The Gift for the Friend Who Just Lost Their Job

My friend Arlo was laid off on a Wednesday.

He had been at the company for six years. He texted me from the parking lot, sitting in his car, because he did not know where else to go at eleven in the morning on a weekday when everywhere he would normally go was also somewhere he would have to explain what had just happened.

He said: they walked me out. I have a box of stuff in my backseat.

I said: come over.

He came over. We sat in my kitchen and I did not say anything useful because there is nothing useful to say about a thing like that on the day it happens. I made lunch. He ate it. He went home.

For two weeks he was in the place you go after a layoff, the specific no-man's-land of sending out applications and refreshing email and trying to remember that this was not about him specifically even though it felt entirely about him specifically.

I thought a lot about what to give him.

Not anything that acknowledged the unemployment too directly. Not a job search book or anything practical in that way. He did not need to be reminded of the situation. He was living inside it.

I thought about who Arlo was when he was not at that job.

He had been a very good cook before the job had gotten big enough to absorb his evenings. He had run a supper club in his apartment for two years, friends and friends of friends, a different menu every month, obscure regional cuisines he had been working through alphabetically. The job had ended the supper club. He had stopped somewhere around the letter G.

I found him a book about a cuisine he had not gotten to yet. A beautiful one, a serious one, with the kind of recipes that take a whole Saturday. And I booked a slot in a cooking class for both of us, the kind where you make the whole meal and then sit down and eat it together.

I wrote a note that said: you are still the person who did the supper club. That person is available now. We are resuming at H.

He laughed when he read it. Real laughing.

He said: H is for Haitian. I already know what the first menu is going to be.

He had a job four months later. In the meantime he made a lot of food. He fed a lot of people. He was still the person who did that, and sometimes a gift's only job is to remind someone of who they already are.