Andy Anderson sat at the dinette in the kitchen of his suburban home checking and rechecking his watch. He knew well the time. It was a few minutes before midnight. He knew his wife, Eileen, and their two younger children, Ben, 14, and Amy, 12, were sleeping, as well they should be. It was a school night and Eileen had work in the morning and she and the children had turned in at their usual times of 10 p.m. for the kids and closer to 11 p.m. for Eileen. But Andy was restless. He knew he couldn’t sleep, even if he tried. Worry kept him from it. 

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Andy felt he had reason to worry. Not reason for panic, but reason enough to feel a dull presence of worry as slight pressure in his chest, and reason enough to be checking his watch: His and Eileen’s high school girl, Corinne, the eldest, a senior, was about to be late getting home. Not late yet. Her curfew, one specially set for this evening, was midnight. It was now two minutes before midnight. Being right up to the deadline or even a couple of minutes late wasn’t the end of the world but by Andy’s reckoning it wasn’t great either. For one thing, Corinne still was not accounted for, and the clock was still moving. For another thing, being home by midnight meant midnight was supposed to be the very latest – an end point, not the point where measuring begins. Nothing about a curfew, in other words, obligates you to stay out to the very last second as permitted, any more than a highway speed limit means you must drive 70 miles per hour. 

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Andy was the kind of parent who couldn’t conceive of heading off to bed before everyone was in for the evening. He couldn’t imagine how doing so would be possible. Not so for Eileen. She didn’t see any sense in worrying before it was time to worry. For Eileen that meant one worried only when there was clear, present and explicit evidence that did not just justify worry but that compelled worry. A coroner’s report might be sufficient, although Eileen still might reserve judgment pending receipt of a second opinion.

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The family’s ranch-style house, a three bedroom with a walkout basement, sat on a quiet cul de sac far from traffic, in the town of Englewood, a 70s era suburb of Port De Lys, the “old smokestack city.” The house was still, other than the humming sound made by the refrigerator’s cycling on and off. A periodic rising of a late autumn breeze could be heard jostling the few leaves still holding on to the subdivision's mature trees. The near silence was too ominous for Andy, and so throughout the late evening, he went down to the basement to do a couple of loads of laundry. The measured sound of timer, water, dry air tumbling, like a steady falling rain, was evidence of good order and thus a source of comfort.

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Corinne was now not just officially late, she was unaccounted for, and was driving herself, alone, in her mother’s car. Andy knew that would be the source of trouble from the moment he had agreed to the midnight curfew. Midnight was ridiculously late for a school night, even for a high school senior (even for a 46-year-old man). Andy knew, he just knew, there was a good chance the evening would end with a period of worry. That’s just how it happens. That didn’t mean the evening would end in mishap, or tragedy. To the contrary, Andy felt the main purpose of worry was to stave off mishap or tragedy. The whole exercise, in other words, conducted in moderation, served as an offering, even tribute, to the fates so that they might become distracted, or at least less tempted, and less inclined to impose the worst possible outcomes. Andy knew from experience that plans that call for late evening operations tend not to go as planned. He knew that when things run late, they inevitably run later, and that when they run later, one becomes beset with worry as he waits to find out what’s going on or what’s happened. 

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Andy looked at his watch, 12:02, and took inventory of his mind and imagined the most likely practical circumstances that could account for things having not gone as planned and that might reveal where things stand. Of course, he focused on innocent and harmless explanations, all readily foreseeable, only occasionally allowing his mind to drift to minor mishaps. It could be that the kids were just enjoying one another’s company and lost track of the time for the moment. That was the most probable reason things would be running late. It could be that one of the kids was experiencing car trouble, her car wouldn’t start after the evening broke up and maybe had a dead battery and the kid needed a ride home, and Corinne offered. 

