Chapter 2
Billie spent Sunday getting organized at the hotel, and making lists of the employment agencies that serviced the Boston area.
She was going to call them on Monday. She focused on the ones that had experience in the medical field, since that was where her skills and degree applied.
She wanted to find a job at a laboratory, preferably in research.
She went for a walk on Sunday afternoon, thinking about Ben Hewitt and his family and how nice they had been to her, and how normal they seemed.
She wished she had a family like that. She might have, if her mother had lived.
Virginia would have forced her father to be at least slightly more attentive, whatever his preferences for Mickie were.
And she would have made Mickie behave better than she did.
Now all three of them had separate lives and went their own ways.
They made no effort to stay connected. She and Mickie never spoke on the phone.
Once in a while they texted. Her mother would have come to her graduation even if no one else did.
Her father wouldn’t have, he never left the farm.
Billie wondered what it felt like to have a real family of people who cared about each other and showed up when it mattered.
The last five years since her mother’s death had dissolved all remnants of the glue that had held them together.
She felt like an orphan sometimes. She was closer to her friend Tom than to her father and sister.
And now she couldn’t even communicate with him, since he was on secret missions for the U.S.
Army, working underground on counterterrorism.
She didn’t know where he was, but surely it was someplace dangerous.
Every few months he’d surface and call her.
She missed the days when they were in school together and saw each other every day.
He had left for West Point when her mother died, so she had lost both of the people she loved at once, and was left with a sister who cared about no one but herself, and a father who had ignored her for her entire life.
It wasn’t much to hold on to. But she couldn’t think about that now. She had to focus on finding a job.
She called all three employment agencies on Monday morning and made appointments to see two of them that afternoon and one the next day.
When she got there, they told her that the new graduates had snatched up all the jobs months before, anticipating their entry into the workforce, and it was slim pickings now as a result.
She was coming late to the party, and they had nothing for her.
She filled out all the forms and was willing to take a temporary job in the meantime.
There was occasional relief work in the labs at Mass General, but not at the moment.
Billie was discouraged when she went back to the hotel that afternoon.
She started looking for jobs online, and found nothing there either.
She scoured the newspaper and called the agencies back for the next two weeks, and didn’t get a single interview.
The agencies were flooded with the latecomers like her, who had done nothing about finding a job until after graduation.
The market was glutted with young people looking for work, and all the good jobs were gone.
Trying not to panic, she decided to go to New York for a few days, to see what she could turn up there.
She was beginning to worry she’d run out of money.
The campus bookstore gave her a few days’ work, but it was slow season for them, and they couldn’t give her a full-time job, just some shifts to fill in.
But New York was a big city and there would be more opportunities.
She took the train to New York, and stayed at a youth hostel on the Lower East Side.
She made the rounds of the major hospitals, to see if she could get some relief work at their labs, but they were fully staffed with regular personnel and summer interns who had lined up jobs months before.
It was hard to believe that in a city the size of New York, she couldn’t find a single job.
She had ten days of money left when she got back to Boston, and touched base with the agencies again, to no avail.
She was sitting on a park bench, considering what to do next.
If all else failed and she couldn’t find employment, she’d have no choice but to go back to Iowa and help her father at the farm, until she could find a job somewhere, maybe in Des Moines, or even Chicago.
She didn’t want to go back to the Midwest. She hated the bitter winters, and she loved Boston.
But she couldn’t stay there without a job, and she couldn’t afford the hotel for much longer.
She was angry at herself for not having looked for a job months before, but she had been finishing her papers and focusing on her exams, and hadn’t had the time to job hunt.
She kept putting it off, and now it was too late.
She was on the verge of tears when her phone rang, and she was surprised to see from the caller ID that it was Mickie.
She never called unless she wanted something, and there was nothing Billie could do for her.
She answered the call, and Mickie sounded bright and cheerful, but Billie knew that something was up if she was calling.
She wondered if something had happened to their father.
He was only forty-one, but he was aging prematurely.
The life of a farmer wasn’t easy, and his drinking didn’t help.
He looked sixty when Billie had seen him at Christmas.
“Hi, Mick. What’s up? Is Dad okay?” Billie said when she answered.
“I don’t know. Why? Has he been sick? I haven’t talked to him in a couple of months.” Neither had Billie. It reminded her again of how disconnected they were. They were hardly even a family anymore, as her graduation had demonstrated.
“I just wondered if that was why you were calling,” Billie said, trying not to sound as down as she was.
“No. When are you graduating?” Mickie asked, and Billie knew there had to be a reason for the question.
“Three weeks ago. Why?”
“Oh. Sorry I missed it. I thought it was in June.” It had always been May, but it wasn’t on Michaela’s radar since it wasn’t about her. “Where are you?”
“I’m in Boston.”
“Are you working?”
“Not yet. I’m looking for a job.”
“Why don’t you come to L.A., and look for one here?
” Los Angeles seemed like it was part of another universe to Billie.
She had never been to California, but Mickie seemed to love it, the weather, the people, the modeling opportunities.
She loved being in a big, spread-out city, with so much going on.
She couldn’t imagine living anywhere else now, and going back to Iowa would be like a prison sentence.
“It’s a long way to go, and I don’t know anyone, except you.”
“You could stay with me. You could even wait tables where I work. They’re always hiring extra girls to fill in on the weekends.
It’s good money and the tips are great.” It wasn’t like Mickie to make helpful suggestions unless they helped her too.
Billie could smell an agenda in there somewhere, she just didn’t know what it was yet.
“What’s happening with you?” Billie asked her. L.A. seemed so far away, and she wasn’t eager to live with Mickie. Somehow Billie always ended up getting the short side of any deal that involved her sister.
Mickie was more direct than usual. “I just lost both my roommates. One moved in with her boyfriend and left me high and dry on a day’s notice, and the other one is moving back to Dallas.
Her dad is sick and her mom is paying for her to go home.
I have a great apartment. I love it, and I don’t know anyone who’s looking for a place right now.
I can’t afford it on my own. But maybe if you get a decent job, we could split it between the two of us.
I just wondered if you’d be interested. Hell, Billie, why don’t you come out here and give it a shot?
The weather is better than Boston, and it’s a lot more fun.
” There were over two hundred thousand students in Boston, which had made it young and lively for Billie for four years, but now she couldn’t find a job.
Los Angeles was on the other side of the country, and she was leery of moving in with her sister.
She knew what that was like. She wondered if Mickie had grown up enough to make it possible.
She was nineteen and had been in L.A. for more than a year, and she’d had roommates, which must have taught her something about not running roughshod over other humans.
Billie didn’t want to relive what it had been like living with her growing up, but they were both adults now, so maybe it could work.
“I’m not sure I have enough money to spare for a ticket to L.A.,” Billie said cautiously, “and if I don’t find a job there, I will be flat broke and won’t have enough to even get back to Iowa.”
“I’ll lend it to you if that happens,” Mickie said confidently. She made good money on tips at the restaurant where she worked, and there were plenty of trade shows in L.A. where she got modeling jobs. They didn’t pay a lot but they covered her rent, if she had a roommate to pay the other half.
“How much would my share of the rent be?” Billie asked her.
Mickie told her, and it would be impossible for her without a job.
Pretty soon dinner would be impossible without a job.
Her situation was going to be desperate soon.
Flying to L.A. would really drain what she had left.
But there didn’t seem to be any jobs for her in Boston.
It was a tough call. She could get a waitress job in Boston, but the labs and employment agencies hadn’t held out any hope of a real job anytime soon.