Nine Hundred Miles To Tampa

When the phone lights up again, Kevin takes in a breath and answers. “My name is Kevin Dwyer. How may I service you?” Hannah, on her own call at the next desk over, spits into the phone. The official script, pasted next to Kevin’s desk, says, How may I be of service? Kevin grins back at Hannah.  

The woman on the other end of the line, who doesn’t seem to notice the screwup, wants a sporty two-door for a week. Kevin faces monitors all around him. They all do, all two dozen or so representatives, boxed into four-desk pods, each facing the others, so if they look up from their screens, they can see their faces, headsets, the backs of monitors. Hannah calls it their corner suite. Anyone walking by Kevin’s desk can see he’s got two screens up, and one of them is his iPad, where he’s watching some guy streaming himself playing video games on Twitch. Hannah raises an eyebrow across from him, and Kevin, sensing someone passing by behind him, puts the iPad down and returns to his reservation screen. When they pass, he bobs his head and makes the rock-and-roll hand sign to Hannah. 

Maybe Kevin could’ve been a YouTube star, with a mic in the corner of the screen and the game projected behind him. He watches guys getting rich from it. He can make his voice like theirs. He’s always liked building things. Minecraft when he was younger. Planet Coaster, too. He likes checking inventories of tools, chats popping up around him. That’s how Hannah described this job to him—headphones, inventories, and chats—but it’s nothing like that really. He’s been duped. 

When Kevin asks which location, the woman on the phone says Fort Lauderdale, airport location.

“Fort Lauderdale. Yeah.” He chews on a wad of gum. “Something sporty. I’ll check the inventory. Yeah, west coast of Florida, a real place to be seen. Cultural capital of America, and all.” 

Kevin used to want to visit Florida, Disney World if he could ever afford it, but not now. He’d need a car seat anyway. He’s thinking about the kind of person who can afford a week in Florida with a sporty twoseater, no car seat, just road and beaches. He thinks about his old Toyota, windows peeling at the edges, with milk spill stains on the seats and an empty baby bottle on the floor. 

“It’s on the east coast of Florida, actually.” 

“Ah, the other side of America’s great wang.” Amber’s somewhere in Tampa now, where she has family. He thinks about her, driving on her own, no car seat ever. Just an easy, big, clean car, clean floorboards, it really burns him up. How she didn’t even want custody, even ask for it. Didn’t respond to his calls or emails. 

“Um.”

Hannah nods toward him. She’s making some gesture with her headset. Kevin glances behind him, but there’s no one there. The iPad is already down. 

“I guess you’re not on site,” the voice says. “Or you’re confused about which coast we’re on?” 

Kevin laughs. “I’m often confused, but nah.” Kevin’s pants feel uncomfortable all of a sudden. He sticks a hand in his pocket and pulls out a pacifier. “Damn,” he says. That’s where it went. He was looking all morning. 

“Sorry.” 

“Uh, nah, we’re in a call center based in Sterling. It’s in Virginia.” 

“If I reserve a specific model, can you be sure it’ll be there on the lot?” 

Kevin remembers how Amber told him where she was going, almost as an afterthought. And then, boom, gone the next day. She would’ve had to rent a car too, since she was always borrowing his. The planning. That was what got him. She’d had to do all that without telling him. Maybe she did it online. Or maybe she called a reservation center. Or, God, maybe she called Quick Car. He was working here then. What if he’d answered her call? What would he have said? What if he gave her the idea in the first place?

“There’ll be a car there, yes ma’am, for sure.” 

“How about a Porsche Boxster? We’d like to drive it to Tampa. Can I do it one way?” 

“Tampa. Tampa, really? Oh, yeah, a Porsche,” Kevin says. “Gotta impress some dumb prick, right?” 

“Excuse me?” 

There’s a click. 

Another woman’s voice breaks in. “Ma’am, this is Regina Clark, manager at Quick Car Rental reservations. I’m going to help you find the vehicle of your choice and provide a discount for your trouble. Kevin, you may drop the call.” He taps the button and he’s off the call. 

Hannah is staring at him. She mouths, What happened?

He’s half-laughing, he can’t help himself. It’s so shitty. Everything is funny to him right now, because what can he do? 

“I tried to tell you,” Hannah says. “Regina’s listening in today. What’d you think this meant?” She gestures to her earpiece. 

“Oh it’s too late. Dammit,” Kevin says, the whole thing sinking in now. “Dammit. I thought you were just excited about some dumb thing you saw online or something.” Kevin likes Hannah. Mostly as a friend, he thinks, though that doesn’t stop him from fantasizing a little sometimes. He wouldn’t have talked to her just a year ago in high school. She and Amber were in different circles. While he and Amber were smoking blunts after classes, Hannah was studying for AP physics. Now, Hannah’s taking a year to save for college, Amber’s in Tampa, and Kevin … is still figuring out what Kevin’s up to. 