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Corinne had always been a super responsible girl. She had provided a reasonable, detailed, explanation for why she and a group of girls from her class needed to be out late this evening, why they needed to meet up at Mary Claire Cassidy’s house to finish up a group project because Mary Claire’s grandmother had died, and her family would be leaving town early Friday morning for the funeral. The following Monday was Veterans Day, a school holiday, and the group had to present its project to their literature class on the Tuesday after Veterans Day. The project, the collaborative writing and shared reading of an original English sonnet, would account for half of their grade, and while they had planned to work over the weekend to complete the project, Mary Claire’s grandmother dying made that impossible and now they needed to work late Wednesday night to get everything ready and they had a lot of writing and rehearsing to do to get everything ready.

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What could Andy do, except say OK? 

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Eileen, of course, did so without hesitation; she thought it would be fine.

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That was not all: Corinne asked if she could drive to Mary Claire’s house. Andy hated the idea because the house was 35 minutes away and getting there involved a choice of two bad driving alternatives. Corinne either would be stuck on the busiest, most truck-laden stretch of Interstate Highway in the greater Port De Lys region, or she would be left to drive the loneliest back route of winding, hilly, poorly lighted two-lane road, stretches of which had no shoulder. Andy tried to think up an excuse for not allowing Corinne to drive, an excuse that might involve him driving her and then picking her up, or better still Eileen driving her and picking her up because he had a big meeting on Thursday morning and didn’t want to be out late the night before.

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As Andy struggled to come up with a reason that wasn’t ridiculous, Eileen settled the matter. “Yes, you may drive. Take my car,” she said. Eileen then looked over at Andy with an expression that said, “Relax. She will be fine. She’s 17 and has been driving – very capably, by the way – for a year and a half.”

 

Here, again, Andy had to resist thinking about what an excellent driver Corinne apparently was, just as he must avoid considering how reliable she was and what excellent judgment she consistently demonstrated – even though these things should be a source of comfort for one who worried. The opposite was true. The reason for this is that virtues such as these also would be a source of irony in the event of tragedy, and fate may find such irony to be irresistible.

 

Now it was approaching 4 minutes after midnight and, just as Andy predicted, he was still waiting for Corinne and his waiting was starting to become in earnest. The question that now bothered Andy was why Corinne, seeing she was running late, hadn’t checked in. She knew her father worried, and in addition to being reliable and a good driver, and having good judgment, she was considerate. She also had an excellent mobile phone, the best kind of phone a teenager could hope for, and she kept it well charged, her mother having a charger in her car. All it would take to set Andy at ease was a simple text message that said, “running late, on my way home.” Andy, if he received such a text, might respond: “Take your time. Drive safely. Xoxo.” Although he probably wouldn’t because Corinne would be driving, and she shouldn’t be checking text messages while she was driving. Plus, she would be reminded that Andy punctuates his text messages, which would cause Corinne to roll her eyes, another distraction.

 

Andy knew that he had means of ending the drama himself. He had a phone too, and he could call Corinne to find out what was going on. But for two reasons Andy knew he wouldn’t do that: For one, if she did not answer or respond his worry would become amplified. He didn’t want to face that possibility. It was better to just wait. For another, Corinne was most likely driving, either navigating an armada of trucks or keeping an eye on the winding back road. The ring or ding of her phone and urge to check what it was could be a dangerous distraction. 

Instead, he would get up periodically and look out the living room window and onto the cul de sac circle out in front of the house, hoping to see a hint of ambient brightening dispelling some of the darkness, the distant light and moving shadow that precede the direct appearance of headlights on an approaching vehicle.

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Andy’s technique for checking the time and noting its passage mimicked what, growing up, he had seen adults of his parent’s generation do when they checked their wrist watches – something that no longer occurred, even among middle aged men such as Andy, because so few wore a watch. 

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Andy wore a watch that had been his father’s watch, a watch that had been given to his father by Pipefitters Local 29, after twenty years of membership in the union. Andy took over the watch after his father’s stroke. Andy always had admired it, with the distinctive coat of arms made up of flanging tools and pipe clamps replicated on its face. It made no sense for his father to have the watch at the nursing home. His father had no reason to wear it there. He lacked the physical capacity and presence of mind to read it or need it. It was likely to get lost or otherwise to disappear.

