Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Samantha
One Week Later
It was nine p.m., and Caleb still wasn’t back. I squinted through the peephole and peered into the second-floor hall of the hundred twenty-five-year-old Queen Anne Victorian that we both called home, but the door across the hall from my apartment remained closed and silent. I listened for the crunch of his tires on the gravel drive—nothing.
It had been a week since our little—um—confrontation, and we’d both managed to carefully avoid each other.
But I had a problem. That farm-bonding weekend was coming right up, and my car was still bone dead, waiting on a part that still wasn’t in. I’d have to borrow a friend’s or rent one, plain and simple. The third option, asking a favor from a person I considered despicable? Ugh. My pride hurt to ask the first and third favors, and I couldn’t really afford option two after barely squeaking by—between loans and my savings—to meet my sister’s tuition payment for a class she had to retake this summer.
Yes, retake. Take again. As in paying twice. Ouch.
I wrung my hands as I paced my apartment, talking to my little sister, Wynn. “Did you say you got a job in the perfume department?” I’d just learned that she’d definitely not been planning on spending the summer doing research in a lab like we’d planned. Working in the perfume department of a department store was not going to be a good cred to get her into medical school. Unless she was doing chemistry experiments there.
In between glances through the peephole, I paced the solid oak floor. It creaked in a few places, which ordinarily I barely noticed, but in my present state, every sound was like chalk on a blackboard.
“My job at Winterfield’s starts next week,” Wynn said. “So I’ll have the restaurant job and this new one. Isn’t that great?”
She’d mastered an enthusiastic tone, but it sounded fake to me. Which made me worry, worry, worry. Wynn was emotional, excitable, and young—the opposite of me, who was steady, even-keeled, and cautiously thrilled about only a few things. Plus she was just nineteen, a far cry from my own age of thirty-two. I didn’t want her to have a truckload of worries, especially financial ones.
But it felt like I was going on fifty-two, because the trouble was that I found myself constantly straddling the gap between sister and parent, something that you’d think I should’ve mastered by now. While I wanted her to enjoy her time away at college, something I’d never truly been able to do, I wanted—make that needed —her to have a secure future. Basically, I needed her off the payroll ASAP. And that meant her passing her classes with flying colors, focusing, and declaring a major in the appropriate time frame to graduate in four years. Easier said than done.
The parent part of me couldn’t let her off the hook. “I thought you were coming home to take calculus here in Milwaukee this summer.” Summer housing was yet another expense I hadn’t counted on. But the real truth was, I wanted her here. I yearned for our relationship to be what it used to be, before our grandmother died a year and a half ago.
“Home?” she asked in a deadpan tone that sent a chill through me.
Last year, after Oma died, I’d sold her house, and Wynn hadn’t forgiven me for getting rid of the only home we’d ever had even if that money was now helping to fund her college. And even though Oma’s neighborhood was becoming crime-ridden and scary—not the home-sweet-home fantasy anyone would dream about.
We were homeless, so to speak. A bit unmoored, but I’d vowed to be the glue. We’d always stuck together—except now there was a chasm between us. And I didn’t know how to bridge it.
“Yes, home. Home with me.” Not that this tiny apartment was so great, but I’d made the big bay window a sleeping alcove. I’d bought a cute futon with bright pillows and hung flowery curtains for privacy all around it. With the naturally quirky nature of this old house, that arrangement would work out great. Except that Wynn was throwing me a plot twist.
“To retake calculus,” I added.
That was the elephant in the room: She’d failed calculus last fall. Not because, like a lot of us, her brain simply didn’t get calculus, but because she’d met a boy first semester and had fallen madly in love with him—and had stopped going to class.
Ugh. A boy named Miles, whom I hadn’t even met yet.
I was completely out of my wheelhouse here. The only reason I’d made it to college in the first place was my smarts, and without total focus, I wouldn’t have survived. My future would have had as great a chance of being as chaotic as our mother’s, who’d gone from bad job to bad job and worse man to worse man. Until one day she’d left us behind too, in Oma’s care. Which was probably for the best for everyone.
“I want to work this summer.” Wynn’s tone was insistent. “That’s more important.”
More important than retaking calculus? “I admire that you want to work.” So did my bank account. “But med school admissions committees aren’t going to be excited about the perfume job.”
I’d sent her the names of some doctors who were taking students to work in hospital labs for the summer and therefore take part in research—the typical med school application credential. If she could get into a prestigious lab and get her name on a cutting-edge scientific paper, it would be a great thing to put on her CV. I’d helped her fill out the applications—but she hadn’t said anything about hearing back.
This was a different attitude from before… the boyfriend. Miles, who didn’t seem to care about things like passing classes and planning for a good future. I looked down to find that I’d shredded a bunch of tissues into confetti on my kitchen counter as I talked.
I suppose that was better than nail biting or drinking, but still.
“I want to save up until I can pay for the class I have to retake,” Wynn said. “And I want to stay here.” There was a long pause. “With Miles.”
Shred, shred, shred, shred, shred.
I supposed I should be glad she’d taken the perfume job. That one would be in addition to her job waitressing at a very chichi restaurant in downtown Madison. But would her grades suffer even more? When she first got the waitressing gig, I practically broke out in hives every night thinking of her walking out of the restaurant alone and taking public transportation home late at night.
