Green Card Christmas (Just A Guy With A Goal #2)

Chapter 1

One

I don’t think it counts as “fired” if you never really wanted the job. Can’t we just say that Clay it’s never going to support me.

And then I see it. On top of this teetering shelf—my Spiral Song.

My labor of love. My passion project. My possible award winner.

I go down, making a splash in the water beneath me, and with the reverberating surge, water rushes, rocking the shelf off balance, and with it my Spiral Song.

“No!” I wail, watching my glossy blue-and-cream piece as it teeters then falls from its safe space on the top shelf. The spirals and swirls etched into the piece whirl as it plummets down, down, down. I watch as if in slow motion, but I’m unable to stop it from happening.

It clunks hard onto the tiled floor, then bobs back up in the lake that is now my kitchen, just before glub, glub, glubbing it’s way to the bottom.

I dive toward my eighty hours of work and love and lift the vase from the drowning depths of my kitchen sea.

The Sierra Clay awards rarely have finalists who are big fat nobodies. And yet, they chose my piece as one of their five finalists. Mine.

However, they didn’t choose this drowned statue.

I gasp, lifting my piece up and inspecting every inch. My throat clenches, and the room seems to spin. A large, rough crack runs down the center of one of my spirals, and a jagged chunk is missing from the rim.

Sitting on my kitchen floor, surrounded by a sudsy ocean, tears brim in my eyes.

My wet arms are suddenly much too heavy.

So, I lay the piece back onto the surface of this watery grave.

A bubble glubs from the mouth of my ceramic baby just before it sinks to the bottom, drowning all of my hopes and dreams with it.