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Andy checked his father’s watch with subtle physical maneuvers. He would cast his eyes down to meet a flexed tilt of the watch face held at about belt high. Sometimes Andy wore the watch face on the inside of his wrist, with the band on the outside. In that case he would make a fist and subtly rotate his wrist to bring the watch face into view. When wearing a long-sleeved shirt, Andy would reveal the watch with a short punching movement to pull back the cuff. Other times he might lazily raise his angled wrist, and with the forefinger and thumb of his other hand rotate a loosely fitting band until the watch face came into view. 

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These were not just nervous tics. They were a choreography that Andy had worked out for this and similar circumstances of restlessness as a distraction, a game, a ritual akin to the persistent pressing of an elevator button, a benign means of what had been called “killing time” in earlier generations, behavior which, back then, might have been accompanied by chain smoking cigarettes. 

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Andy didn’t smoke and knew that modern expression of time passing distraction seldom involved reference to a wristwatch or smoking cigarettes and instead, almost always involved obsessive preoccupation with the screen of a mobile phone. Today it was the exceptional person who, even when relaxed, in good times, could look up from their phone, much less resist the feeds and memes of social media or otherwise fail to persistently refresh and check for incoming mail and messaging.

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Andy returned to the basement to switch a load of laundry from washer to dryer, and to start a new load in the washer. He carefully distributed the blue liquid detergent, pouring it from the red cap in a circular motion, into the still drum already loaded with dirty laundry as it filled with warm water. Andy’s idling mind drifted to when he was in high school, and he would be out late on a school night. On Thursday evenings throughout the winter, after open gym basketball finished at 9 p.m., Andy would wait at the bus shelter across from the rec center on Broderick Boulevard for the No. 11 city bus, which ran every half hour. Andy’s time hastening ritual then involved stepping down from the curb and counting 2, 3, 4 steps to the edge of the bus lane. where he would look down the street as far as he could see into the night in hopes of catching a glimpse of an incoming bus’s high and broad profile, made up of tall windshield and wide set headlights, which rose above and to the sides of regular passenger vehicles or the bus would invisibly announce its presence by a distinctive but more distant pfffffft tssssssss release of air brakes followed by a gunning roar of the diesel engine as a bus accelerated after a stop.

 

Andy glanced down again at his father’s watch. He was relieved the time was only 12:07. He feared he might have become so distracted and so much time had passed he would be jolted by a lateness of the hour. Still no Corinne, though. Everyone knew a pot of water would boil when it was ready and after a predictable sequence and time frame correlated with thermal and atmospheric conditions, along with the amount and composition of that which was sought to be brought to a boil. Corinne meanwhile would arrive home when circumstances that matter aligned and allowed. 

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No one worried about Andy when he arrived home late in high school. That was because no one was at home. His dad, Bertram “Bert” Anderson was a widower. They had lost Andy’s mother, Bert’s beloved Mary Anne, when Andy was in the fifth grade. Bert buried his grief in endless work. For Andy, a half orphaned only child, this was better than if his father had turned to drink, but not a lot better. Bert had spent his entire career and most of his life working the third shift and plenty of overtime at the steam loop in downtown Port De Lys. This was a coal fired plant that delivered copious amounts of high-pressure steam that circulated through a network of underground pipes and turned electric generating turbines to a core of Depression era office buildings spread out over 20 city blocks. It was an energy generation system that never caught on and had been kept in operation by a small handful of skilled men, Bert Anderson devoting his life to it. He was hale and still working when he was knocked down at age 74. The fitters had an assisted living center called Members Rest Haven. For the past year, Bert had been cared for there. He could sit up in a bed or in a chair for a couple of hours a day. But he could not walk, or feed himself, or relieve his functions in any dignified fashion, or talk or communicate in any manner, except for how his eyes seemed bright and he seemed able to move and focus them in what might be recognition of his surroundings.

