Harry scoffed, and Cierra continued. “I think I should quit. Like, soon.”
“Really?” His tone sounded more concerned than excited. “Are you being serious?”
“Yes, I’m serious. I think it’s time to try something new. And it’ll be better for us. I can be more reliable. Obviously, I’m still really sorry about missing your parents’ anniversary.” Harry bit his lip, but continued to listen. “What do you think?”
Harry sat for a few moments and then said, “Sorry, it’s just, I feel like this is coming out of nowhere, Cee. Your schedule . . . it’s not like it would change if you went somewhere else, right? Besides, I know your salary isn’t much, but I thought Terra paid more than most places?”
This interrogation was beginning to gnaw at Cierra. How could he expect her to answer all these questions right now? She just had to get out of Terra; it was suffocating. He hadn’t seen the gleam in Prep School Mom’s eye, that look of contempt as if she were a queen and Cierra was a misbehaved peasant. That wasn’t what she’d signed up for when she started her culinary career.
Cierra wasn’t ever going back to Terra. And he was making it a lot more difficult to tell him that she’d already quit. If anything, now she was beginning to worry he wouldn’t take the news well at all.
“Listen, I can’t get the mental space to think through my next move working like this. Going there, cooking for the kinds of people who visit, it’s soul crushing. Degrading. Don’t you get it? If I quit, then I could take a few weeks to—”
“Babe, I hear you, but have you thought about your next move at all? Is there any plan here?” Cierra could tell Harry was having flashbacks to when she had quit her corporate job. Backthen, she gave him plenty of heads-up, but it still didn’t help to ease the transitional period.
He ran his hands through his hair, which still looked well-groomed, even though it was thinner. “I don’t know, Cee. I don’t think quitting your job nextweekis a good idea. Terra is demanding, and of course I’d prefer if you got better treatment, but you can’t just up and leave a job. Why don’t you take the day, like Jesse said, and . . . I don’t know, maybe take a few more days.”
Cierra was a bit stunned; she had not been expecting the conversation to go this way. And she was already on thin ice. “But wouldn’t it be nice if I had a more normal schedule? I can find a new job, still cooking, but something with more stable hours and better pay. I just feel like there has to be something better than sacrificing my social life to serve people who don’t even know what charred chicken is.”
“Sacrificingyoursocial life?” Harry raised his eyebrows and shook his head. He almost looked disgusted. “Listen, I told you what I think. Sometimes I don’t think you realize this, but your decisions impact me. My life. It seems like you haven’t thought this through at all. I just . . . ugh, I don’t know. I just didn’t envision us here, at this point.” He gestured to their one-bedroom apartment, which was nicely decorated, but wasn’t the three-bed, 1,000-square-foot apartment he wanted. Something they could have easily afforded if she had remained a product manager.
“Okay, that’s not fair. When I took the job at Terra, you said you were on board for what that’d mean financially. I was going to take a pay cut to try to — oh, I don’t know — avoid feeling like I was going to ‘optimize revenue’ like a drone until I died.”
“Is that what you think I do?” Harry shot back. Cierra sat in silence while Harry stood up, making his way to the window overlooking a tree-lined street in Chelsea. His time spent on thecouch showed on the back of his creased sweater. He stood by the window, grasping one of his shoulders with his hand.
“I thought you’d be more excited by my decision. I . . . I’ve kind of already made it,” Cierra said, now worried. “I figured we’d been fighting about it for so long. Maybe this could help us reset?”
Cierra hadn’t just left after her shift and headed to the subway. Before grabbing her parka from the coat rack, she swung by Jesse’s office. She didn’t need an extra twenty-four hours to realize this wasn’t the life she wanted for herself. Jesse had told her it was late, that she shouldn’t be making a decision like this so hastily, but he couldn’t convince her any differently. How could Cierra have known Harry would be so against her quitting?
As Harry put the pieces together, he shook his head in bewilderment, and a grin appeared on his face. But not the kind you ever wanted to see.
“You’re kidding me,” he said flatly.
She bit the left corner of her lip, alarmed at how badly this was going. Why couldn’t he see that this was the better option for her? For them?
“You already quit?!”
“Harry, think—”
“Thinkwhat,Cee? How did you think I would react to you quitting your job without even consulting me?”
“But just think about it—”
“Oh my god! You still don’t get it, do you? You know what,”—he held up his hands—“I can’t even have this conversation right now. I’m going to bed.”
After he slammed the door to their bedroom, Cierra took another sip of her Diet Coke and slouched back on the couch. The documentary was still on, showing a pair of magnificent pearl-feathered cranes migrating toward the south together.
“Must be nice,” she muttered to herself, and shut the TV off.
The sounds of cars and small groups of people chatting on their morning walks drifted through Cierra’s bedroom window. It was a sunny winter morning, and she had slept in later than usual. With the unexpected day off, she settled on the idea of grabbing a coffee and bagels with Harry. That usually helped solve whatever issue they were facing — it was hard to stay angry over a bacon, egg, and cheese. Good food didn’t always have to be served on a two hundred dollar oval white plate.
But when she turned to her left in bed, all she saw was crumpled sheets, long since overturned. Cierra tossed on an old robe, threw her fuzzy curls into a messy bun, and emerged to see Harry fully dressed, sitting at the kitchen bar. A single, slightly stained, to-go latte cup was sitting in front of him on the white granite counter, letting her know that coffee and bagels were not in the cards for her today.
Silence had replaced the usual sounds of his slow Saturday mornings, like history podcasts or funk music. In fact, she wasn’t sure she could figure out his expression at all in that moment. The closest thing she could think of was what a doctor looks like before telling someone they’ve never met before that they only have a few months to live.
“Morning, babe,” she said, trying to sound chipper, like this was any other morning and he hadn’t just gone out for breakfast without her. And she hadn’t just quit her job with zero warning. “Did you go for a walk?”
“Yeah,” Harry replied. His demeanor was eerily stoic, devoid of any emotion.
