Chapter 13: The Good Son

I was born and raised in Seattle—well, Ballard to be specific. My parents were Swedish immigrants. My father worked on the docks and on the fishing trawlers until he retired. My mother was an education activist in the Swedish community, establishing a kindergarten program and teaching until she was forced out at 70 years old. That had been last year, and she wasn’t taking it that well. It’s a cruel twist of fate when a couple work all their lives toward their goal of retiring and traveling together and then something like a heart attack in the middle of the night a year after retirement dashes the dreams to pieces. Mom had been alone for nine years now.

We talk several times a week and I try to visit at least once a week, but the past two weeks had been so busy that I’d missed lunch with her last Sunday. When she saw me at the door she looked quizzically at me and asked “Yes?”

“Mom, it’s me, Dag.” Is she losing it?

“What happened to your hair?” I realized she hadn’t seen me clean shaven since I got out of the Navy and I’d completely forgotten that Sinclair had dyed my hair.

“Oh. I got a job. I have to look all corporate now.”

“A job? Why?”

“Well, Mom, I work for a living.”

“But your business was doing so well.” Now that was a twist. For the past year she’d been telling me I needed to clean up and get a job while I protested that I was in school and had started a business. She hadn’t been enthusiastic about me becoming an entrepreneur and I’d downplayed the real work, choosing to tell her I repaired computers.

“Everyone has computers that need fixed. Mine never does what I tell it to,” she said. That was because she’d never really wanted one and didn’t bother to learn how to use it. But it was okay. As much as I thought I’d like to just jot off an email to her sometimes, she really didn’t need a computer. As easily as the elderly can become prey on the Internet, I was just as glad hers sat in a corner collecting dust.

I helped her on with her jacket and we went out to the waiting cab. I don’t drive my car much, and on rainy days not at all. The past four days had been beautiful but the wind and rain picked up again during the night and I nearly lost the umbrella as I opened the door for her. It was a short trip to the Fish House on the other side of Salmon Bay.

Mom always liked Salmon Bay. She could look out at the fishing boats moored at the pier. I think she liked to imagine that Dad would be getting off one of them and come to join us for brunch. I’d tried to take her to some of the other nice restaurants in town for Sunday brunch, but when asked, she always suggested the Fish House.

We talked about our lives the past week and I told her a bit about the work I was doing at EFC. I didn’t tell her I was undercover, but I did suggest that it was temporary to fill a specific need and I expected I’d be back in my own business soon.

“Maybe they’ll like you. You might be asked to stay.”

“I doubt that, Mom. These kinds of jobs don’t usually work that way.” I didn’t add that I wouldn’t go back to work for a corporation even if they did try to hire me. The taste of independence I’d had the past year-plus made it hard for me to think about returning to a corporate grind. I’d tried that, thinking it was the road to security and wealth. Then the company I’d invested fourteen years of my life in had tanked, thanks to unscrupulous management. Why would I do that all again? I might starve, but I was happy.

“Everyone wanted to hire your father,” she continued. “He was a hard worker. Of course, it wasn’t always like that.” That was news to me. I’d only known a father who worked long hard hours every day of his life.

“What do you mean?”

“Well...” she lowered her voice and glanced around the room conspiratorially, “when we came to America, we were hippies. We never intended to work a day in our lives.”

“Mom! You’re kidding!”

“No, it’s true. You should know these things now that you’re grown up.” Grown up? I was 43. It seemed like I could have been told about this sometime in the past 20 years. “We got off the boat without even having a proper visa. We were just tourists on a year-long trip to see the continent like American youths went to Europe. American teens headed for Amsterdam for the drugs. We headed for San Francisco.”

“What happened?”

“We met a nice couple, a little older than us, who invited us to stay with them on a ranch in Montana. They worked us hard for little food and no money, but they were very convincing. Society was about to collapse. The only ones who would survive were those who lived communally and regained a native work ethic. They could make slave labor sound like paradise.”

“How did you manage to leave?”

“They took periodic trips to San Francisco to recruit new members of what they called their commune, even though they owned everything and worked the kids they brought in like slaves. They made the mistake of assuming they were so far out in the wilderness that we wouldn’t try to leave on our own. But we did. We set all the animals free on the range and walked away the day they went to California. We walked seventy miles to the railroad and walked along it for two days until we came to a place where a freight train was stopped at a grain elevator. We snuck on board and the next time it stopped, we were in Seattle.”

I’d never heard about this part of my parent’s life. I thought they came here straight from Sweden and went to work. My mom was full of surprises.

“We couldn’t find a place to live,” Mom continued, “but your father found work on a fishing trawler. For the month it was at sea, I lived in the warehouse and picked up odd jobs doing cleaning and cooking. His first paycheck was enough for us to get a room in a boarding house and a permanent job offer. They weren’t so particular about checking visas back then.”

“You were illegal aliens?”

“You make it sound like we came from outer space,” she laughed. “We discovered the Swedish-American Center and a legal aide there went to work getting us proper papers and eventually citizenship. I went to college and got my education degree while your father continued to work the fishing trawlers and then the docks. And you came along. We couldn’t complain about that! The next year, Pastor Lundquist at the Swedish Lutheran Church asked me to start a kindergarten. Once we got it straight that there would be no religion taught in my school, I went to work.”

I remembered that kindergarten in the basement of the Lutheran Church. I’d gone to it for three years with my mother as teacher.

“That’s an amazing story, Mom,” I said. I was too overwhelmed with the information to ask a coherent question.

“Well, it’s time you reconnected with your community, Dagget. Come with me to the Center this afternoon and meet people.”

“I kind of have ... uh ... an appointment this afternoon, Mom.”

I’m not sure why I wasn’t ready to tell her about Andi. It was still too new for me to be sure of what I could say. I’d really been alone now for over five years. My little black hole of an apartment wasn’t exactly conducive to having women over. It was a retreat. I’d had a few trysts over that time, but I’d avoided becoming romantically involved. They’d last a few weeks at most and we’d go our separate ways, my dates having never seen the way I live. If they had, I’m sure my time with them would have been even shorter. I wondered why I was suddenly so willing to let myself go with Andi.

“You need to get back to your roots,” my mother was saying.

“Mom, you always taught me to be a hundred percent American. You never wanted any of the kids in school to speak Swedish. You never took me to the SAC when I was growing up. Why should I now?”

“I mean your hair,” she smiled. “Your roots are showing. If you are going to color it, you need to keep it touched up.”

Damn. I couldn’t afford to go back to Sinclair every week. If this was going to be a problem, the dye job would be a one-time thing.