know, your mum and my mum. She moved back to Blackpool about a month before the wedding. I started wondering to myself if I was doing the right thing. Why shouldn’t I move back to England? What was I doing? Your mum wouldn’t move to England, even though we talked about it. Wasn’t fair to her either. So we stayed here.”
I kept thinking of how my mother hated my wife. How everyone hated her. How I hated her now. If only I had listened. Only my dad, he was the only one that told me to do what I had to do. I was starting to guess now why he was the only supporter.
“That was September of ’71,” Dad said. “You came along 16 months later. Then Heather, then Sarah.”
“Yeah,” I responded. “So it was right for you. Married almost thirty years and with…me,” I joked.
“Yeah, but I almost went back to England.”
That statement floored me. It was simple to do the math. Going back to England = no me. Sobering.
“So you’ll be all right,” Dad said. “You gotta do what you need to. I only talk to me mum once a month or so now. It’ll be all right.” I heard the upper Lancashire accent in that final word.
Off the phone, I was resolved again. Dad did it. Another country, for Pete’s sake. I went to the computer and started looking on the internet for a new job.

That was 1999. I married Amy in October of 2000 and gained a stepdaughter, Morgan. Amy helped me focus on teaching and I got my first full time teaching gig in 2001. Madison was born in 2003.
The phone calls home are more and more infrequent. That’s because Dad was right. Amazingly, we don’t call all that often when we actually have stuff to talk about.