Chapter 9
“I’m definitely hardworking,” I stated. “For example, recently I had to remove several layers of wallpaper from a dining room and I believe it was all applied by using supernatural forces.” No, you shouldn’t have talked about that in a job interview.
“I mean, very strong glue. But I didn’t quit until it was gone.
The walls were also gone,” I added, because I’d ended up ripping them out.
That was ok, because according to Keon the contractor, almost all of the old plaster would have to go to expose the problems behind it.
“Right. Wallpaper.” The man who had been interviewing me looked at his screen again, where he had pulled up my résumé.
Per my sister Sophie’s suggestion, I had “streamlined” it by removing many, many of my former places of employment.
Unfortunately, that had left many, many gaps in the timeline of my employment, several that lasted months and some that represented years.
Sophie had also told me that I might have to explain those away.
She’d made me practice lies—what she called “reasonable excuses.” They sounded a lot more sophisticated than my old standby, “I’ll have to get back to you on that. ”
Still, the hiring manager was frowning in a way that signaled that Sophie’s excuses had not been sufficient, or maybe I hadn’t sounded convincing enough.
Maybe I hadn’t deleted enough of the positions that I’d held, or maybe I shouldn’t have put down all three colleges that I’d dropped out of.
I probably shouldn’t have talked so much about my special affinity with fish in the “Skills” section.
But thinking about the aquarium reminded me of something. “If you talk to my references, they’ll back me up and tell you that I would do a good job if you hired me here,” I said. Regina would definitely say nice things, because she’d also said them while I was working with her.
He stopped frowning at the screen and looked over at me. “Thanks for coming in, Grace. I’ll be in touch.” And I left.
“Oooh,” Pinar said sympathetically. I had headed over to the medical building to talk to her and Regina, thinking that they might interpret my success at the interview differently than I had.
I didn’t want to tell my siblings quite yet, and maybe it hadn’t gone as badly as I’d thought?
But the sympathetic expressions they wore told me that yes, it had been absolutely terrible.
“I wouldn’t actually expect to hear from them again,” Regina cautioned me. “That’s what I always say to someone that I’m not very interested in hiring.”
“At the end of my interview, you told me, ‘Pinar, I think you would be perfect,’” her coworker remembered, and Regina told her that she’d been exactly right, because Pinar was perfect.
“Why do you take all these different jobs, Grace?” Pinar asked me next. She was thumbing through the hard copy of my résumé that I’d carried with me. It was even printed on nice paper, thanks to my sister Juliet. “Why hop around like this?”
Explanations often worked better if you started with basics. “I needed money to pay for things, like food for me and the dogs.”
“What dogs?” she asked, but then shook her head. “I understand about needing a job, but why wouldn’t you try to get one that you actually like so you’d stick with it longer? Why don’t you start by asking, ‘What would I be good at?’”
“What would I be good at?” I asked them back.
“You did well here,” Regina answered. “Did you like it?”
“I liked both of you and I liked the fish,” I said. Of course I liked Theo so much, but that didn’t matter.
Then there was silence until they started to laugh.
“Ok, we get it. You weren’t thrilled to be in a medical office,” Pinar said.
“I think that you need something different, something where you’re moving around, except not anything dangerous.
My cousin is a vet. Would you want to work with animals like that? ”
I remembered what Dion had said about not being good at school.
I wasn’t sure that was true about him, but it definitely was for me.
“It turned out that I was terrible at learning stuff in a scholastic type of way, so I won’t ever graduate from college.
I wouldn’t ever get to be a vet unless there are other countries where they don’t require so much education, and I could go there,” I suggested.
“Maybe I could even take care of fish in their natural habitat of the ocean.”
“No!” Regina answered immediately. She explained that she didn’t think I should work near water and that she also thought I should live in Detroit, where I had family. “Stay near the people who love you.” She glanced at the pictures of her grown kids that she kept on her desk.
“Let’s get back to the issue of her job,” Pinar said, and again, that was the problem. I was somebody else’s problem instead of my own.