Hannah laughs. “Goodbye, Kevin. It’s been good working with you.” He doesn’t crack a smile. 

“Hannah Hernandez. I hardly knew ye.” He picks up his bag, iPad, framed picture of Mason. He stuffs it all in his bag. Just in case. 

He’s barely zipped his bag when Regina approaches and asks him to come with her. He follows her across the crowded den of desks into her office. An office with a door—that would be nice. If he couldn’t work for himself, which would be the best option, Kevin would like his own office someday. He’d close the door, tell everyone he was on calls, and a nap in the afternoon. He is tired. So, so, so tired 

“Kevin,” she says as he sits across her desk from her. Regina is not all bad. In fact, Kevin thinks, as he stares at her thick fingers and unpolished nails, she’s pretty nice. He would’ve fired himself long ago, but there’s the matter of the baby, and that seems to have kept him on. “Today’s call.” 

“Oh. That.” 

“We can’t have that—ever again.” 

“Yeah, that’s fair.” 

“I know you’ve been through a lot lately.” She motions to her mouth and points at him. Kevin knows gum isn’t allowed on calls. He spits the gum out into his hand and then looks around for a place to toss it. She grabs a tissue and holds her hand open. Regina has three kids in elementary school. He bets she does that with them. What is it about having kids that turns you into a person who doesn’t care about having someone’s spit in your hand? Kevin’s almost nineteen, but he feels like a kid. He drops his gum into the tissue in her hand, and she throws it away under the desk. 

“Kevin, do you want this job?” He hesitates. “All right. Go home. I’ll say you went home sick. Think about it, and then let’s talk.” 

“Thank you, ma’am.” 

He’s never called her ma’am before, and he thinks she’s about to change her mind when she shrugs. “If you don’t want to be here, I can’t help you.” Then her face softens. “How is Mason?” 

“Good. He’s with my parents now.” 

“You know, Kevin. You had a pretty good record before all this. You need another way to deal with things. Sometimes you just have to sit down and have a cry and let it all out.” 

Kevin crosses his arms and raises an eyebrow. “I don’t cry. Never have.”

---

Kevin’s parents’ house is only a mile away from the call center. When Kevin walks in the front door, Mason is whimpering in a bassinet in the living room. 

Early on, Kevin couldn’t believe the sound his newborn made—a shaking, quivering sound that opened something up inside him. It was so high-pitched. Now, four months into it, Kevin knows every cry. When he’s hungry, it’s one thing. When he’s in pain, like the time Kevin accidentally dropped his iPhone on Mason’s head, it’s high-pitched. There’s a whole lexicon of baby cries. He hears them night and day, different sounds, one after the other. Sometimes at night when the baby’s not crying, he hallucinates cries and peeks over the edge of the bed into the bassinet to be sure. 

Because it’s Saturday, Kevin’s dad is in the kitchen making a sandwich. Kevin’s dad is an outdoorsman but spends every day in an office crunching numbers. 

“Thought you said you’d be home tonight, Kev.” 

“Got home early. Dad, Mason’s dirty.” 

“Did you check?” His dad sets down a knife. 

“Listen to him.” Kevin’s dad shoots him a look. 

So Kevin checks, and sure enough. Number two. “I’ll do it.” Thing is, Kevin didn’t need to check. He could tell by the whimpers. 

Kevin moves Mason to the floor and takes the diaper off. “How long’s he been dirty like this, Dad?” 

“Listen, Kev. I don’t know. Your mom’s at the store.” 

“You can tell by the way he was whimpering, Dad.” His dad ignores him and grabs a glass of water. 

When he finishes with the diaper, Kevin picks the baby up again. “Good news at work. I can help out a little more here at home. Then, yeah, I’m going back. But it’s like a vacation today.” 

“Paid or unpaid?” 

“Not paid, but—figured I’d help with Mason, and then go back. Maybe f ind another job. Maybe not.” 

Kevin’s dad makes a sour face. “Uh, Kevin. The whole reason your mom and I are helping you is so you can apply to colleges, or find a long-term job, or you know, do something with your life. So, we aren’t doing this forever. We need, more than you helping now, to make sure you’re set up for later.” 

Kevin knows that’s true, but his dad is also cranky. Really, he’s been cranky since Mason came along, not like one of those happy grandfathers in the commercials, in a red plaid shirt with white hair, standing there, swinging the baby around or whatever. He’s still young, he doesn’t even have much gray yet. But he looks older than he did just a year ago, when he’d seemed invincible, when Kevin was finishing his senior year of high school and had to tell his dad that he felt lost, that Amber was pregnant, that she didn’t want the baby, but he did, somehow he really did. 

