“Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” she said as her laughter slowly petered out. “I sat down and Dad came to me about fifteen minutes after I’d started working. I actually had trouble logging into the dashboards, and in retrospect, I think Dad made the decision over the weekend, he just wanted to tell me at the office.”
“That doesn’t seem like Dad,” I said, words I wished I could have back as soon as I said them.
“That’s because you’re still trying to be on his good side,” Tara said. “Now that I’m not, I can tell you that seems exactly like Dad. He doesn’t know how to confront us at home, God forbid it’s a family thing, so instead, he does it at the office, the one place he’s comfortable.”
I couldn’t get over so much of this. For one, Dad…why? I didn’t think we should just get handed everything we wanted, but Tara had graduated from Rice and busted her ass the past three years. I’d gone to Cornell and done much of the same. We were not two ditzy cheerleaders who had Mommy and Daddy buying us Bugattis in high school.
Although, then again, apparently my ability to objectively view anyone in this family was far worse than I’d ever wanted to believe.
“So when he fired you, it was—”
“Shitty? I mean, at first, yeah, I was angry. I was angry that Dad had had me drive to the office. But on the other hand, it made packing up a lot easier. Not that I had much of it left, but I’m just going to finish moving into my new place by the end of the day and I will officially be on my own.”
How terrifying.
“Granted, three years later than it should have been, but hey, that just means we have three years of being pent up ready to let loose at an apartment warming party—”
“How are you so relaxed about this?”
Tara went silent on the other end of the line.
“You just lost a six-figure job when you had the chance to work toward being an executive someday,” I said. “You had everything paved out in front of you for however you wanted. And now that’s all gone. You went from making at least ten grand a month, granted before taxes but still, and having no rent, to now probably paying at least fifteen hundred a month and making no money. And yet you act like it’s no big deal.”
“Because it’s not,” Tara said.
It was much harder to argue with her when she sounded sincere. Did she not appreciate what she was losing out on?Can I not appreciate how much less stressed she sounds now?
“Elizabeth, Albuquerque is not some small, podunk town where we had the one company with white-collar jobs. There will be plenty of options here. I’ve already got some phone interviews set up with some places.”
Which meant…
“You were already looking.”
“Remember, that’s why I got pulled from the Santa Maria location,” Tara said. “I was ready for this. I wasn’t ready for Dad to be so callous about it, but looking back, I should have been. He loves us, I know it, but he’s terrible at showing anything other than a desire for profit.”
Tara…
“How do you do it,” I said, forcing a laugh that was so obviously not a laugh, I wasn’t even sure why I’d done it.
“I do it because I want to feel loose and free,” she said. “Not like I’m going to Burning Man with Brock and doing a lot of drugs. There’s a big gap between ‘freedom to enjoy work on my terms’ and ‘turning into a Black Reaper.’”
I laughed. It was probably for the better right now that she didn’t know.
“I don’t know that I could ever do that,” I admitted.
“You can, and you should,” Tara said. “You know what you should do? Go have drinks with Steele.”
My stomach sank. But it also caught fire, and my face felt so red and warm that I could have melted snow with it. Did she know?
“Why, why would I do that?” I said, but the way my voice had caught at the start sold me out. “Why would I want to have drinks with Steele?”
“Elizabeth, we all saw you two at the club party on Saturday.”
Now it’s hot enough to evaporate water.
“I promise it would be OK if you did. I am perfectly happy with Brock. I love him. I wish Steele the best, but there’s no part of me that would be jealous. Whatever part there was died before we broke up. You two actually seem to click.”
