Chapter 11
11
Natalie
T he next night, I walk up the front path to my parents’ house, bottle of wine in hand.
I’m still trying to sort out Preston’s contradictions, to reconcile the asshole who tried to get me fired with the guy who clearly loves his sister enough to do anything for her. The guy who offered his suit jacket to me even though I hadn’t let myself shiver with the guy who’d do pretty much anything to end a conversation with me.
The guy who looks like he could cow a roomful of C-suite executives into submission with the guy who blushes when you hand him a Fleshlight.
Though I’ve been trying hard not to think about Preston and that Fleshlight.
I ring the doorbell, and my mom answers—tall, slim, salt-and-pepper haired, beautiful in middle age, if a bit severe. “Natalie,” she says. “Where’s Lloyd?”
Right. On my own, I’m a disappointment. Story of my life.
“Hi, Mom. He?—”
I almost say it. He cheated on me, and I dumped his ass . Or, you know, the mom-friendly version of that. But I can’t quite bring myself to do it. My mom loves Lloyd. In her book, he’s the best thing I’ve ever done—and when she found out he’d helped me make a plan to go back to school… Well. He could do no wrong, ever again.
“He’s busy tonight.”
“Oh,” she says. “That’s a shame. I love that boy. You know how much I love that boy.”
“I do.” I manage to swallow my sigh.
“Come in, come in,” she says and ushers me into the dining room, where my sister and dad are already sitting at the table. I’m inside my on-time window, but like Mr. Fun, my parents are prompt, and if they told me dinner was at seven, they meant it.
That might be why I don’t appreciate Preston’s perspective on time management. It reminds me of how I grew up.
My parents’ house is big, as befits a chief of surgery and a state supreme court justice, and well appointed. The kind of house where you can host dinner parties with important people. The five of us—my parents, my older sister, Jenna, and her husband, Marcus—are spaced too widely around a broad, elegant dining room table set with my mother’s good china, dwarfed by the imposing dining room.
“Hi, Natalie,” Jenna says, getting up and giving me a big hug. My sister smells faintly of something chemical, which makes sense because she’s a big-shot biochemical engineer. She actually works with one of the Hott brothers, Quinn, at the lab he runs in Bend. I almost asked her to call in a favor with him when I applied for the Hott Springs Eternal job—but then decided not to. My sister has never made me feel as small as my parents do, but I don’t want to be indebted to her for anything, either. I want my successes, when they finally come, to be my own.
My dad rises and gives me a hug. “Hi, Nat,” he says.
I sit down and help myself to a spoonful of rice and some stew.
“Jenna was telling us about a breakthrough she made,” my mom says proudly.
“I can’t talk about the details yet,” Jenna says, blushing, “but it was a good week.”
“Yeah?” I say, cocking an eyebrow upward. “Congratulations.”
“We’re so proud of you, kiddo,” my dad says.
I know it’s not a zero-sum game—I know it’s not—but it still hurts sometimes to hear them say that to her. Only because they’ve never, not once, said it to me.
“What can you tell us?” my mom asks, and Jenna launches into a complicated description of the properties of a certain molecule when it’s supercooled.
Then it’s Marcus’s turn. He’s the founder/CEO of a start-up that was recently acquired by a multinational conglomerate. He’s been in Belgium working out the details, which will set up him and my sister for life. They could own a tiny house in every port.
My parents hang on his every word as he leads us through the series of ups and downs that resulted in his deal.
We’re almost to dessert before my sister asks, “What have you been up to, Nat?”
I don’t want to admit to myself how much I crave my family’s—especially my mother’s—approval, but the way my heart rate kicks up makes it hard to lie to myself. “I got a job,” I say, then hate how much I sound like a little kid. So eager to please.
“What kind of job?” my mother says.
“Activities coordinator at Hott Springs Eternal. I’m developing a whole activities schedule for the resort.”
My mother’s mouth pinches. If you didn’t know her as well as I do, you might not notice, but it’s like a flag waving in my face. It’s the patented Disappointed Face.
Once I asked my sister if she hated my mom’s Disappointed Face as much as I did.
