“I’m sorry, miss,” he said, not sounding even remotely sorry. Sorry was a foreign country to this guy. Sorry was another goddamn planet. “Your sales are too small, and you have nothing to back the loan.”
“But—” I spluttered.
He waved a hand at me dismissively. “You’re a bad bet, and one this bank will not be taking. But we cordially thank you for choosing Morningstar for your banking—”
“Frack Morningstar!” I may have shouted on my way out the door, which, okay, yes, I may have slammed. Except ‘frack’ might have actually exited my mouth in the form of a slightly harsher word, I can’t quite remember. My brain was a little cloudy at that moment.
SIX
Thankfully, even in the toughest of times, we can always count on the support and understanding of our family.
…are you done laughing now? I know, I know, I’m hilarious, but I think I really outdid myself with that one.
I shouldn’t be too hard on my folks. They love me, I know—they just don’t take me seriously. And there are some days where I seriously debate whether I’d be willing to trade one of those things for the other.
But anyway, I guess it was mutual, because I didn’t really understand them either. I didn’t get why they always had to be as formal and stuffy as if they were accepting a Medal of Honor when they were just walking the dog, getting their hair cut, or going out to dinner. I didn’t get why they were so obsessed with appearances, never going out the door without a final check to make sure that a single hair hadn’t drifted out of place or a single strand hadn't come loose from their outfit. And I definitely didn’t get how they were so afraid of taking risks they wouldn’t even try a new brand of salad dressing.
Yeah, I loved them right back, but for all I understood them, they might as well have spent their entire lives speaking to me in an obscure Baltic dialect. So I might just have been able to forgive them for not understanding me except for—
“Oh Brian, darling, that is just simply marvelous! Did you hear that, Katherine! Brian’s supervisor told him that his work on the Dunsinane project was ‘definitely his most competent work this week!’ Isn’t that so exciting?!”
--that.
I looked around the restaurant, hoping for something to distract me so I wouldn’t have to hear my parents drooling over my brother like he was an extra-rich tiramisu with double fudge sauce on top. It was a classy joint, because heaven forbid you ever catch my parents in a place that wasn’t. Lighting was low, pooling on the red tablecloths tucked into cozy mahogany nooks, and low murmurs of conversation whirled around the room. The air smelled like red wine, perfectly cooked steak, and the kinds of perfumes that if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it.
“Brian’s certainly moving up in the world,” my dad put in, fairly bursting with steak and pride. Mostly pride. “I think this company will really be the right fit for you. Really make use of your talents.”
“Oh yes, all those others were completely wrong!” my mother agreed. “Do you remember, that simply awful man who told Brian he didn’t even care that Brian had graduated top of his class in Harvard?”
He’d told him that because Brian had fucked up a business meeting so hard an entire convent of nuns couldn’t have unfucked it, but you’ll notice that little detail got left on the editing room floor of my mom’s story.
“Always been obvious the boy’s talented,” Dad said with a misty look in his eye. “Ever since he was a little man. I knew we could expect great things from him.”
I needed a distraction before I puked. Would it be too evil to ‘accidentally’ set a table on fire with one of these crystal candlesticks?
“It’s just such a pity that Kate hasn’t applied herself to finding her true potential—”
And yep, there it was, right on schedule. I tried for a tight-lipped smile but I could feel it failing on my face under the harsh glow of their disappointment.
When I was in elementary school, they told me to take ballet class; I took the money and the permission slip, and signed up for hip hop dance instead. They told me they didn’t see any reason I should have to move out of the house for college; I explained the concept of a party to them and then took on two extra jobs to pay rent on my own apartment. Senior year they took me aside and told me that they would pay for another two years of college if I would just switch my major from studio art to art history, since that would give me a much better chance of “attracting the right kind of man”—I swear my mom time-traveled that advice right here from the 1950s. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that most of the guys who expressed interest in me were more interested in getting a hand up my shirt than hearing a short discourse on the use of color in Caravaggio canvases. And yet here I was, single and unemployed, with the weight of a lifetime of unspoken ‘We told you so’s heavy on my shoulders.
“We just want to see you settled,” Dad said, and it took me a second to mentally rejoin the conversation that was going on in the present. Probably because it was so identical to so many conversations we’d had in the past. “Comfortable. Don’t see why you had to break up with that nice Steven boy. He would have seen to you.”
“Yes, Steven was delightful,” my mother added. “Are you sure he won’t take you back? Perhaps if you explained things and apologized—the male ego is a fragile one, and you aren’t always most delicate, dear, with your words…”
I couldn’t believe this; I had explained the break-up with Stevie to them a hundred times. “Uh, he was fucking terrible. He showed up yelling at me at work!”
“Language, dear.”
“He was the worst!” I edited. “He didn’t trust me around other guys, he whined constantly about his thesis, and he blew up over the smallest things!”