Chapter Twenty-Seven
There are two routes I’ve taken more than any other when leaving Ryser Cares: the way home and the way to Pretzel in Paradise. All those runs to pick up pretzels when I’m on snack duty have made the route something akin to muscle memory.
I don’t much feel like going home. The thought of sitting alone in my room reminds me of all the days I’ve spent by myself in my apartment over the years. Just the idea of it makes me feel lonelier than ever.
Which is why I find myself pulling into the Pretzel in Paradise parking lot.
When I get out of my car, I notice that the store is busier than I’ve ever seen it.
Normally a few people are milling inside, but now it’s bustling with activity, so cramped the line almost extends out the door.
At the apple festival, Meg sold out of stock by early afternoon on both days.
This surge in business must have something to do with that.
I know this is a good thing, but seeing the busy shop fills me with reluctance. I don’t want to be surrounded by people. I have no interest in hearing Meg rave about what a success the festival was when I’ve never felt like more of a failure.
A fiftysomething woman stands outside the shop, eating a pepperoni pizza pretzel and staring at the empty storefront beside Meg’s. I eye her curiously, wondering how I recognize her, when I realize she’s one of the attendees I checked in at the festival. She made a twenty-dollar donation.
“You were running the festival booth,” she says when she spots me.
I force a smile. “Yeah.”
“I knew these pretzels had to be something special when I saw that line. I couldn’t get them out of my head.” She takes a bite and closes her eyes as she chews. “Even better than I expected.” The woman turns back to the empty storefront. “Do you know if this is for sale?”
I glance from her to the vacant shop window. “Probably. Why?”
“I own a restaurant in Falls Point and I’ve been thinking about opening up another.”
I don’t know how to not sound judgy when I ask, “ Here ?”
My question doesn’t faze her. She dunks a piece of pretzel into her dipping cup of marinara sauce.
“It’s next to a successful business, the rent would be cheaper, and I hear Greenstead’s making a comeback.
Could be smart to get in now.” She says goodbye, pops the pretzel piece into her mouth, and walks off.
I stand there, wondering why the term making a comeback sounds oddly familiar, until I realize it’s from the headline of Peter Guo’s article. If my brain were rational, I’d be grateful to Peter for publishing a piece that helps uplift Greenstead.
But it’s not, so: I mentally curse him and get in my car.
I do drive home this time, but I feel aimless once I sit down at my desk. There’s no work to do, no one to impress. I don’t know how to cope with being unemployed. Robotically, I open up a job search site and click on listings, and I can’t stop myself from comparing every job to Ryser.
Significantly lower salary. Less vacation time. No free snacks. Far from my apartment.
Right, my apartment that I hate, according to Marina. The thought of it pings something in my brain. I got an email about it last week, sometime during the blur of festival preparations. I click over to my inbox and search for it.
Lease Renewal Offer
I scroll through the document, see the space at the bottom for a signature. I should want to sign this. Even with the minor rent increase, it’s still the cheapest apartment I’ve seen in the area. Cheap apartment means more money for savings, which means I’m one step closer to early retirement.
Marina’s words come back to me, and I tamp them down, tell myself she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, that I should sign it just to spite her.
But I don’t. I close out of the file and decide to postpone it until later. Which I’m sure Marina would say is typical of me. I postpone so much of my life already, the Marina in my head says. I shoo her away.
I end up passing the afternoon watching a dating show on Lurv Plus.
I can still log in to Jen’s account, and the profile Marina set up for us, under the name Marina & Lauryn, is still there.
Seeing our names linked in this account Jen shared with us feels like a vestige from an era past. I don’t touch Love Quest —even after our argument, it feels wrong to watch a show we were watching together—but I do pick out a different show: Loving on the Edge , in which a group of singles is mixed and matched into pairs to go on dates centered around adventurous activities like skydiving and white water rafting.
As I watch a woman comfort a fellow contestant who’s tearfully confessing her fear of heights, I wonder what Nancy would do if she were on this show.
I wonder what inside jokes Marina and I would concoct if we were watching this together.
It’s not nearly as fun, bingeing this by myself. But turning it off would force me to think about what happened at Ryser Cares today, about all the things Marina said, about the job applications I haven’t filled out, about the lease renewal offer I can’t think about.
So, I dig my hand deep into a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos and watch a bunch of adrenaline-filled singles zip-line through treetops in the name of love and television.
“What’s this?” my dad asks when he comes home. At this point, several episodes deep, I’m lying on the couch, bag of Doritos on the floor for easy access.
“ Loving on the Edge .” I point at the woman on the TV. “Aaron thinks Caroline is going to give him her golden power bar after they make it through the cave expedition—but he doesn’t realize Caroline is saving it for Benny, even though Benny’s on a skydiving date with Ingrid.”
“Right,” my dad says slowly, shoving his hands in the pockets of his chinos as he watches Aaron and Caroline move through a narrow passage.
He turns to stare at me, even though Aaron and Caroline are far more interesting.
I don’t have to look at him to know he’s got his scrutinizing face on, eyes serious and shrewd behind his glasses.
“What?” I ask.
“I thought you’d be…happier.”
“Why?” I dig a hand into the bag of Doritos and shove one in my mouth.
“The festival was a success! You should be celebrating.”
“Yeah, and I lost my job over it,” I grumble. When my dad gapes, I pause the TV with my hand that isn’t covered in Doritos dust. “It’s no big deal.”
