“That made me just mad enough that I went through with it and did it. I threw my stuff in my car and drove, without stopping, all the way down here. This house belongs to my parents and, lucky for me, it was empty, because they spend their summers up in the mountains, in North Carolina.” He took another sip of beer. “I found a job right away. Back in Chicago, I was a systems analyst for a steel company on the south side. It wasn’t hard to find myself something similar and as mind-numbing right away.
“So I was all set. A house—at least for the summer and early fall—and a job.
“And then I got miserable. I started to miss my Adam something terrible and worried about him, scared that something awful would happen to him with no one up there to look after him.
“I started to call him, just to
