I could hear the points in our little game of delivering zingers ding loudly above her head with every word she said.
“So you don’t actually have a job.” It was a last-ditch effort to try and save some of my dignity, to try and make her feel a tiny bit inadequate.
“A job?” She laughed. “Who has time for a job? Fortunately, I managed to snag a guy who can take care of me without my having to resort to anything so…menial.”
The heat of the sun was blazing down on my head, bringing beads of sweat dripping down my face and leaving me without a comeback. Game over. She’d won.
“Well, I better be going. I’m prepping for a big case right now, so I better get back to it. It was nice seeing you again, Trace,” I said and started walking away.
“Janie? I think you forgot this.”
I glanced down to see the economy-sized package of cotton underwear still clutched in her hand.
Dang. I just couldn’t catch a break.
“Uh, yeah. Thanks. Catch you later,”
Catch you never, I muttered under my breath a moment later as I trekked home. What had the world come to when I, Jane Elizabeth Carmichael, Esquire, was jealous of the vapid and annoying superficial prom queen?
Armageddon came to mind.
2
“You know, honey, there’s nothing that Tracey Applewood has that you don’t have. You were always prettier than her and oodles smarter,” my mom said as I shoved another square of chocolate in my mouth and lay back into the couch cushions.
Because of my quick hang-up earlier, my mom had been calling my phone nonstop, afraid that I might have been kidnapped and sold into some sort of sex trafficking ring. So as soon as I’d arrived home and brewed a pot of coffee, I’d called her back and quickly relayed what had transpired on the sidewalk.
“Your mistake wasn’t just moving in and living in sin with Eddie before you were married.” Great. She had another reason to harp on for why things hadn’t worked out. “No. Your problem is that you’ve never set your sights higher. Like this show I was watching, Rich Housewives of Bel Air or Hollywood or something like that. These women have no skills, no book smarts, not like you, all they have is a decent rack and a pretty face, and now they’re living in these mansions that could fit our house in it times ten and going on fancy vacations and wearing designer clothes. Why do you think that is? I’ll tell you. Because they found the right man, a man with some means who could support them. Men like that don’t care if their wife knows the names of all nine of the Supreme Court justices or who was the twelfth president of the United States.”
Okay, I knew the first, not so much the second, but I’d let her live under that illusion if she’d get to the point.
“These men just want someone to take care of them and to look decent doing it, both qualities you could easily fit. I mean, look at your sister. She married Rob and now they have a handsome little boy and live in a virtual mansion. You don’t see her having to find a job with a boss who takes liberties with her.”
“You’re saying I should have married some billionaire? That I should have gotten my degree in Gold-digging 101 instead of law?”
“Exactly,” she said, missing my sarcasm entirely. “Think about it, sweetie. A man like that could take care of you, let you explore your options without having to worry about money. I mean, I love you girls and all and wouldn’t change that for anything, but there are times I wonder how different my life would be if I’d just set my sights a little higher. You know, honey. You can just as well fall in love with a rich man as you can a poor man. Your problem is that you aren’t surrounding yourself with the right kind of men to fall in love with.”
“Yes, well the Billionaires-R-Us Club hasn’t opened down the street from me yet.”
“Oh, Janie. You’re a smart girl. You know what I mean. You need to put yourself in the way of rich men, and you just might find yourself a rich husband, and this mess you’ve gotten into would go away. What you need is to get away from Tucson. You need a vacation somewhere fabulous where the right sorts of men are just waiting to buy you a drink. It’s like that old movie. The one with Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe and the other blond gal. Only you’ve got to set your sights higher. You want a billionaire. And you’ve got to go where they are.”
“Sure, Mom. I’ll get on that right away.” I went to reach for another piece of chocolate only to see that I’d eaten the half bar that I’d broken off before wrapping the other half for tomorrow. “Look, Mom, I better go. I wanted to do some more job searching.”
“And I probably better get something on for dinner or I’ll never hear the end of it. Bye, honey. Think about what I’ve said.”
So my mom had never been particularly liberated when it came to the whole women’s rights movement. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe there was some truth in her words.
You could just as easily fall in love with a rich man as you could a poor man.
Why couldn’t I fall in love with a rich man?
I turned on the television and searched for the reality show she’d mentioned, pretty sure there were like twelve different versions of it. One of them had to be on. I was right, and I flipped the show on just as my cell phone rang. I picked it up before I could look at the caller ID.
“Is this Jane Carmichael? This is Ashlyn from Diamond Credit Collections. I need to talk to you about your past-due bill.”
I hung up, and immediately it rang again. This time I blocked the number. I wasn’t proud, but I also wasn’t in a position to pay anything. Not until I found a job, which right now did not look promising.
For a minute, tears threatened as I thought about how right my mom was about what a mess I’d made of my life. But I’d shed so many tears in the past year—tears for Eddie, tears at leaving a job I’d loved, tears at finding myself physically assaulted at a job that I hated, and now tears because I couldn’t find a job to save my life. I’d gone from feeling like I was on top of the world when I’d graduated in the top ten percent of my law school class to finally hitting rock bottom.
I was done with tears. Tears had gotten me nowhere.
What I needed was a plan. To somehow turn my energy into something that—
The reality show I’d put on returned from commercial, and I was caught in the middle of some argument these two middle-aged women were having. I turned it up.
I would come up with a plan. But first I needed a moment to not think.
I was still watching television—a different show, same concept—when my roommate walked in the front door nearly five hours later. With a PhD in astrophysics, Holly was a postdoc researcher at the University of Arizona, where she’d been trying to prove some theory about dark energy or black holes for the past three years. In short, she was brilliant and yet still as broke as me.
“You think you have the TV on loud enough? I don’t know if they can hear it across the street,” she said.
I had barely noticed, too busy feeling sorry for myself as I scarfed down the last half of the giant chocolate bar that I’d decided not to wait until tomorrow to eat as I worked and planned.