“And the paving company is okay too?”
Her father lightly bounced his fist on the table, making the silverware jump.
“That’s not the point, Caroline! That’s never been the point. You tried to make me out to be the bad guy, but wewere always going to take care of you with your grandmother’s money. You acted like we were just going to leave you out on the street, but you had a full scholarship! You didn’t need to touch a cent until you graduated.”
Caroline scooted her chair away from the table, heart already racing.
“This is a good investment, because you can run the tennis center and earn a good living,” her father insisted. “Jay and I can handle the renovation, and by the time you graduate, you’ll be ready to manage it. You might even spend some time on the pro circuit first—that’ll help bring in students.”
“But I don’t want to run a tennis center,” she protested. Her ears were ringing. Her mother was staring at the black napkin in her lap, no help there. She must have known about this plan, just like she must have known about the last one.
“Seems to me you don’t know what you want to do,” her father growled. “You’re just squandering my mother’s money. You’re not the kind of person who can be responsible for a small fortune.”
Caroline jerked back, stung. She’d earned more in investment income than she’d spent, and the market hadn’t even been that great this year.
She hated her family’s pity. She didn’t want to be the person they thought she was anymore. Caroline, who never got invited to birthday parties. Caroline, who was sitting by herself at the barbecue. Maybe they’d thought they were doing a good thing for her by filling her life so full of tennis that she didn’t have time to feel the lack of anything else, but even if she was terrible at most things, that didn’t mean she couldn’t be trusted with this.
“That’s not true,” she said, but her voice had gone wobbly and threadbare. “I’m keeping to a budget. I canshow you. I have QuickBooks. After I graduate, we can talk again about what I do with the money—”
Her father exhaled through his nose. “I’m trying to help you,” he said. “Because I can see where this is going already. I’m not going to let you flail when you graduate from this place. Caroline, you know there’s no way you’re getting hired against all the other kids who are graduating with you. You need to come home so your family can help you find a stable career.”
Caroline took a deep breath, trying to gather enough of her wits to champion Boston College’s career services office, its alumni network, her spreadsheet of potential internships... and noticed her hands trembling. She was so tired of defending herself and what she wanted. Maybe she’d fall on her ass when she graduated, but like Adrian had pointed out, she had two million dollars in the bank, and she could comfortably afford to study underwater basket-weaving as her vocation if nothing else worked out.
So why couldn’t she just get a little time and grace to try things she might screw up at? To try things she might not like? Or might end up regretting? It was nobody else’s job to save her from her own decisions but hers.
Caroline stood up, curling her hands into fists.
“I thought it was about wanting the money, you know,” she said, and her father leaned back in surprise, because she was not allowed to raise her voice. “And I didn’t blame you for that part. Because I wanted it too! It wasn’t like I was more deserving than you or Uncle Jay. I thought you wanted to spend it on yourself. But that wasn’t it, was it? You just can’t stand me having it. You can’t handle me having two million dollars’ worth of choices, if I might make bad ones.”
She didn’t wait for his sputtering reply or finish her fish. She had five pounds of turkey in her fridge backhome. She grabbed her purse and put a few large bills on the table.
“You know what?” she snapped at her father. “I think I’ll be out of the country over the winter holidays. I’ll send you a postcard.”
It took Adrian a moment to understand what was going on when his bedroom door crashed against the wall. He’d intended to just take a short nap after arriving home that Sunday morning, but judging by the light filtering in through the battered mini-blinds, it was midafternoon.
“What did you do?” Tom’s voice demanded, and Adrian woke up further. He squinted blearily at his roommate’s solidifying form. He must have returned from New York while Adrian was passed out.
Adrian had been sleeping at his studio ever since he’d left Caroline’s apartment. He was testing that arrangement for permanency, since he needed to be out of Tom’s apartment by the end of the next week unless he somehow came up with rent money. It was far from ideal, to put it mildly. The other artists kept wildly divergent work hours, and there was noise from the other spaces for all but a few of the small hours of the morning. And Adrian couldn’t ask another artist to stop running a pottery wheel after midnight because he was trying to sleep.
So he’d drunk a lot of coffee and done his best to paint something commercial over the past week. His hands were aching, which meant he’d been careless about how long he’d worked, since he could hardly afford to injure himself at this point.
Six days of staring at a pile of produce and acclimating himself to his immediate future as a painter of attractive fruit. No need to worry what the critics would say; hewouldn’t bother to publicize a lot of classical still lifes produced solely to refill his bank account. He imagined his artist’s statement:The glass bottle in the background is inspired by the eyes of the woman who broke my heart. The chipped bowl is evocative of sadness and loss. The fruit is depicted in a color that I think will match the sofas of most art collectors.
“What?” he belatedly asked Tom. The man had his feet planted in Adrian’s doorway. He was peeling a large navel orange and dropping the rind directly on the floor. His expression flickered between outrage and confusion.
Tom hooked a thumb in the direction of the front door.
“Caroline just came by, dumped a bunch of your paintings in the hall, and told me good luck in New York.”
“Caroline’s here?”
Adrian scrambled to get up, reaching for the sweater he’d dropped on the floor that morning. Then he realized that after seven days, it didn’t smell great, and since he hadn’t showered since going to the gym on Friday, he smelled even worse. He craned his head at the living room, heart pounding.
“No, she booked it out of here,” Tom said grimly. “Which brings me back to my original question: What did youdo?”
Adrian collapsed down in bed, head swimming like he had a fever. He pressed a palm to his forehead, which ached in a throbbing way. He hadn’t had any coffee since finishing the painting late last night.
“Did she really dump my paintings in the hall?” he asked, feeling ill. He hadn’t expected that. Of course, recent events had shown that he was bad,verybad at predicting how women would react to his relationship decisions, but he’d thought that Caroline was, at the most, disappointed that he couldn’t be the partner she wanted. Not angry at him. He supposed he was wrong.