“No, I have to get going,” I said. I needed to pack up everything usable in the cabin since another rodent clean-up had taken place and because construction was starting soon.
I had my stuff and Theo was going to take care of his, but there was more to do.
I wanted to save the set of cast iron pans and an old metal cooler that I’d found in the attic when I’d cautiously ascended those stairs.
There were also some other things that I’d dug out of the melting and half-eaten cardboard boxes previously scattered throughout the house along with all the trash.
I wanted to put the keepsakes in more plastic bins and store them in the barn until Theo could finally return everything to his rebuilt, safe, rat- and hole-free home, when the remodel was complete.
But first, we also had Christmas to deal with.
The group chat (the one I was included in) had been full of messages back and forth to determine who would cook what for our family dinner.
Since we would be at Juliet’s house, she told us that we didn’t need to worry about oven and burner space (because she had so much of that).
So they were arguing about other things instead.
Did we really have to make another pumpkin pie?
Because Brenna absolutely hated it. Wasn’t it enough that we’d had to smell it on Thanksgiving?
Weren’t three kinds of rolls excessive? Nicola wondered how much bread a person should actually consume.
We needed vegetables! And Addie was sorry to mention it, but was Mom going to dry out the turkey again?
There was another minor spat between Dion and Sophie over sweet potatoes and yams, which ended when Patrick told them both to give it a rest and they jumped into tag-teaming in a fight with him.
“What should I bring?” I had written, and in a first for my family, there had been silence.
“How about a few bags of ice?” Nicola had finally suggested.
“You could do wine,” Addie added. “Come to Granger’s restaurant and pick some bottles.”
“I’ll need help carrying in the flowers from my car,” Brenna had told me. She always made the table look so nice.
“You don’t need to bring anything,” JuJu had chimed in. “We have it all under control.”
Then Patrick had said something about juice for the kids and that led to an argument between him and Sophie about juice-drinking for his daughter, because my second-oldest sister was never short of opinions and she said that it was a dessert, not a beverage.
Dion threw in a snide comment about a certain person’s problem with mislabeling food and everyone had seemed to forget about my offer to do my part for the dinner.
I didn’t want to bring ice or a bottle of wine that I picked from my brother-in-law’s cellar.
But Christmas was the day after tomorrow, so I had to get on it.
I had been at work before my failed job interview so I had cash in my pocket, and I did more shopping.
Then I went back to the cabin, carried and dragged the things to save into the barn, and started another project.
By the time that Theo got home, I was well into it and I was also very cold.
“Grace?” he called and I waved. “I can hardly see you.” He beamed the small light from his phone around my worksite.
“What are you doing so far away from the house?” he asked as he picked his way through the frozen back yard to where I was building.
I had thought things through, since that was how I was acting now, and had begun my construction well away from the cabin and from anything else made of wood, like the pile of dead trees that remained from when the guys had chopped them down with their chainsaws.
It was a good idea not to mix fire with those.
That was what I explained to him. “I’m being safe,” I stated.
“Using a saw in the dark is safe?”
I put down the tool. It was just a regular saw without a motor but I did see his point. “I’m building an outdoor oven,” I said. “Right now, I’m cutting boards to make forms for the concrete.”
He blew on his hands. “An oven? Why do you need that right now?”
“Because I’m making a b?che de Noel. A Yule log, a special cake,” I explained. “But I can’t do it in the kitchen oven inside due to the fact that the scrapper took it, and also because it used to be a rat house.”
“You’re making a fancy cake in an outdoor oven that you’re building yourself,” Theo stated, and I nodded but maybe it was too dark for him to see that.
“I am,” I confirmed out loud. “I got all the ingredients and decorations today. You need mushrooms, for one thing, but not the kind you’d just pick in the woods.”
“Thank goodness for that. Can you explain this to me inside? It’s damn freezing out here.
” He held out his hand and I took it. I had removed my gloves because it was hard to work with them on, and he rubbed my fingers between his palms as we walked back to the house. “What gave you the idea for the cake?”