They told me on a Wednesday in October, right before the morning meeting. Carla from HR called me into her glassed-in aquarium of an office and said, "Rick, we're bringing in a new face. Young, dynamic. You'll love her."
I didn't love her. I'd been waking up Chicago for eight years on Windy City AM—five days a week, 4 a.m. call time, the same scuffed credenza and cold coffee—and no one asked me if I wanted to share the desk with a twenty-four-year-old TikTok weather girl who’d never sat behind a news anchor's microphone in her life.
"You'll love her," Carla repeated, handing me a headshot.
The woman in the photo had that thousand-watt grin you see on billboards along the Kennedy Expressway. Jenna Keeler. Two million followers. A reel of her doing the weather in a crop top had twenty-eight million views. Management was convinced she was the shot of adrenaline our sagging ratings needed.
I tossed the photo onto Carla's desk and went to the soundstage to prep for my segment on Chicago Public Schools' budget shortfall. My real work.
Her first day, she glided in at 3:58 a.m. wearing electric-blue heels and a blazer the color of a highlighter. I was hunched over a script, rubbing sleep out of my eyes with the heel of my hand. The studio smelled of burnt coffee and that particular winter dampness that clings to the Loop before sunrise, when the Lake Michigan wind whips between the buildings on Michigan Avenue and the El trains screech on the tracks overhead.
"You must be Rick." Her voice had the pep of a game show host. "I used to watch you with my grandma before school. No kidding."
"Great," I said, not looking up.
She didn't wait for me to warm up. By 6:02 a.m., our first commercial break, she'd already rattled off a story about a lost parrot in Humboldt Park, made the traffic guy chuckle on air, and pulled up a fan tweet praising her "vibe." Our producer, Sal, was beaming in the control room. The silent, motionless way he just stood there with his hands in his pockets—that was new. Normally, he'd be pacing and muttering about timing. Now, he watched her like she'd hung the moon.
The first two weeks, the ratings ticked up. Nothing seismic, but enough that Carla sent an all-staff email with the subject line "Wednesday's Numbers" and three exclamation points. Jenna got a welcome basket from the station owner. I got a printed memo about "synergy."
She started taking over my segments. The budget piece I'd researched for a week got cut to forty seconds so she could do a five-minute bit about her dog's Halloween costume. The worst part was that people watched. Our Facebook Live views hit 200,000. #WindyCityAM trended in Chicago for the first time in four years. Then came the day Sal asked me to do the farm report.
"The farm report, Sal? We're in Chicago. The nearest dairy cow is fifty miles away."
"Jenna thinks it'll be charming. You, talking about soybeans. It'll get shares."
I told him I'd rather eat a CTA bus fare card.
By mid-November, the cold settled in and so did my certainty that I was being eased out. Jenna had her own segment intro now—some electronic jingle they'd paid a composer in Nashville to write—and the camera lingered on her longer during my intros, as if it couldn't wait for her to speak. When I brought up the city's pension crisis, her eyes glazed over. When she told the audience she'd forgotten to buy almond milk that morning, my coffeemaker at home was mentioned in seventeen tweets.
The night before sweeps week, Sal gathered us in the green room. The carpet was worn down to its backing in the spot near the fridge. Someone had taped a handwritten sign above the microwave: YOUR MOTHER DOES NOT WORK HERE. Clean up after yourself.
"Big surprise tomorrow," Sal said, rubbing his palms together. "Jenna's got something. Don't ask. You'll see it live. We're gonna blow the roof off."
I turned to Jenna. She was tapping on her phone.
"What surprise?"
"You'll see, Rick. It's going to be beautiful."
I should have pushed. I knew I should have. But I was tired and I had a headache and I wanted to be anywhere else, so I just nodded and left, catching the last Blue Line train home to Logan Square. My apartment was cold. A lightbulb above the sink had burned out three days before, and I hadn't bothered to replace it.
The next morning, the studio felt charged, the air heavy with the faint scent of ozone from the lighting rigs. Jenna had a different energy—not her usual chirpy bounce, but something sharper, her eyes moving around the set like a cat tracking a moth. I sat in my chair. The cameras lit up. Sal counted us down.
"Welcome back," Jenna said, her voice low and theatrical. "We've got someone very special joining us this morning. A person Rick hasn't seen in a long, long time."
