Later it will occur to me that I could have just made him pour it himself. Later I will have lots of smarty-pants ideas about how I could have handled this differently. But I’m stressed and creeped out and really pissed off, and the only thing I can think of right now is how exposed I will be, balanced over the table trying not to spill.
And all of a sudden I’m pouring the sangria, not into Perry’s glass, not into any glass, but onto Perry.
Onto his head, his chest, his shoulders, and finally his lap.
I’m seeing chunks of the orange Nita just sliced bouncing down him, and the fruity liquid soaking his nether region.
And I’m hearing the sound of ice cubes as they hit the floor.
And I’m feeling words roaring out of me, though I don’t even know what they are.
And there’s Perry’s face, and all the faces, shocked, and finally silent.
And it’s incredible.
For a moment I feel incredible, I feel amazing, I feel like everything finally is fine.
And then I remember.
Life.
My future.
All the reasons I needed this job.
Shit.
THREE
MONTHS
EARLIER . . .
2
THINKING BUT NOT SAYING
I am sitting at the table in our rarely used dining room on a bitter-cold January evening. My mom has set out the wedding china and the fancy candles that have never been lit.
Something is going on.
That Mom, Dad, and I are eating together at all is unusual, but there’s also a lot of smiling. An unreasonable amount of smiling. At me. This, combined with the fact that Mom got all teary before dinner and told me she loved me, and Dad has combed his hair and is wearing jeans and a nice shirt instead of his usual rumpled sweats, is making me very nervous. I’m on alert and at the same time smiling back so hard my face muscles are starting to cramp up.
Then Dad throws his napkin down like it’s a gauntlet and says, “I’ve figured it out.”
Mom’s smile freezes. In fact her entire body goes as still as her carefully shellacked helmet of golden-brown hair.
“Figured what out, Dad?” I say.
“I’ve figured out where we went wrong with Jack!”
Uh-oh. My brother Jack is not a good subject—not since he dropped out of pre-med and ran off to Greece with no explanation, taking the remainder of his education money with him.
That was two and a half years ago, only a couple of months after Dad got fired from his real estate brokerage and embarked on his looking-for-employment/festering-miserably-in-the-basement career, which was then made more miserable by Jack’s defection to Greece.
There was a lot of ranting (Dad) and weeping (Mom), and then they stopped all contact with Jack and started referring to him in the past tense, as if he died.
Things have been a tad grim since then.
“Uh, what about Jack?” I say in a quiet, carefully neutral voice.
“We spoiled him,” Dad says, both arms flying up in one of his signature declamatory gestures. “We gave him too much, helped him too much, complimented him too much.”
Sure, Jack bailed on his entire life due to being over-complimented, I think but do not say, because while it could be considered a positive change that Dad’s so animated, when he gets like this it’s best not to fuel the fire. This means I do a lot of thinking-but-not-saying. I may, in fact, be the champion of thinking-but-not-saying.
“We spoiled him and it ruined him,” Dad continues. “There’s even a name for it—‘entitlement disease’—and I’m telling you, it’s an epidemic. Your mother and I worked for everything we have. Paid our own way. Meanwhile, everyone in your generation would fall apart if they didn’t have the latest iPhone.”
Right. My cell phone is ancient and Dad is the one who gets a new one every year, even in this past year when both Mom and I worked more paid hours than he did. No point saying that either, though—it would just cause him to launch into defending whatever his latest money-making scheme is these days: staging houses, becoming a city planner (when we live nowhere near the city), studying for his brokerage license so he can open his own company and run his old brokerage out of town, media consulting . . . Each idea is pursued with manic intensity for a few weeks before he abandons it and descends into weeks of moping and binge-watching apocalyptic television.
“We’re not going to make the same mistake with you,” he’s saying. “And the fact is, your mother and I need to start thinking of ourselves, about maximizing our investment here.”
“What investment? Where?”
“Here! This house. You just turned eighteen, you’re almost finished with high school, you need your independence. And meanwhile, we could be pulling in thousands of dollars per month if we Airbnb your room. With all the tourists that come to Pine Ridge for the weekend, it could be a gold mine.”
“My room?”
“Yes!”
“A gold mine?”
“Darn right! And Jack’s room, too. I don’t need to have my office in there. I’ll set myself up in the kitchen.”
My mom seems to pale at this, which means she’s now frozen and pasty-white.
“I’m thinking end of June, so we can catch the summer tourists,” Dad rolls on. “And we’ll need to spruce it up. Same as Jack’s room. Get some nice bedding, couple of fancy pillows, and I’ve got a line on one of those luggage racks, where people put their suitcases! Give ’em that authentic hotel feeling.”
I’m still not getting it—I’m too busy trying to imagine how any part of our house could ever have an “authentic hotel feeling.”
“We’ll need all your stuff out of there by the end of June,” Dad’s saying. “You’re going to have to take your tchotchkes, the stuff from all your abandoned sports and hobbies, your boy band posters—”
Yes, I have abandoned some hobbies, but I have zero boy band posters. This fact is easily provable by walking twenty steps down the hallway to my room, and he also knows it, and even still I don’t say it.
“We might keep that cool mobile you made, since it’s white, but those navy walls, Lib? They’ll have to go.”
I am most certainly not giving him my origami star mobile—not when he’s getting rid of my beautiful walls.
“Tourists want light,” Dad is saying. “They want soothing. Not dark walls and stars everywhere.”