By the following week, the silence from the agency had become ordinary.
I no longer expected Gavin to call.
I no longer checked my email every few minutes to see whether someone had changed their mind.
The decision had been made.
I had to make my life work without the job I had lost.
That was harder than saying it.
Every morning, I sat down with my laptop and searched for openings.
I rewrote parts of my résumé.
I adjusted the descriptions of my work so that they showed what I had actually done instead of the job title printed on my old business card.
I sent applications to companies I knew and companies I had barely heard of.
Then I waited.
Some replies were polite rejections.
Others never came.
I tried not to take each one personally.
That was difficult when I had so much time to think.
At the agency, I had been used to solving problems quickly.
If a campaign wasn't working, I studied the numbers.
If a client was unhappy, I found out what had gone wrong.
If a deadline was slipping, I stayed late and caught up.
Searching for a job was different.
I could do everything I was supposed to do and still have no control over the result.
It reminded me of the morning I lost my position.
I had done what I believed was right.
Gavin had made a decision anyway.
There was a lesson in that, although I wasn't sure I liked it.
Working hard didn't guarantee fairness.
Doing the right thing didn't guarantee a reward.
And being a good employee didn't mean someone would treat me well when circumstances became inconvenient.
I had known those things in theory.
I hadn't expected to learn them so personally.
My wife never treated me as if I had failed her.
She didn't make a speech about how proud she was of me.
She simply kept doing what needed to be done.
When we discussed money, she was practical.
When I got discouraged, she sat beside me.
When I wanted to spend another hour staring at job listings, she sometimes reminded me to take a break.
I appreciated those things more than I could explain.
One afternoon, I found myself looking at the photograph again.
It was still on the kitchen counter.
The girls had moved it while cleaning, and it now stood beside a small stack of school papers.
I straightened it.
Then I noticed the scratch along the plastic corner.
I remembered the morning I had placed it in my bag.
I remembered thinking that the photograph was the only thing I wanted to take with me from the office.
That hadn't been entirely true.
I had wanted to take my dignity, too.
I had wanted to leave without crying.
I had wanted to prove that Gavin couldn't hurt me.
But I had cried.
He had hurt me.
And I had driven away feeling as if the whole world had decided I was foolish.
For days, I had treated those feelings as evidence that I had made the wrong choice.
Now I was beginning to see them differently.
Being hurt didn't mean I had been wrong.
Being frightened didn't mean I lacked courage.
And losing a job didn't erase the work I had done or the person I had tried to be.
I wished I had understood that in the parking lot.
It might have saved me some of the anger I had carried home.
Still, I couldn't pretend that everything was improving.
We had to be careful with money.
I thought twice before buying things I would once have picked up without concern.
I postponed expenses that could wait.
I kept looking for work.
Some evenings, I lay awake wondering how long we could manage if nothing changed.
My wife would reach for my hand in the dark.
I would hold it and try to stop calculating.
The next morning, I would get up and begin again.
The woman remained in the back of my mind.
I didn't know much about her.
I knew the sound of her voice.
I knew the expression on her face when I told her I had lost my job.
I knew she had made an effort to find me, first at the office and then again after our conversation.
I also knew she had not treated me as if I were asking for something.
She had listened.
That was all.
It shouldn't have felt so unusual.
But after the way Gavin had spoken to me, being listened to had mattered.
I found myself thinking about the road more often than I wanted to.
I remembered how quickly I had pulled over.
I remembered the confusion of the moment.
I remembered that I hadn't known whether I could help her.
I had simply known I couldn't leave without trying.
When I looked back on it, the decision seemed clearer than it had in the hours immediately afterward.
I couldn't control what Gavin did.
I couldn't guarantee that the woman would recover.
I couldn't know what stopping would cost me.
I had been able to control only one thing.
Whether I stopped.
I had stopped.
I was still living with the consequences.
That didn't make the decision easy to carry, but it made it easier to understand.
One evening, my wife found me sitting at the table with the photograph in my hands.
"What are you thinking about?" she asked.
I looked at the picture.
"That morning."
She sat beside me.
"Again?"
I nodded.
"I keep trying to decide what it says about me."
She considered that.
"Maybe it doesn't have to say everything about you."
I looked at her.
"Maybe it was just one decision," she continued. "An important one, but still one decision."
I rubbed the edge of the frame.
"I thought I'd feel better by now."
"You've lost something important. It takes time."
I nodded slowly.
I had wanted the loss to become meaningful immediately.
I had wanted the story to arrange itself into a shape I could accept.
A good deed.
An unfair punishment.
A lesson.
A better future waiting just around the corner.
Real life wasn't so tidy.
I could be grateful that the woman was alive and angry that I had lost my job.
I could believe I had done the right thing and still worry about money.
I could feel proud of stopping and ashamed of how frightened I had become afterward.
None of those feelings cancelled the others.
That night, I put the photograph back on the counter.
I didn't know when I would find another job.
I didn't know whether I would ever understand why Gavin had reacted as he did.
I didn't know what the woman would say the next time we spoke.
But I no longer believed that I had to feel fearless to stand by the decision I had made.
I only had to be honest about its cost.
The next morning, I opened my laptop again.
There were new listings.
There were more applications to send.
There were still bills to pay.
I took a breath and began.
I wasn't ready to call what had happened a blessing.
I wasn't ready to forgive the man who had fired me.
But I was ready to stop treating my own conscience as the enemy.
That was enough to get me through another day.
Click here to continue reading: PART 9: The Days After Losing My Job Forced Me to Face Every Bill on the Kitchen Table, Even When My Wife Tried to Make the Numbers Feel Less Frightening
I Thought Being a Good Man Meant Doing the Right Thing, Until My Boss Made Me Choose Between My Job and a Stranger
Part 8 of 15
