You graduate from college and begin earning an amount of money so large it makes you nauseated. More money in a month than you’re used to seeing in half a year. Cheese plate in one hand, imported light beer in the other, you listen along as a fellow new grad says you’ll all have to stick it out for a few years for the real money to come in. Did you hear that first years at such-and-such firm made more? They travel less, too, though they can’t keep their airline miles, which is a nice perk, don’t you agree? It feels like everyone is there in the moment and you’re just behind it, looking from face to face, trying to catch up.

Your biggest splurge is a furnished studio in Stuytown. Bed, couch, a wood table. The bed is a single, same as college, and it’s plenty. The sheets are from your university bookstore, school colors. You make your bed every morning and kneel beside it, rest your head on the mattress, curly brown hair falling over your eyes. You like the view of the smooth navy, looking up at the pillow like a small creature making its way across the expanse.

The couch is set up to face a TV, but you use your laptop instead, resting it like a book in your lap. You rewatch the first three seasons of The Office again and again. Things seem like they won’t work out, until sometimes they do.

You eat cheaply because it feels like you can’t change everything at once. Halal carts and off-avenue buffets, the kind favored by cab drivers who surely know which places are cheap and good, where steam rises from the serving bins in thick sheets. You can reliably make three meals: mac and cheese, chicken and rice, eggs. You eat the rice the same way your father does, in a salad bowl for easy leftovers. You barely drink and have no loans. Your legs itch.

Many of your colleagues also don’t have loans. “Because of my family,” one of them said. It was true of you, too, in that your father didn’t have money, so you qualified for full financial aid. He calls every day at 8 p.m., 5 p.m. his time, to make sure you’re not working too late, to talk excitedly about the Sacramento Kings, to fill you in on the latest drama at the restaurant his cousin owns. The younger son is already making changes—he threw out the laminated menus because they seemed cheap, according to a video he saw. You walk from one end of your apartment to the other, eight or nine steps. You have magnetic darts you’ve begun to bullseye from further and further away, rice digesting in your belly, nodding along to your father who cannot see you.

You run along the river in the cool night and stare up at the buildings. You think about the restaurant, your hometown, about how it’s not your home anymore. This is your home now. Sometimes people here spit on the sidewalk right in front of you. You end the run and lean against the railing, staring out over the water. There are cranes across the river, and facing north you can see famous skyscrapers.

The night is quiet, and you are alone, even as people pass by. You scroll through your contacts and send some short texts to former college suitemates. Ask them how it is in their cities. Ask them if they’ve played such-and-such game yet. It’s effortful to think of each initiating question. They are like you: quiet laughers, nervous chatters. Hardworking, nice. It was easy to fall in around a screen or ping pong table.

It’s the kind of cold out your father would curse. You know it’s Brooklyn you’re looking at but you still haven’t been. When coworkers say they live in the city, they mean Manhattan. A woman runs behind you and you hear her breath move from left to right. It’s dark but early evening. There are rats, even on this thin strip of sidewalk between the highway and the river. You can see the remnants of old piers never fully deconstructed, floating like crocodiles. A ferry whips by, lifted out of the water. You imagine someone walking up to you by the railing. They stop and ask how you’re doing. Good, you say, good good. The conversation would pick up from there, and soon you’d be laughing and clapping each other’s backs like old friends on TV.

#

It becomes easier to stay late at work. You are good at it, the job. It’s not that different from school. You don’t care much about the things you’re doing, but it’s nice to get positive feedback. You’ll sometimes take cabs home, which are expensive, ten times the cost of the subway, but a nice treat after a long day. You speak with your father once a week now, on Sunday afternoons.

You joined a meetup group, went with them one Saturday to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. People seemed nice, but the group chat fell into disuse. You reached out to one guy, a wise-seeming engineer in a hoodie. He was a year or two older, and had gone to school in the same city as you. “Let’s hang,” he replied, and you asked what days were good, maybe Tuesday if that worked, and he never wrote back.

You’re sitting in snow pants by the fountain at the center of Stuytown. An audiobook is playing in your ear. The sky is paper white. It’s an airport book, pop-psych, the words finding no purchase in your mind. The fountain is off for the winter so the pipes don’t freeze. A parent and middle schooler hustle by in matching mittens.