So I’d bought her a used car, even as the dollar signs racked up. So many dollar signs that they appeared in my dreams at night. I’d been supporting both of us on a resident’s salary, loans, plus all the moonlighting jobs I could find, including one spending weekend nights at a local psych hospital doing admission physicals on patients. Despite all that, the expenses felt endless.
That’s okay, I told myself. It wouldn’t last much longer. After one year of internship and three years of anesthesiology residency, I was now in a fifth year of training, a special year of pediatric anesthesiology fellowship—and I was finally applying for a real job. After years of sacrifice, real income was just around the corner.
“Don’t worry about me,” Wynn said. “I’m fine. Maybe I’m not as smart or as independent as you, but I’m finding balance. I’m learning how to study and have a social life.”
That was a hit directed at me—the fact that I’d studied and worked my way through college. Even in med school, I worked as a phlebotomist from four a.m. to seven a.m. four mornings a week. My sister was now telling me I was one dimensional. Unbalanced. And too independent. She probably wasn’t wrong, but I didn’t have a choice. I chose to tamp down the insult even though it hurt a little. “You are smart. And I’m glad you’re finding balance.”
Not worry? Impossible. And her tone—so disdainful! I bit my tongue as I thought of more disasters. Was she using birth control, like I’d preached many times? But if I said that now, I was afraid she’d hang up.
I agonized. I shredded. I was wasting the whole fricking box of tissues. But it was better than losing my mind. No lab job, no calculus retake, no return home to be with me for the summer. No, no, no.
“You’re using birth control, right?”
That was met with dead silence as I’d predicted. I had to ask. If I didn’t and something happened, I’d never forgive myself.
“Yes,” she finally answered, exasperation in her voice.
“Okay, just checking.” I tried to strike a more positive tone. “Maybe I’ll drive up for lunch or dinner next week,” I said. “Would that be okay? We can go somewhere cute to eat.” I paused. “Miles can come too.” That last part cost me two more Kleenex, but I said it.
“Yeah, but I—uh—I’ve got exams. I’ll text you when’s a good time, okay?”
“Okay.” I disguised a little more hurt. She’d been putting me off for the past month or two. When she was younger, she’d been filled with adoration for me, wanted to spend every moment with me. But she was an adult now. And now our relationship was fraught with all these other things. “You sure everything’s okay?”
Actually, she sounded fine. I was the one who was not okay.
“Sam, I’m doing great. Don’t worry so much, okay?”
The floor creaked again under my pacing . Thump thump thump sounded from below my feet.
That would be Mrs. Von Gulag, my elderly landlady, who lived below me. To be clear, that noise was her broom handle—and her temper—hitting the ceiling.
I glanced at my watch. Nine on the nose. Her way of signaling me to stop pacing, walking, talking, and also breathing, since it was her bedtime.
“Okay,” I conceded. “I just— I love you. Make good choices,” I snuck in at the last minute.
The line went silent. Wynn took a breath, gathering patience, no doubt. I should’ve left out the Jamie Lee Curtis line.
Oh, but I had so much more I wanted to say. Make other friends. Don’t let anyone distract you from your goals. Work hard and then play hard.
I knew that sometimes I sounded pushy, and I tried to keep my mouth shut. But sometimes I just couldn’t.
You know why? Because I was frightened. I didn’t want her dreams to get derailed. I wanted her to have every chance, every opportunity. I wanted her to have an easier way than I did. And I wanted my hard times to be worth something. Like, I’d put in the suffering for both of us, and now it was over, and she’d never have to experience it.
“Love you too,” she said in a cautious tone. “Talk soon.” Then the call ended.
I sat down on the cute futon, totally distressed. If only Oma were around, she’d manage to laugh this off somehow. Make me tea. Sit down beside me and put her arm around me and surround me with her love. But there was no Oma. There was just me, alone in the cheapest (but safest) apartment I could find.
Oh, I had good friends. But trying to talk to them about parenting matters was… difficult. They were always supportive, but it was like asking a Burger King employee to create for you a James Beard recipe. No experience.
In some ways, I perpetually felt that my sister was one misstep away from disaster. From flunking important classes to getting involved with the wrong boys to spending money that I couldn’t replenish fast enough. I was always torn between pretending that everything was normal so that she could enjoy a college life relatively free from worry to coming down on her hard and demanding that she get it together or else , whatever that meant. And so I said nothing, afraid to drive her away for good.
I would never do anything to drive a stake between us. It was bad enough we’d grown up without a father—at least, by the time she’d come around, he was long gone—and that our mother had been capricious, floating in and out of our lives as randomly as a bubble in the wind, bringing the promise of excitement and fun and raising our hopes, only to have them all dashed.
After a while, that kind of hurt makes you want to give up on people. You don’t trust anyone except yourself. And you end up alone.
I didn’t even have a pet. I wasn’t sure that I could manage one more responsibility.
But at least I could depend on myself, right?
I just had to figure out how to handle my sister. How to be a good big sister. How to help her reach her full potential. Be a mentor. And love her. But how?
I had no clue what I was doing. As I lay back on the pillows, my phone fell from my pocket and clattered on the floor.
The broomstick banged again.
Caleb never got the broomstick.
He got leftovers and pieces of homemade pie and cookies while I got… the broomstick.
But then I was a woman. I was used to working hard in what was very subtly still a man’s world without perks or privileges. I didn’t expect cookies or leftovers or a friendly landlady. I didn’t expect the world to give me anything. I’d come a long way on my own willpower. And I would be just fine.