My stomach tightened. I looked over at her, but she kept her focus on Camera 2.
"Please welcome, all the way from Pensacola, Florida… Rick's father, Tom Grady."
The words didn't register at first. They were sounds, syllables.
And then a man walked out from behind the weather screen. Gray hair. A plaid shirt I remembered from my tenth birthday party, the last one before he left. He still wore that same silver watchband.
My father.
I hadn't spoken to him in fourteen years. Not since the night he packed a duffel bag and told my mother he was done, that he'd never wanted a family, that he'd been suffocating for a decade. I was fifteen. I'd stood in the doorway of my parents' bedroom, holding a model airplane I'd been building, and watched him walk out. He never called. Never wrote. My mother died six years later, and he didn't come to the funeral.
Now he was on my set. On my show. Jenna had brought him here.
My throat closed. The red light on the camera seemed to swell, filling my vision. I heard Sal's voice in my earpiece: "Go to him, Rick. Go to him."
Jenna beamed, her teeth too white under the studio lights. "We know there's been some distance, and we thought… it's time. It's time to heal, right, Rick?"
My fingers curled around the armrests of my chair. The fabric was worn smooth there from years of my own grip. A cup of coffee sat cooling on the desk, the steam long gone, a thin skin forming on top.
I stood up.
My father took a step toward me, his hand extended. "Son."
I didn't move. I looked at Jenna, and for a split second, I saw her expression flicker—a tiny crack in the performance—and I knew she had no idea. She'd dug up some dirt, made some calls, spun it into a feel-good moment without asking a single question about what she was excavating.
"You brought him here," I said, and my voice came out flat, alien even to me. "You brought him without asking."
"Rick, we just wanted to give you—"
"Give me what? A reunion I never asked for? On live TV, in front of half a million people?"
Sal was shouting in my ear now, but I pulled out my earpiece. It dangled on its cord against my chest like a dead insect.
My father stood frozen, his hand still out, his face a mask of rehearsed regret. I recognized that expression. He'd worn it the night he left. It meant nothing.
I looked straight into Camera 2—straight into the red light, into the living rooms of all those people who'd become strangers over the last few months—and I said, "I'm done."
Then I walked off the set. Past the teleprompter, past the boom mics, past the craft services table where Jenna's vegan muffins sat untouched. My footsteps echoed on the concrete floor. The heavy stage door slammed shut behind me with a hollow, final thud.
I ended up at a diner on Milwaukee Avenue, the kind of place that serves eggs any time but only takes cash. The booth had cracked vinyl and a window that overlooked a bus stop. A guy in a Bears parka was arguing with a parking meter outside. I ordered a black coffee and sat there, still wearing my make-up, watching my phone explode with notifications. I turned it off.
A few hours later, a producer from a cable news network called. The story was already everywhere: "Anchor Storms Off Set, Father Reunion Falls Apart." They wanted a sit-down interview.
I said no. I said no to all of them.
Two days later, Carla fired me. Officially, it was a "mutual decision." Unofficially, the station couldn't have a host who'd abandoned a live broadcast during sweeps. Jenna made a tearful apology on air, blaming herself for not "doing the proper groundwork." The ratings spiked for three days, then fell below where they'd been before she arrived. Two months later, the station announced it was replacing Windy City AM with a syndicated game show. Jenna moved to a morning show in Tampa. I heard from Sal that she still mentions the incident in every job interview, the one big moment that went wrong.
As for my father, he flew back to Pensacola the next day. A week later, an envelope arrived in the mail with no return address. Inside was the model airplane from that night, the one I'd been holding when he left. The left wing was cracked. There was no note.
I didn't throw it away.
I put it on a shelf in my new apartment, a small place in Oak Park near the train tracks. Every morning, when the Metra rumbles by and the windows shake, I look at it.
And then I go to work. I'm not on TV anymore. I write scripts for a documentary production house in the West Loop. It's quiet, most days. No red lights. No cameras. No surprises.
I still get up at four. I can't break the habit. Sometimes I sit at my kitchen table in the dark, drinking coffee, listening to the sound of the city waking up—the distant hum of the L, the garbage trucks in the alley, the neighbor's dog barking at nothing.
And I think about that cracked wing. Still holding together, after all this time.
