The first month up there was a horror. Living with her parents was a horror. It wasn’t that they were not nice to him/them or anything like that. It was more like her father asked him every day if he’d gone looking for a job and what was happening with that.
Being unemployed, having to look for a job and not having anywhere to live brought back deep anxieties in Bill. He did not realize how deep they were, but they were the classic GAD symptoms, that lump in the pit of his stomach as if he’d eaten a heavy lead ball, constant worry, difficulty sleeping, twitching and muscle aches and irritability.
His wife went off to work each morning, Monday through Friday, and so he was left there alone with his mother-in-law all day long. She was a good egg—she left him alone, was always pleasant and did anything and everything she could to assist him in whatever he needed.
In the first two weeks he checked out three jobs. One didn’t pay enough money for the effort, the second was okay but it was a long travel, and the third, an Italian restaurant, a job which he agreed to try out for, asked him to cut up a veal and he didn’t know how to do that. They showed him, and he could have learned, but he did not like that kind of work. Cutting meat from loins was one thing. Cutting up an animal’s insides was another.
In the third week, feeling very down and out, those feelings taking him back to when he was facing jail time, the whole court thing and being so broke he couldn’t pay the rent, he had an interview with the chef of the Sheraton-Cleveland, on the Square. They needed a broiler cook, and anyone, anyone, who could run a broiler was a good candidate.
So like Robert had told him, being able to run a broiler meant that he could work, that he would work if he wanted to. The chef, a Swedish fellow, trim and slight and maybe in his young fifties, who wore a chef’s hat almost taller than he was, hired Bill on the spot. In part it was because of his experience. In greater part it was because he was a college graduate and being a college graduate was like being golden. Needless to say, Bill didn’t tell him he’d been arrested and when he went through Sheraton’s Personnel office and its paperwork, they didn’t ask. Unlike for the jobs Bill had applied for in the professional fields, they did not do a police check.
So the following Monday he started work at the Sheraton-Cleveland, or as he referred to it, the Sheraton on the Square. Until he was settled where they had bus service, the chef allowed him to park off to the side in the small delivery outlet. This was a big plus.
His father-in-law was elated. Bill was elated. His mother-in-law was a bit saddened since she liked having her only daughter at home and she liked having company in the house during the day. She knew Bill’s having a job meant they would be looking to move out.
Bill and his wife immediately started looking for a place to live, something they could afford now that they knew he was going to have a salary and what the salary was. Bill told her he had to join the union, Hotel Motel Workers Union, and would be on probation for the first ninety days. But they would get medical insurance and all benefits.
They spent a few days and that last weekend they would have together for a long, long time having some fun and enjoying each other. They went out together looking at places and found one with a landlord who would skip the deposit and work with the fact that they were both employed.