She said, What disappointed face ?
I love my sister, but we grew up in the same household in parallel universes.
“Oh,” my mother says. “What happened to that list I gave you, of careers in the medical field?”
“I’m not trained for any of that, Mom,” I say. “That’s why I have to go back to school.”
“So why this job, then?” she asks. “I thought you were planning to go straight back to school?”
“That was never the plan,” I say, keeping my voice calm with effort. “I don’t have the money for it yet. I need to save up.”
“Darling,” she says, covering my hand with hers, “let us pay for school.”
This again.
I cannot let my parents pay for school—for the same reason I can’t come home to live with them. Because I can’t stop feeling like they’re waiting for me to fail.
One night when I was a senior in high school, I snuck down to the kitchen for a midnight snack and overheard them talking in the kitchen.
My mom asked my dad, What does having fun all the time equip you for? and my dad said Not much and laughed.
I didn’t know yet they were talking about me. Then my mom said, It’s like she was born completely without ambition, and my dad said, She’s the one we’ll have in our basement till she’s fifty.
That was the moment I vowed I would never move back home once I left. Or ask them for money, no matter how desperate I felt.
The thing is, sometimes I’m pretty sure they’re right about me.
I went to college and got a communications degree. But I hated every job I got after that. I hated writing copy. I hated PR. I hated human resources.
Basically, I hated desks.
I don’t know why I was surprised. I’d hated school. I loved being at school because I loved the people. But I hated sitting still and reading and writing. Getting paid for it didn’t change that.
When you hate your job, your job has a tendency to hate you back.
I’ve been through a lot of jobs. And every time I leave one, I think about my parents.
She’s the one we’ll have in our basement till she’s fifty.
When I got my first activities director position, at the nursing home, I freaking loved it. I thought my parents would be happy for me that I’d finally shown some ambition and turned being a people person and a perpetual partier into a potential career—but they were distracted and had bigger things to deal with. Like my sister’s shiny career and my father’s retirement party. My mom only said I didn’t know that was a job title before losing interest.
And when the nursing home downsized and I got laid off, she said, Well. It’s an opportunity, really. For something better.
Now I pull my hand out from under hers. “I want to pay for school myself.”
“Admirable,” my father says, in his judge’s booming voice. There: decided and pronounced.
“You could go right away if you let us pay.” My mother is working herself up to dig in.
Just then, my sister rescues me—although I don’t think she does it on purpose. “Wait,” she says, crossing her arms. “I figured something out. You’re the one working with Preston. Oh my God! Oh, you have to hear this story,” she tells my parents. “You know how Quinn had to do that thing where he worked as the receptionist at the spa? Because of his granddad’s will? Well, all the brothers have to do something similar, and in Preston’s case, he has to design a complete activities program for the resort, and he has to work with the resort’s activities coordinator, and that’s Natalie!”
“Wait, what’s this?” my mom asks. “I thought you were designing the activities program.”
“Right, I am, but, well—” God. “We have to work together for a few weeks till Preston fulfills the terms of the will. Then the job will be mine.”
Assuming we pass the test.
The thought gives me an icy shiver, but I push the possibility of failure away.
“What does Lloyd think of the new job?” my mother asks.
“He thinks it’s great ,” I say. “He’s all for it.”
She nods at that. “Okay. Well. It sounds like a good…first step.”
Right. Now that it has Lloyd’s stamp of approval.
It’s going to suck when she finds out we broke up.
“And have you made a decision yet about which program you’re applying to? I’ve been talking to people at work about the options and hearing good things about nursing administration.”
I have to be honest, I haven’t actually had time yet to look at the programs or to think about which one would be best for me. They have all have names like health information and medical records administration , but when I look at them, they all look like deskdeskdeskdesk .
But there are loads and loads of careers in the medical field, and I’m sure there’s something on the list that won’t be like that. Something I’ll like, that will offer me lots of earning and growth potential. That’s the plan.
“Nursing administration is way up there,” I tell her, and then I ask Marcus about the food in Belgium because it’s so much easier when we’re not talking about me.