You close your eyes and retreat into “The Scenario.” Something you think about before drifting off to sleep. In “The Scenario,” friends and acquaintances are gathered at a kind of modern wake. A little party at a bar. You have died doing something heroic. Saving people. Good people. Sometimes you tackle an active shooter; other times, you save someone from a fire before the roof collapses. Now, you stop another man with a gun, this time on the subway. He enters through the don’t-use-these-doors doors at the end of the car, and you are up and on him, using vague martial arts to flip him over your body and pin him to the ground. There’s a struggle for the weapon.

People take turns giving speeches about you. They raise their glasses and take small sips. Your father isn’t there; it’s attractive former classmates, upperclassman whose swagger you aspired to. A few coworkers: older, confident women with straight blonde hair. Talking about what a great guy you were, how they wish more people had gotten to know the real you. You’re not sure why you’ve begun imagining The Scenario during the day.

#

You’re on a date with a woman. She is the friend of a coworker, who asked if you would take her friend out to dinner. For a date. It wasn’t a question you’d been asked before, and you didn’t understand how to refuse. They texture of the menu cover reminds you of a fancy picture book your father kept long after you outgrew it, an animal for each letter. There are candles on the table, music playing somewhere. She is in a nice dress, you think; you’re not sure how to judge such a thing. Her raven hair falls in long strands behind her shoulders. You’re in the suit you wore to work.

The restaurant is dim, like they’re trying to save on the electric bill. You have begun treating yourself to nice meals like this more often. Even though you don’t have the most refined palette, who doesn’t like to eat good food?

She is quiet. After you run out of prepared questions, sourced from a Reddit thread you perused on your subway ride and memorized with a quick mnemonic, you don’t know where else to go. How simple it must be for all the fast-talking, easy-laughing people at work, shapeshifters able to be whatever the listener needs them to be. Panicking, you ask the first questions that come to mind: What’s a skill you’ve recently acquired? What motivates you? She answers each question politely with no further elaboration. What’s a recent challenge you’ve faced? If she asks you back, you might be willing to share about your father’s recent passing, but she doesn’t.

You suspect your coworker selected you because your families are from the same general area. The waiter replaces the empty bread basket with a new one, the bread still warm from the oven. You think, in one of the silences, how perhaps the coworker also correctly assumed you are single and unable to get dates on your own.

Redditors upvoted curiosity, listening, and playfulness as the most desirable traits. You imagine a playful evening, laughing together at the table, but you don’t know how to get there. All your conversations these days are in meetings with agendas.

A lightbulb goes off. You think: perhaps this woman is like that, too. Unable to get dates on her own. She has only asked you, “What are you thinking of ordering?” and has had most of her water. Her olive hands wrap around the glass, one finger on the lip. Maybe this shared lack is the opening of a path.

You ask if she goes on many dates, and she says no. You say, “Me neither.” You smile, and she smiles a bit. It’s encouraging. You are two people who are not good at this. Birds of a feather. You can see a pathway to the laughing dinner, light from the candle illuminating your smiles from below, but as you’re thinking through how you might get there, the appetizer comes, a small plate with an orb of white cheese.

The two of you eat in silence, taking forkfuls from opposite sides of the orb, and the pathway seems to have closed off. It’s a strong possibility that she’s not having a good time. You wish you could just ask that. Are you having a nice time? What are three things I could do to make it a more enjoyable experience?

#

After your first year, half the new grad class is cut, per tradition. No one has managers; you find out you still have a job via email. The salary does indeed rise substantially. You decide to move into a nicer apartment, one where the bed isn’t steps from the kitchen. The lobby has some paintings and even a doorman. It’s a relaxing space to return to after work travel, which has increased to nearly weekly. You are still wise with your money, but the initial guilt about your new monthly number fades fast. The wood floors meet the walls with no gaps.

You’ve developed a reputation for being diligent, smart, no drama. Spreadsheets appear in the inboxes of the project leads with minimal massaging needed before presentation to the client.