“It seems like it’s a big deal to you,” he says carefully. He approaches the other end of the couch, and I reluctantly sit upright to make room. “What happened?”
I sigh and relay the terrible details of the day: the news I’d kept secret, the firing, coming clean to the Ryser Cares team, the argument with Marina. I have to blink several times to keep tears from welling up in my eyes.
My dad is sympathetic but direct. “I have to say, I’m with Marina on this one. I’ve never understood why you’d stay on with Ryser all these years.”
“Of course you don’t,” I say before I can think better of it. “You’re stuck.”
He pulls back. “What do you mean?”
“Mom always talked about feeling stuck here,” I explain, reaching into the bag for a handful of Doritos. “She said she felt like she was suffocating in Greenstead. So, she got out. But you stayed here.”
“Because my life is here! That doesn’t make me stuck.”
The Doritos in my hand drop back into the bag. “You like living here?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because, it’s…sad. And empty.”
“Not to me,” he says with a shrug. “To me, it’s home.”
Home . Said with such ease, such pride. I look around at the framed photos on the walls showing Dad and Wendy with various friends, the calendar with scribbles denoting Taco Tuesday and Hiking with the Forresters , the Pretzel in Paradise coupon affixed to the fridge with a WAKE UP WITH NANCY magnet. There’s so much joy here.
His gaze lingers on me. “I have to admit, there are times I’ve wondered if you feel stuck.”
I frown. “Why?”
“Well…your apartment is…the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” he says with an apologetic chuckle.
“When I call, you never talk about doing anything fun. You always used to pester me about getting a dog when you were little, and now that you’re grown, you’ve never gotten one.
I just…I worry about you, all alone in that apartment.
You don’t seem happy.” He eyes me like he’s afraid I might take this the wrong way.
My first instinct when Marina brought up my apartment was to lash out and deny it, and that same impulse comes to me now, too.
It’s easier to deny it than to dig deeper and consider the possibility that it might be true.
To think about the time I’ve spent watching the potted plants in my living room—which I bought for the sole purpose of brightening up my apartment—wilt and wither away from lack of sunlight.
How much unhappiness are you supposed to put up with to set yourself up for a happy future?
And how happy would my future be if all the years before it were spent alone, isolating myself out of shame?
Even if I got that promotion and did something good at Ryser, it wouldn’t cancel out everything I did, and everything I put myself through, to get here.
Doing good at Ryser wouldn’t improve my life overnight or turn me into a different person.
My dad’s right: I’ve spent so much time trying to avoid being stuck that all I ended up doing was getting myself stuck.
But not in Greenstead, where people have made lives for themselves, where they wake up every day and choose this place because they believe in it.
I’ve been stuck in a deep, dark hole of my own making.
If I keep burrowing deeper into myself and pushing people away, there won’t be anyone left standing at the top to pull me out.
But I do have people, ready and willing.
There’s my dad, who I don’t visit as often as I should.
There are the people I’ve only gotten to know in the last few months but whose presence has been a greater comfort than I’ve realized: Randy, Jen, Arun, Tessa.
And there’s Marina, whose renewed friendship has felt like righting a terrible wrong—until we went wrong again today.
But it might not be too late to right us back again.
“I haven’t been happy,” I confess. “But I think I’m learning how to be.”
His mouth perks into a smile. “I’ve noticed. See, we just needed to get you out of that sad apartment.”
I laugh when he elbows me in the side. “It wasn’t just the apartment. I had everything wrong. I was letting the way I felt about my job take over my life.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that job anymore,” he says. “You know, it’s funny that they’d decide to fire you all now, when they were so afraid to do it before. Guess they can’t make up their minds.”
While my dad picks the Doritos bag off the carpet and grumbles about my inability to use a bowl, his comment stays with me.
The Ryser Cares team told me about how they’d messed up at work, how Ryser chose to demote them and ship them off to Greenstead instead of firing them—because they knew too much.
Even when Ryser did fire us, they did it in secret, removing our access from the company systems because they were afraid of retaliation.
Our small Ryser Cares team is capable of so much more than any of us thought. We got an entire festival off the ground, didn’t we? We planned it to such success that it drew more attention than we—or Ryser—could ever bargain for.
We’ve managed to do a lot of good in our time here.
We showed people how much Greenstead has to offer.
We helped Bertram tap back into one of his most cherished childhood memories.
We convinced Art McKenzie to come to Greenstead.
We brought Mayor Bradley out of hiding. We got a respected journalist to declare that Greenstead is making a comeback.
We made a goddamn mustard apple taste good.
I can’t take back all the questionable things I’ve contributed to in my years at Ryser.
The blatant denials of completely true allegations, the way we’ve spun narratives to discredit innocent people, the picture-perfect image I’ve painted of an organization that’s done irreparable damage on a monumental scale.
All while telling myself I’m not really causing any harm, because one day I’ll do something good to absolve it.
That fantasy wasn’t enough to lessen my shame.
But I can try to do more good. I don’t have to wait for a promotion to make an impact. I can do something now, something that makes me feel better about myself before I close out this chapter of my life. I can try to undo the harm I’ve caused—by any means necessary.
Now that we’ve lost our jobs, we have nothing left to lose. I have absolutely no desire to return to work at Ryser ever again.
So, why not show Ryser what we’re really capable of?
I turn off the TV and rise to my feet with purpose. I’ve got a team to assemble.