Kevin remembers telling Amber once, before she got pregnant, how babies all look alike. He still thinks that a little too, except Mason clearly has his face, the ears that stick out, poor bastard, fat cheeks and sunken eyes. If the ears don’t stop him, and if his face turns out all right, if he gets a good jaw and gets tall and all that like Kevin, maybe he’ll be a lady’s man like Kevin was, at least before the baby. Or, maybe Kevin’s just wrong about that. Maybe he doesn’t know what a lady’s man is. After all, he couldn’t keep Amber. 

He loved her. He really did. First, he loved watching her kick up those cowboy boots on the high school drill team. Then, at some point, he loved all of her. He loved watching TV with her, he loved her surprisingly loud laugh. None of that changed when her belly started getting bigger. And, as he told her, he didn’t understand it, but he wanted this stupid baby and this stupid life together and stupid you. 

“And you’ll let me do all the work, won’t you?” she’d said. “And my life will be all gone.” But he’d badgered her so much, convinced her finally, went to every appointment with her, and she’d finally come around.

“You’ll fall in love with him once you see him,” Kevin had promised her, but she hadn’t. Not even close. It turned out he was the stupid one.  

“So Kevin,” his dad is saying between bites of sandwich. “This is your full-time job now? Staying home, so you can listen to different kinds of baby cries?” 

Kevin throws his hands up in the air. “What the hell, dad?” He takes the baby, storms off into his childhood bedroom, and waits there with the door closed. 

When he hears his mother come home, he comes out. He puts Mason down and helps her carry in the groceries from her car and then put them away. 

“Dad doesn’t do much,” Kevin says. His dad is out of earshot in another room. “Was he the same when I was a baby?” 

She thinks for a moment. “Yeah, about the same.” 

Mason makes some fussing noises. “I’ll bet he’s a hungry boy,” Kevin’s mother says. Does he want a bottle?” 

“A boy,” Kevin repeats. “You wouldn’t really know by the sound.” 

His mother laughs. “Why do you think you’d be able to tell?” 

“Oh, I don’t know.” Kevin blushes and feels stupid that he’d thought that boys wouldn’t cry the same. Or that they’d sound a little less— desperate. Yes, that’s what the sound is like to him, desperate for everything. 

Kevin thinks back and can’t remember ever seeing his dad cry, or any man in his family. Not once. When Kevin’s dad is sad or angry, he disappears. He goes into the garage and fiddles with things. The car, a piece of wood that needs sanding, anything. He gets a stain on his shirt, a splinter in his hand. Maybe his tears are actually splinters. Maybe he cries with his hands. 

When Kevin told his dad about Amber and the baby, and his dad saw the reddening of Kevin’s nose and eyes, the beginning of what might’ve been a cry, if Kevin had ever let it, his dad had turned away in embarrassment. Or maybe disgust. 

With the bottle from Kevin’s mother, the baby stops crying. 

“Your dad says something happened at work.” 

“My boss let me go home early.” 

“Let you? Or told you? Were you being an ass to the customers?” His mother smiles when she asks. 

“I was an ass. It’s the truth. But, well, no, I didn’t have a good reason. But—you know what? Regina likes me. I don’t know why, but she does.” 

Kevin takes Mason from his mother and pinches the baby’s arm in the process. Mason gives a high-pitched scream. “Sorry, little guy. Sorry, sorry,” Kevin says. Not a girl cry or a boy cry but an animalistic cry, so high and primal Kevin feels it might break him wide open. Kevin pulls the baby toward his chest. He is surprised by his own tenderness. 

Kevin wonders what kind of husband he would’ve been. He was actually looking forward to doing stupid things like grocery trips and going out to restaurants with Amber and Mason, and cleaning up their dishes after dinner, and then, he doesn’t know, making love and kissing the baby, and the whole stupid life he thought they were going to have. 

“I’ve decided to go for full custody,” Kevin says to his mom. He decides like that, just in that moment. Or, rather, he decided earlier today, on the phone call, when he imagined Amber in the two-seater, riding across Florida fancy-free.

But it’s not just that. He wants Mason all the time. Mason steadies him. And, he thinks—so far, anyway—he steadies Mason. He doesn’t want him with Amber, a mother prone to coldness. Even before the baby, she would get mad at Kevin sometimes for little things, freeze up and give him the silent treatment. She could be cruel. But she knew that about herself. 

“I don’t have the maternal instinct,” she’d told him when they’d first learned about the pregnancy. 

“You will,” Kevin had insisted. “Women always do when the baby comes.” But he was wrong, stupid wrong. 

Kevin rocks Mason in his arms. Mason’s head flops around until Kevin steadies it with a palm. 

