Author Information
Sailing Steady
He sighed as unlocked the front door of his apartment with ease, a motion that no longer needed any conscious effort since it had become a routine, much like everything else in his life, until today. He turned the light of the small foyer-like hallway that greeted him. To call it a foyer was definitely an exaggeration, seeing as it was a miniature hallway, which had a small closet door to the left where he’d neatly organize his different coats and hats every day at the beginning of the day and at the end.
He turned the lights on without much thought and carelessly dropped his coat and hat to the floor. He walked further until arriving to the living room, which offered much more room that the previous hallway, and flopped down onto the sofa, while tossing his suitcase mindlessly into the couch next to him.
For someone who knew him it would be apparent there was something wrong, something definitely different in him. He had just come home from his job, a job he had been dedicating his time to for more than ten years, defeated. His boss had called him to his office today, something that hadn’t happened since the day he was hired, and told him he wasn’t needed anymore. There had been a few cuts in budget and they had to let him go. Funny, he thought, one would think they’d fire people who had been in the office for far less time than him. Maybe his part hadn’t been as useful as he had led himself to believe.
He could bad-mouth his boss and the other co-workers that got to say because they were clearly more useful than he was, but deep down he knew that it had been a long while since he had ever fully put his efforts into something, especially into his job. He had been losing his motivation for a while now, the more time passed the more apparent it became, but it dropped completely two years ago, the day his wife had died in a driving accident. Leaving him to the house they had designed together and alone to raise their baby boy, Dean.
He stopped his job-related sulking to think about his son. He was seventeen when his mother passed, a tough age. Understandably he drifted away and distanced himself, something his father thought was, well, expected. The boy had lost his mother and I got caught up with work, he thought to himself. It was obvious Dean would be mad at me for neglecting him in such an awful time.
He got up from the sofa he had been lying in for what seemed like minutes, but as he looked at the clocked he realized he had been doing nothing for over two hours. He had to have a plan. He could barely keep the house expenses with the job he had just lost and he certainly would not be able to keep it if he didn’t find another one. After his wife passed away he had to give some of her stuff away, but he would never leave the house they spent so much in building for some other family to live in. This was theirs.
He snapped out of his thoughts and decided to go look for Dean. He could go job hunting tomorrow, check the newspaper or the internet or something. Now he needed to be with his son. Be it because of the sadness of losing his job or the realization of how little time he had spent with his son because of said job he didn’t know, but now he knew that he wanted to spend some time with him, he needed to.
After searching the bottom floor of the house he didn’t find much, not that he expected to find him, seeing as all the rooms were pitch black and silent. He began to go upstairs when he looked to the small patio they had outside. There were a few plants that looked to be healthy. He didn’t think much of it until he reached the top of the stairs. The only person to have worked on the garden had been his wife, so why where there live plants in there?
He walked backed down and outside to inspect the plants. They didn’t seem to be simple cooking herbs or flowers; they had a very particular shape that he was a bit ashamed to recognize. Just as he was about to uproot one of them Dean came running down yelling for him to stop.
Suddenly it made sense to him why there would be live plants on the garden. He started getting angry and ready to lecture his son about the plants and why he had such things in his possession when Dean pulled out a roll of cash from his hoodies pocket; all hundred and five hundred bills. Dean explained that he knew how badly they were sailing in terms of money, he wasn’t blind.
His father was torn, but he didn’t have much of an option. It was a business after all, and a few months into it and they were sailing steady.