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Andy would visit Bert two evenings a week, and on Sunday afternoon, usually for not more than 30 minutes at a time. This seemed like a respectful period with reasonable frequency, under the circumstances. Bert had a semi-private room which he shared with a much older man, Elmer Hbrank, who had a fully addled mind and lived in his hospital bed, and never had a visitor.

Andy would think about his father late at night, envision him in his room, imagine whether he was sleeping or lying awake. He would wonder whether his father, if he were awake, would have to lie in his bed in the darkness, or whether one of the staff would be sufficiently caring or have the presence of mind to notice that his father was awake, and might turn on a small bedside lamp and maybe spend a few moments seated next to him and talking to him. 

 

When residents of the Rest Haven first moved in, they were allowed, even encouraged, to bring with them a single piece of furniture from their home, something that would be of a modest size, and that would fit, and be suitable and useful in a double room, a small chair or bedside table being the most common choice. The idea was that the residents, and their families, would take comfort in seeing something familiar in their room, something that provides at least symbolic continuity, from their life before coming to the nursing home.

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Andy had brought his father’s narrow four drawer dresser from his home to his room, where it remarkably fit in the corner by Bert’s bed. He also brought the picture of his mother that always had sat on top of the dresser. His father carried a big fat wallet when Andy was growing up and Andy also remembered seeing it sitting on the top of the dresser as his father slept during the day or rested before rising in the evening in time to clock in by 9 p.m.

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Bert had been carrying that wallet when he was felled by the stroke, and it had been returned to Andy by the hospital in a Ziplock plastic bag. Andy always wondered what his father had kept in that wallet. He knew it did not include cash or credit cards. Bert kept his cash folded in a front pocket along with a blank check. He didn’t carry credit cards because he didn’t believe in credit. It was in the hospital parking garage that Andy finally learned what his father had overstuffed in his wallet. It was two thick stacks of Mass cards. Each accounted for the passing and announced Mass and prayer that would be said for the souls of family, friends, loved ones and acquaintances dating back to his father’s youth. Each stack was organized by age of the card’s subjects at the time of their deaths. Apart from Andy’s mom, who had died at age 33, death had come at a reasonable and expected time – one of Bert’s workmates passing at age 56 and his mother’s sister, Aunt Louise, dying at 59 years old, being marginal exceptions, but everyone else being at least in their early 70s or older with many in their 80s and older.

 

Andy, to his surprise, thinking of the order reflected in the Mass cards, suddenly came to see, just at that moment, that his worry about his father was strangely similar to the worry he felt for Corinne being late. He imagined his father and his daughter being alone, Corinne in her mother’s car either moving down the eight-lane interstate or along the darkened backroad, Bert in his nursing home bed, a prisoner in his own body. 

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A comforting calm swept over Andy as he returned to the basement to fold the laundry and move a load from the washer into the dryer. It came in the form of a realization that eluded him in past spells of worry, but now seemed obvious. Andy understood how, come what may, however acute his worry might be, it was sure to be fleeting. He realized his current fretting about Corinne’s status and whereabouts would be resolved shortly – almost certainly, it now being 12:17, a.m. within a matter of minutes.

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In much the same way, worry about Bert’s holding on to life past what might be seen as a curfew by which all should be home was sure to be resolved before too long – 95 cases out of 100, according to his doctors, in a matter of months, a year at most.

*

An Anderson family expression was born that night. Thenceforth, to be “off doing a load of laundry” was to be engaged in a clueless, fatalistic preoccupation. It was to think the worst just because, to invariably resolve situational ambiguity as tending toward doom. It was, simply put, to worry for nothing. Which is what worry does best.

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When Corinne had arrived home that night the light was on in the living room window. The time was 11:54. She pulled her phone from her purse after parking her mom’s car in the driveway. She had no calls or messages. She came through the side door and walked through the kitchen. She could hear her father down in the basement fussing with the laundry. She quietly got in her pajamas, washed her face, brushed her teeth, said good night to her mother and went to bed. 

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("Curfew" by Eddie Roth first was published in September 2024 right here in the Eddie Roth Reader.)