"Wanting a thing isn't a crime." Walter folded the dish towel into thirds, then into thirds again, the way he folded everything. "Your mother loves you. That's not what's wrong here."
"Then what is?"
The old man was quiet so long that Jalen thought he wasn't going to answer.
"Some of it's me," Walter said finally. "More of it than she'd say out loud, and more than I'd like." He set the towel on the arm of the couch. "Go to bed. You've got conditioning in the morning."
"How do you know?"
"I know your schedule better than I know mine." He almost smiled. "I'm retired, son. Your schedule is my schedule."
II.
Walter slept badly, which at seventy-four wasn't news. He lay in the second bedroom, the one Renita called his room and he still privately called the guest room, seven years after Gloria's stroke and the sale of the house on Glide Street. He listened to the building settle and thought about Building 23.
He'd started at Kodak in 1972, twenty years old, hired off a two-year machining certificate from Monroe Community College and a recommendation from his uncle Clement, who swept floors in the emulsion buildings and had told every white man he swept around that his nephew could make a part from a drawing better than anybody they'd ever seen. That turned out to be true. Walter could look at a blueprint and see the finished part sitting in the air above the paper, all its tolerances, the places it would wear. He could hold a micrometer like a fork.
Kodak Park in those years was a city inside the city. The film-spooling lines ran around the clock in the dark, and the machines that wound film onto spools were finicky, and when they jammed, a shift's worth of product could go to scrap. In 1979 Walter watched one line jam six times in a week, went home, and drew a gate at his kitchen table, a small spring-loaded guide that caught the film edge a quarter inch earlier than the old one did. He machined a prototype on his own time. He showed it to his supervisor, a man named Frank Dettlinger, who looked at it for a long while and said, "Leave it with me."
Six months later the gate was on every spooling line in Building 23, and there was a write-up in the plant newsletter about Dettlinger's innovation, and Dettlinger got a bonus and a promotion to the engineering office on the fourth floor. Walter got a handshake in the parking lot and the words, "You know how it is, Walt."
He did know how it was. He had a wife and a baby on the way, and Renita was born that December. He stayed thirty-one years. He trained two dozen machinists, a few of whom made foreman. He applied for foreman himself four times and was told four different ways that the floor needed him where he was. He never stopped drawing at the kitchen table.
In 2004 the digital wave came for the film lines the way everybody had sworn it never would, and Walter took the buyout with eighteen months' salary. He was fifty-two. He was sure, with the certainty of a man who'd watched his own ideas carry other men's names for three decades, that this was his turn. He took the buyout, then the savings, then, in 2006, a second mortgage on Glide Street, and opened Hollis Precision in a rented bay in Gates with a used South Bend lathe, a Bridgeport mill, and a plan to do short-run prototyping for the small optics firms springing up out of the ruins of the big company.
He worked. Lord, he worked. He left the house at five and came home at eleven and went down to the basement, where he'd built a second shop, and drew. He missed Renita's twenty-seventh birthday dinner because a client in Victor needed a fixture by morning. He was in the bay in Gates the night Gloria called to tell him their daughter's marriage was in trouble, and he said, "I'll call her tomorrow," and then didn't, because tomorrow had a deadline in it too.
In 2008 the optics firms stopped paying their invoices, and then they stopped existing. By 2009 Hollis Precision was a lathe and a mill and a stack of letters from the bank. Gloria went back to work full-time at the county clerk's office at fifty-five to keep up the payments. Renita, pregnant with Jalen and already worried about her marriage, took a second job doing billing at night and still drove over twice a month to bring her mother groceries, because her father was in the basement drawing a better gate for a world that no longer made film.
He sold the lathe and the mill to Sal Ferrante, an old friend from Building 23 who had a small job shop on Elmgrove Road. Sal paid more than they were worth, which both of them pretended not to know.
In 2012 Kodak filed for bankruptcy, and the retiree health benefits Walter had counted on for thirty years were cut down to almost nothing. Gloria had her stroke in 2019 at her desk. She lived eleven days. After the funeral Renita stood in the kitchen on Glide Street and looked at the numbers and said, quietly, "You can't keep this house, Daddy." She was right. He sold it. He moved into the guest room on the twenty-second floor, where the windows were too big and the floors were too quiet, and he cooked on Mondays and Thursdays and did his grandsons' hair and drove them where they needed to go, and he never once said the thing he most needed to say to his daughter, because he didn't know a sentence long enough.