If I believed in signs, I would've seen that message as a big one. I would've yanked the blankets over my head, changed my flight, and spent the morning eating an omelet unaffiliated with nuptial events. Not because I loved Millie or felt the sting of her rejection but because now I had to explain this shit to my mother, the self-appointed ruler of the seating chart.
But I didn't believe in signs unless they were in a mathematical equation.
* * *
Gettingdrunk first thing in the morning wasn't part of my standard air travel procedure.
It wasn't part of any procedure of mine. I didn't get drunk. On occasion, I enjoyed a beer or two, a glass of wine if it was offered, maybe a cocktail, but I rarely drank to the point of feeling it the next day. There was no space in my life for hauntings by ghosts of decisions past.
But I was well on my way to drunk this morning.
I had coffee topped with a hearty dose of whiskey and the ache in my shoulder had quieted to a low throb. While I waited for the rest of the passengers to board, I amused myself by scrolling through résumés. I'd never screened applicants while under the influence but I was enjoying it. There was no reason to stress over the complete shortage of qualified candidates. Not when I had a whiskey latte to dull it down to a mild irritation.
That was all it was to everyone else. An irritation. My father couldn't find it in him to get worked up over our glaring need for more support staff, better systems, new revenue sources. He didn't get worked up over anything, not even fiscal year-ends or tax season. I was busy pulling late nights and weekends while he shrugged off the mountains of extensions and corporate filings waiting to be reviewed with little more than, "It will get done."
"Yeah," I muttered to myself. "It gets done because I do it."
Millie wasn't fond of my urgency either. She worked at one of the high-profile management consulting firms in Boston and couldn't conceive of anyone leaving an international financial services giant for a small accounting shop as I had a few years ago. She couldn't understand that shop having enough business to require anything more than nine-to-five either.
"You can go fuck yourself, Millie."
I washed that thought down with another sip and toggled to the next résumé. A quick scan had me copying and pasting my standard "thanks but no thanks" response but I stopped short of sending it when a man edged into my row.
"Hi there." He flashed an amiable smile and gestured toward me in a way that announced we'd be discussing something rather than sitting beside each other in relative anonymity for five hours. "There was a mix-up with seat assignments. My wife is in the back"—he gestured toward the tail end of the plane—"with our sixteen-month-old."
I bobbed my head as if I understood but I was stuck on the age-in-months thing. When did months stop being the unit of denomination? How many months old was I? Four hundred and…and twenty-five. Shit.
"That's a lot of months," I murmured.
He shrugged, shoved his hands in his pockets. "Yeah, the time really flies." We nodded as if we were talking about the same thing before he continued, "Would you mind switching seats with my wife?"
I blinked down at my watch, once again disappointed to find the lifeless screen. I didn't want to be the prick who wouldn't move to make things easier on a family butI had a routine. This day hadn't allowed me to maintain much of it but this was my seat. This seat. 5A. I didn't mind bumping back or forward by a row or two so long as I stayed in the right-hand window seat.
The one time we'd traveled together, Millie had railed against my preferences too. Real business travelers didn't get hung up on that kind of nonsense, I was told. She could go fuck herself. Truly.
It seemed there were multiple benefits to morning drunkenness, one of which being that I required six days to answer simple questions. When I struggled to respond, he waved at the tray table where I'd spread out my laptop, phone, and earbuds. "You've settled in here. No worries. I'll ask the person seated with my wife if she'll move."
I bobbed my head as he stepped into the aisle. "Yeah. Okay."
With that crisis averted, I returned to my email, quickly sending the rejection message before toggling to the next. My approach was simple: scope out recent experience, check it against education, and then scan for finance or accounting keywords. Anything involving revenue, audits, P&L, budgets, margins, expenditures, financial analysis. I could manage this task asleep, or—as this day would have it—drunk.
There was no mention of profit or loss on this résumé, no keywords worth clinging to, no connection to money math whatsoever. It was a dog's breakfast of scattershot jobs and schooling. I found myself shaking my head in dismay as I skimmed the document. How did anyone live a life marked by this much incongruence?
I understood that much of the world didn't operate like me. Most people didn't live by the billable hour and they didn't keep their lives as ordered as a cash flow statement. There was no greater proof than my siblings Linden and Magnolia. We were triplets, for fuck's sake, but we couldn't be more different.
Linden was an arborist and—god help him—only earned a living because I processed invoices, deposited payments, and managed his personal bills. Otherwise, he'd be a thirty-five-year-old man who performed actual tree surgery but had no money and lived with his parents because he never remembered to cash his checks.
My sister had a better handle on business administration but she'd invested a solid portion of her twenties waiting for lightning to strike. Lightning, divine intervention, the arrival of her fairy godmother, whatever. Somethinghadhit her because she owned a sought-after landscape architecture firm but I'd survived years of sitting on my hands to keep from shaking sense into her.
They were my only siblings and—without a doubt—my favorite people in the entire world but our brains functioned in radically distinct ways. It'd worked in our favor when we were kids. Magnolia had always been the spirited one, Linden had all the imagination, and I'd kept us fed and watered and out of oncoming traffic.
The beautiful part of being a trio was never leaving anyone behind. From my earliest memories to the baseball game at Fenway two weeks ago, it was the three of us. Even as we'd grown into our separate identities, we'd made a point of sticking together.
But it wasn't just the three of us anymore. Magnolia was getting married and it was a matter of time until a forest nymph claimed Linden as her own. Until this morning, I'd been chugging along with a private promise to make time to live, once I bested this eleven-years-long busy season, and occasionally dating a woman who actively disliked me.
I washed down the melancholy with my boozy latte and blinked at the résumé again. "Hard pass," I said, control-arrowing to my email.
From somewhere behind me, I heard a brittle laugh and, "Hard pass, huh?"