At a team meeting, an associate partner says the working group was lucky to land you, that everyone was fighting over you. He says it with a smile you understand to mean he is serious but also expects laughter. You smile and say thank you. The meeting moves on. They’re talking about how they will walk the client through the data you’ve prepared. You look out the windows and spot your new apartment building. You trace with your eyes the different runs you’ve done. You’ve now been to Brooklyn, over the bridges and back. A new app shows you a map of where you ran, how long it took.

You paid for a service to pack up and store your father’s things. You couldn’t really spare the time off when it happened. Plus, it would have been sad. You heard about the service through a colleague. It felt well worth the expense. One of the nice things about money, you now saw, was what it spared you. Because you have the money, you can go through his things whenever is most convenient.

These new watches track your heart rate, too. Your resting heart rate is in the high-thirties. You’ve noticed there’s no relationship between how nervous you feel and your heart rate. Everyone laughs again and you smile, looking around the room at each face, trying to make sure your smile is meeting the moment.

#

Your father never lived in a real house, as far as you know. You know he grew up in a cramped apartment in a small city he never talked about. You think about him a lot now, much more than when he was alive; picture him with a beard for some reason, though he’d long since shaved it. You didn’t know how to make him laugh but loved when he did. Many nights you walked in from school and went right to your room, and he let you go. His love was one of giving space, space you wish you could take back.

The money piles up in your bank account. You imagine a dragon’s cave, your salary converted to gold chalices and rubies. You had wanted to buy a house for him. Not an apartment, a house. Something with a front door that opens to the weather.

At happy hour, while waiting for the canape line to move, you hear about your colleague’s recent purchase of a vacation home. The passive income possibilities are extensive, he says, and subsequent research confirms it. There are services who will manage it for you. Nice towns in low-income states are undervalued; erosion makes beach-adjacent less attractive, nearby is better. Maybe you could convince some of your old friends to come visit. On vacation, one landlord writes in a comment section, no one minds a quick walk to the water.

#

You’re surprised by how loud the ocean is. You walk towards it in the dark. You can hear the crashing of the waves out somewhere across the blackness, slamming into the shore. You watched a video once about how the human eye adjusts to low light, so you stand there looking at the sea waiting for it to happen.

You’re back in the house now, standing in your new living room, and it’s quiet. You’ve never owned anything you could stand in, only small things you could hold. That it came fully furnished is nice while you’re settling in, but you’ll have to replace most of what you see. A crease in the middle of the couch tells you which seat was most popular. A lighter section of wood by the doorway—the site of a former throw rug? You can hear the refrigerator threatening to make ice. You can no longer hear the ocean.

You imagine your father being in the room with you, and it makes you happy in a way. Picture him leaning over the table looking for the edge pieces of a puzzle, but it’s painful, too, so you stop.

You should eat. You had groceries dropped by the side door an hour before you arrived. The gig worker texted you, asking where it was okay to leave them. You also signed up for a service that sent you kitchen supplies and basic ingredients. You selected what kinds of foods you wanted to cook, and they sent you a starter kit. Red wine vinegar and a zester. Paprika, cardamom, and a colander.

You’d like to cook more. Part of the appeal of buying the vacation house was to be a real adult person. Maybe you’ll have leftovers to share with neighbors. You ordered Italian, French, and Indian kits. But really, you could make anything you want. Your grocery order was thorough, and anything you don’t have is a short drive away.

There are some cookbooks on a high shelf next to a conch in the kitchen. Maybe you’ll keep these. You pull them down. There’s a water-warped second edition of The Joy of Cooking and one called Family Seafood. There’s another with a laminated cover, bound with plastic spirals, and you have a flashback to binding your senior thesis in the computer lab. Your scholarship covered a certain amount of printing, but didn’t specify binding, and the woman working there smiled at you and eliminated the issue. Lately she’s been the first person to raise a glass in The Scenario. He always thanked me so genuinely, she says.

You pull down more books. There’s a thin one, in Italian, or the cover is at least. In between that and the bound book is a smaller notebook. You couldn’t even see it from the ground. Nice leather. You trace your finger around the raised outline of a flower on the front. This one will have the best recipes, you think. Hand written, worked over with care. The more personal the recipe, the better the food. You’ve seen videos about that very idea. Bespoke and personal, it’s always better that way. You open the book.