“Does Amber want custody?” his mom asks as she puts the last box of cereal into a cabinet. 

“What does Amber think? Geez mom, I don’t know. Maybe I would if she would ever answer her phone. Or any texts.” 

An image shoots into Kevin’s mind just then. Amber, who wanted to be a professional dancer, still tiny, and all belly, getting bigger and bigger. In the last few months, she wasn’t herself at all. She just looked—scared. 

“She just drove off,” his mom says in a musing way. Not severe enough for Kevin’s taste. 

“Was I like this as a baby, Mom? Like—this little?” She nods absently. Now Kevin wants to know how his dad felt about him when he was a tiny thing who could barely steady his head. Because if Kevin didn’t start out kind of numb, if he wasn’t always this way, he must’ve gotten here somehow. 

He needs a distraction from all this thinking. Kevin texts Hannah. He tells her he’s not sure about this job, and she texts back a broken heart. Kevin tries not to read too much into it. Then he feels a little wave of panic that he won’t see her again. He texts, Want to come over and watch a basketball game tonight?

At yr parents? Duuude.

And then another. Jk Kev. Sounds fun.

Hannah didn’t date in high school. Kevin’s not even sure whether she likes men, let alone him, but he does like being around her. He’ll make some dip, and they’ll hang out this evening, and his parents will have to be normal for a little while because she’s there. It’s not Amber, but, Kevin thinks, you know what? Amber didn’t even like basketball. She didn’t even like sports. Kevin is going to teach Mason to love basketball. And he’s going to be a Wizards fan. Oh, shit yeah. And root against Orlando Magic. Miami Heat too. Kevin will be a good dad, not a perfect one. Hell, Mason will root against anyone from Florida. Kevin feels happy now at the thought. 

Hannah texts again. Maybe the call center isn’t right for you. Kevin’s stomach drops again. He imagines living with his parents forever. He is about to fire off something back, something mildly insulting, when he sees the three little dots pop up on his phone. He steadies himself and waits. Then she texts, They have an opening in one of the lots. In person. And then, after a minute, I’d miss working with you oc.

Kevin’s glad he took a beat before responding. He’s trying to do that more. He thinks about it for another minute. Headphones off. Face-toface. He’d miss Hannah too. But—off screens, into the real world. It feels like the right next step. 

He texts back. Hmmm. Maybe I’d like that. I’d miss u 2.

He gets off the phone and tells his mom what he’s thinking about. 

“Good. Maybe a change would be a blessing,” his mom says. “Think about what’s coming next.” 

“Yeah, a lot of people take a gap year, so that’s what I’m doing, don’t worry. I’ll get to next steps.” 

Kevin likes the look of relief on his mom’s face. He decides to tell his dad too. 

Kevin looks for his dad and finds him in the garage. He remembers following his dad all around the house as a kid, talking to him. Room to room. How long has his dad been walking away from him, and Kevin going after him? Kevin thinks maybe this is just how it’s always been for him. Just follow the person around, hoping they’ll love you. Well, he sure as hell isn’t following anyone to Tampa. 

Kevin’s dad is sitting on a garage stool, staring off. “They might want me on site, at one of the lots. And I’m going to have a friend over this evening,” Kevin says. “To watch a game.” He wants his dad to see how his life is going to come together. Kevin left the door open, and Mason starts crying again from somewhere inside. 

“Will you? Will someone?” his dad says. He squints his eyes shut, trying to block out the sound. Instead, the wails grow louder.

Did Kevin sound that way as a baby? Did his dad take pity on him? Did he not hear the crying? Or, did he hear it and hate it? Kevin’s mom is in the bathroom, so Kevin grabs Mason and tries to soothe him. 

“Dad,” Kevin says, returning to the garage with Mason. His voice cracks as it strains to overcome the cries. The garage smells of gasoline and oil. There is no need for his dad to check out the car, Kevin knows. The engine’s been messed up for months. What’s he looking at out here? “Dad. Did you hear me? What I said about the job?” 

“Can’t even—have a conversation. Will someone please shut that baby up!” his dad yells. 

“No!” Kevin bangs his hand on the hood of his dad’s messed up Honda, startling Mason, sending him into shrieks. “I’m going to let him cry. I’m going to go for a promotion. And I’m having a girl over to watch basketball tonight. But first, I’m going to let this baby cry as much as he wants. It’s his right.” 

Kevin feels a welling up inside him too, but then it goes back down again. Where did his tears go? They’re not like Mason’s big, fat wet ones, rolling down his face. They’ve got to end up somewhere. Maybe they’re lost somewhere far away, just like Amber. Rolling down the highway in style, maybe in a Porsche Boxster, going on and on and on.