Recalculating...
Center-Left
Bryce kept his eyes on the road while Sarah explained, for Amanda and Chad’s benefit, the gig economy.
“It’s not just the drivers,” she was saying. Her hands moved when she talked, conducting invisible orchestras. “It’s like, we spent a hundred years building this whole infrastructure of, you know, what it means to have a job, and now we’re just...” She made a dismantling gesture.
“Poof,” Amanda offered from the back seat.
“Right. Poof.”
In the rearview mirror, Amanda nodded with the careful attention of someone still tuning a radio, searching for the right frequency. Chad, beside her, watched the passing farmland. His face had the pleasantly neutral quality of a waiting room.
They’d met the couple at a neighborhood potluck three months ago. Amanda worked in nonprofit communications; Chad did something with supply chains. Pleasant people. Easy enough. Politics still unopened, like a letter you’re not sure you want to read just yet.
“Junction’s coming up,” Sarah said. “31 or County Road 4?”
Bryce had been pondering the route for the last ten miles, a low hum beneath the conversation. Route 31 ran straight north past the Amazon fulfillment center, a beige enormity that had materialized two years ago like a spaceship landed in a cornfield — past the Applebee’s and the Chipotle and the other Applebee’s. Fast. Predictable. The kind of road that didn’t ask anything of you.
County Road 4 wound northwest through Holstein country and a township that still had a hardware store with actual hardware in it. Twenty extra minutes. The scenic route, which meant something, though Bryce couldn’t have said exactly what.
“I was thinking 4,” he said. “If nobody minds the time.”
Sarah’s hand found his knee, a small squeeze of approval. In the mirror, Amanda’s shoulders softened.
The road narrowed and the GPS went sulky, recalculating with audible disapproval. A hand-painted sign appeared, its letters uneven in the way of things made by someone who’d never paid someone to make a sign for them before: SWEET CORN 5/$2. They passed a white clapboard church, its message board offering FAITH IS THE ANSWER, the question apparently self-evident. A hundred yards on, a union hall, its parking lot empty, a banner for a fish fry dated three weeks past still hanging from the eaves like a flag of surrender.
“So how did you two meet?” Amanda asked, leaning forward between the seats. She smelled like the lavender hand sanitizer she’d used after the gas station, and something else underneath, something warm.
Sarah launched into the story. Graduate school. A party neither of them had wanted to attend. Bryce half-listened, the familiar words washing past like mile markers. A pickup truck approached from the opposite direction, American flag decal on the rear window, the colors sun-faded to pastels. The driver raised two fingers from the steering wheel without lifting his wrist, the rural wave Bryce’s father had performed ten thousand times. Bryce returned it before thinking, muscle memory from a self he’d carefully archived.
“Bryce grew up in a town like this,” Sarah said, pulling him back. “Tell them about your high school.”
“Small,” he said. “Three hundred kids.”
“His graduating class had six valedictorians,” Sarah added, “because they couldn’t stand to leave anyone out.” She laughed, and Bryce laughed, and it was fine. This was an old routine, his origins offered up for gentle examination, a specimen under glass.
“That’s kind of sweet, actually,” Amanda said.
“It’s grade inflation as community value,” Sarah said. “Which, I don’t know. There’s something to unpack there.”
Bryce watched a red-tailed hawk lift from a fence post, carrying something small and limp. The corn on either side of the road stood head-high and absolutely still, a green army awaiting orders.
Two yard signs appeared in quick succession. The first, handwritten on plywood: AMERICAN JOBS FOR AMERICAN WORKERS. The second, printed and staked precisely, its colors factory-bright: BLACK LIVES MATTER. Forty yards between them. Same lawn.
“Huh,” Chad said. Just that.
Everyone waited.
“The duality of man,” Chad added, and his voice carried the slight upward tilt of a question, an offering that could be retrieved if necessary.
The laughter came in a ragged chorus, not quite harmonized. Bryce felt the air in the car shift, everyone recalibrating, running private calculations. He merged onto a smaller road without signaling, letting the navigation decide itself.
“We should grab ice,” he said. “There’s a place coming up.”
The store materialized around a bend: white-painted timber, covered porch, a Pepsi sign whose red had oxidized to the color of old brick. A cat watched them from the steps with the calm superiority of the deeply local.
Inside, the air was fifteen degrees cooler and smelled of cedar and something fermenting. An elderly woman at the register looked up from a crossword puzzle, assessed them with a glance that took perhaps a quarter second, and returned to her puzzle. A teenage boy stocking shelves didn’t look up at all.
Bryce gathered two bags of ice that numbed his forearms. Sarah found a shelf of pickles in mason jars, their labels clearly printed on someone’s home computer. “Oh these are actually incredible,” she said, reading the ingredients with the focus she usually reserved for journal articles. Amanda murmured agreement. Chad studied a rack of local newspapers, his expression archaeological.
Bryce paid in cash, correct change, and received a nod that felt like a small door briefly opening.
Back in the car, the afternoon light had gone amber, slanting through the trees at the angle that meant time was moving whether you’d noticed or not. The conversation found its way to housing prices, then to the impossibility of buying in any neighborhood they actually wanted, then to the question that always came next.
“It’s investors,” Sarah said. “Private equity buying up entire blocks. Corporate landlords.”
“And family money,” Amanda added. “I know that sounds, whatever. But it’s true.”
“It’s not classist to notice who has the capital.” Sarah’s voice had found its groove now, the rhythm of the certain. “That’s just observation.”
A fork in the road. The GPS, still nursing its grudge, wanted him to bear right. The right fork ran through a development Bryce had driven past once, streets named after trees that had been removed to build the houses: Oak Landing, Maple Ridge, Willow Creek. The left fork followed an actual creek, unnamed on any map, through a corridor of maples whose leaves had begun to betray the first rumors of red.
He bore left.
The road was poorly maintained and the car jostled over patches and potholes. Nobody complained. Through a gap in the trees, a farmhouse appeared, white with green shutters, laundry on the line despite every prediction of rain. Three children’s bicycles lay in the front yard in the configuration of a recent abandonment.
“This is what I needed,” Chad said. His voice had loosened, the careful modulation of earlier giving way to something that might have been real. “Just some trees. Some water. Nobody trying to get me to optimize anything, or pick a side in some fight I just heard about.”
“Exactly,” Bryce said.
The campsite emerged from the trees as the light was beginning to thicken. Their spot sat beneath oaks old enough to have seen other centuries, their branches interlocking overhead like the vaulted ceiling of a church built by people who’d forgotten what churches were for. They unpacked with the efficient cooperation of people who hadn’t yet found reasons to resent each other.
“Perfect timing,” Bryce said, straightening from the cooler. His back complained in the way it did now, a recent development he hadn’t accepted. “I’m glad we have Monday. Thank God for Labor Day.”
“Thank the labor movement,” Sarah said. She was smiling, but the smile had an edge now, a door opening onto a room she’d been wanting to enter. “People actually died for the eight-hour day. The Haymarket martyrs. We should be celebrating them, not just grilling.”
“I mean.” Chad paused. He was holding a tent pole, turning it in his hands like a dowsing rod. “Were they martyrs though? Someone threw a bomb. People have different words for that.”
The silence held for one breath, then two.
Sarah’s chin lifted by perhaps a centimeter. Amanda set down the bag she was carrying and did not pick it up again. Bryce looked at the oak branches above him, the leaves just beginning their slow turn toward red, and thought about how long the drive home would be, and how many choices the road still held, and how you never knew which fork you were taking until you were already past it, the other path disappearing into the trees behind you like something you might have only imagined.