“That’s what I was worried about,” her mother sighed. “That’s not safe, sweetie. I wish you’d talked with me about this first—”
“It’s fine,” Caroline interrupted her. “We’re in public. I got a background check on him.”
“That’s—okay. But let’s talk about this before you start dating. You’ve just barely started living on your own—”
And whose fault is that?Caroline wanted to demand. She could have lived in the dorms on her tennis scholarship, but it was her parents who hadn’t thought she could handle that, or couldn’t handle that and as much tennis as they wanted her to play.
“Is everything okay? Dad called, and Uncle Jay—” Maybe there was an actual emergency. At a minimum, she wanted to change the subject.
“We wanted to know if you were coming home for Thanksgiving,” her mom said after a pause.
“Probably not,” Caroline replied, because she hadn’t planned on it. “I think I have classes through that Tuesday.” And she wasn’t sure she wasevergoing back to Texas.
Her mother waited another beat. “Okay, I’ll tell them. Your uncle was thinking it would be fun for the entire family to go on a cruise or something.”
Well, there it was.
“Oh,” Caroline said weakly. “Where?”
“There’s one leaving out of Galveston on that Wednesday. It goes to the Mexican Riviera. There’s still rooms free, even this late. They serve Thanksgiving dinner on the boat.”
“That sounds nice,” Caroline lied. It would probably be nice for everyone else.Sheimagined jumping over the rail and swimming for land if she was trapped in the middle of the ocean with her family.
“Do you think you might make it in Tuesday night? We could meet you in Houston.”
“I... I think I’ll need to study for exams. They’ll be coming up,” she said, knowing she wouldn’t fool her mother.
“Oh, okay.”
“But, you know, you should still go. Mexico sounds great.”
“I don’t know about that. Your dad was on the fence about it,” her mother said wistfully.
As far as her father was concerned, school breaks were an opportunity for tennis clinics, tennis tournaments, or, failing that, extra tennis practice. Her oldest niece was turning four—she wondered whether her father would start the whole program over again, or whether he’d gotten everything out of Caroline’s career he needed.
“No, I mean it. How much is it? Let me just send you a check,” Caroline said.
“You don’t need to do that, sweetie,” her mom said, and for a moment Caroline thought maybe her mother was going to get serious about not taking sides. But then she said, “It’s hard, you know. For your father. The idea of taking money from you.”
Really?Caroline nearly snapped. It didn’t seem like it was going to be that hard for him.
“He wanted to pay for the cruise?” she asked, incredulous. Her father barely believed in vacations in the first place and would never spend money to send his brother or adult daughters on one.
“Well. It would be different. If he didn’t have to ask for it. If it was his money.”
Caroline leaned forward and supported herself by her elbows on the bathroom counter. She shouldn’t have answered the call. She didn’t have several hours available right now for feeling terrible.
She’d tried to calculate it. The net present value of two years of tuition and living expenses, plus a little cushion if she couldn’t get a good job right away. Made a budget for everything her grandmother might have expected herto do. It didn’t have to be exact. She could get a part-time job, if worse came to worst. But there were just too many unknowns. She didn’t know how much everything cost in Boston. She didn’t know what she had to pay for that different life yet. She didn’t know what she could afford to sign away. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do.
“I can’t yet,” she told her mother miserably. “It’s not even two years of school. Can he just be patient?”
There was a noise like her mother had walked to a different room and shut the door.
“I didn’t want to get into it, I just—” her mother said.
“No, no, I know, I know,” Caroline said. “You wanted to go.”
She could hear her father distantly calling her mother’s name.
