Six Months of Nothing

Four years later he graduated with distinction, and within a month a mid-sized software firm in the city offered him a role that paid more than his father had ever earned in a year. For three years he lived in a high-rise apartment, ordered takeout after midnight, and watched his bank balance climb. He sent money home every month and told himself that was enough.

It stopped being enough the winter his father fell in the garden. The old man had been thinning tomato vines when his hip gave way. By the time Ethan reached the hospital, his father’s voice was thin and his eyes kept drifting toward the ceiling as if he were already counting something he could not see. The doctors spoke of osteoporosis and the slow arithmetic of age. Ethan listened, signed forms, and on the train ride back to the city he opened his phone and resigned.

He moved into the house he had left at eighteen. The rooms smelled of mothballs and the same detergent his mother had used before she died. His father slept in the front bedroom now, closer to the bathroom. Ethan learned the schedule of pills, the way the kettle had to be filled to the exact line so the old man would not complain about weak tea, and the particular silence that settled after dark when his father stared at the television without turning the sound on. During the day Ethan opened a small repair shop in the front room. He fixed cracked phone screens, replaced laptop batteries, and charged half of what the city shops charged. Neighbors brought him devices wrapped in plastic bags and left with cash in their hands. It covered the electricity and the groceries. It did not cover the hours he spent sitting beside his father’s chair, answering the same questions about the weather.

At night, after the shop sign was switched off and his father was asleep, Ethan opened his laptop at the kitchen table. The idea had come to him on one of the long afternoons when his father dozed and the street outside was empty. An app that matched elderly people in small towns with nearby teenagers who needed pocket money for simple tasks—grocery runs, garden watering, reading the mail aloud. He called it Kin. He sketched the screens on scrap paper, then coded them between midnight and three. He spent what remained of his city savings on cloud servers, on a freelance designer who never quite understood the rural interface he wanted, and on targeted ads that showed up on phones across the county. For six months he posted updates in local Facebook groups, left flyers at the post office, and demoed the app to anyone who walked into the shop. Most people smiled, said it was a nice idea, and went home to call their children instead.

By the end of the sixth month the server logs showed thirty-seven downloads and zero completed tasks. No one had paid the small fee he had set for the matching service. Ethan closed the laptop at 2:14 a.m. and listened to his father’s soft snoring through the wall. He opened it again at 2:40 because he could not stop calculating the number of hours he had written into the code that no one used. He pictured the apartment he had left, the colleagues who still sent him occasional messages about new frameworks, the promotions that had moved past the empty desk where he used to sit. He thought of the money that had left his account in quiet increments—domain renewals, advertisement invoices, the subscription he kept paying so the app would not simply vanish. Each figure appeared behind his eyes like a receipt he could not throw away.

In the mornings he made his father’s tea and checked the shop inbox. There were always three or four repair requests. He answered them. In the afternoons he sat with his father and watched the light move across the garden. His father asked, once a week, whether the computer thing was going well. Ethan said yes. At night the same arithmetic returned. He subtracted the months he had spent coding from the years he might still have in the city. He subtracted the cost of the designer from the cost of his father’s next round of medication. He subtracted the thirty-seven downloads from the number of elderly people he saw each week at the supermarket, all of them pushing carts slowly and talking to no one. The differences were always negative. He felt the weight of them settle behind his ribs, a private heaviness that made his shoulders slope even when he was standing at the workbench soldering a broken charging port.

Sometimes, while he waited for a customer to return with cash, he opened the app on his own phone and scrolled through the empty request board. The interface was clean. The colors were the ones his father had once said he liked on a television commercial. None of that mattered. He closed the app and put the phone face-down. Later, when the house was dark and his father had turned off the lamp, Ethan sat at the kitchen table with the laptop closed and his hands flat on the wood. He thought about the version of himself who had stayed in the city and sent larger checks. He thought about the version who had never started Kin at all. Both of them seemed farther away than the hospital parking lot had felt on the night his father fell. The distance between those versions and the man sitting at the table grew a little each evening, and Ethan measured it in the same careful way he had once measured lines of code—quietly, completely, and without anyone else in the room to see the sum.