Chapter 5 #2
These two men were very dissimilar in their appearance and also their temperament. Even when Shane had argued with his roommates in his driveway, I hadn’t heard him scream like this and of course, he hadn’t called them dingbat bitches like my dad was doing to my mom right now.
My own tongue-lashing was coming next, but I was already tuned out because I was busy thinking about the emails I had just received from my professor.
She’d written that she had been surprised and dismayed by the group project that I’d submitted.
She had let us know that we were getting an F and suddenly all my classmates had a lot to say via angry texts in our group chat about how I’d messed everything up.
I had messed up, hugely: I hadn’t gone back in to check over my work one last time before I’d submitted it, after I’d told my “collaborators” that the project was done and I’d be handing it in soon.
Unbeknownst to me, one of them had opened it (for the first time) and had destroyed it.
The professor let us know that the conclusion didn’t follow the evidence (mine had, before it was mangled).
And the evidence was messed up, too! The graphs were wrong, with altered numbers and missing data points.
She also wondered why my name had been removed from the project, asking if I had been a working member of the group—
Shane’s voice broke into my thoughts. “You need to calm down,” he was telling my father. “From what I’ve seen, your wife and daughter work very hard. Don’t call them names. Don’t raise your voice.”
“I don’t know who the hell you are, but you can get out of my restaurant!” my father yelled. Volume was his usual conduit of control.
“It’s ok,” I told Shane. “You don’t need to stand up for me.”
“Stay out of it, Molly!” my dad ordered.
“Dominic, please don’t behave this way,” my mom said. She spoke in the same tone that she used with me, disappointed and resigned. It was like she already knew that her words wouldn’t make any difference to him.
They didn’t. He returned to ranting and also jabbed at the air with his thick pointer finger, his voice still raised.
I managed to hear Shane when he spoke again.
“Molly. Let’s go,” he told me, and that sounded like a great idea.
I handed the car keys to my sister, who fled into the refuge of the office as he and I walked out of Walter’s.
I turned around a few times as we went because we had left my mom in there to deal with it, but she was used to her husband after all these years. We all were.
“Good golly,” Shane said as we got into his truck. He drew out the words so that they sounded like they had a lot more letters. “What got into him?”
“I’m assuming it was the Wi-Fi. I mean, I assume that he read something that made him upset,” I answered. “After my sister rebooted the network, he must have seen an email or text that got him going. I did.” I was already looking at my phone and re-reading what my professor had written.
“Does he always talk to you like that?”
“My dad? Yes,” I said. “He has a terrible temper and it’s been worse since Christmas.”
“Holiday stress?”
“Running the restaurant is hard for everyone. Look,” I said. I passed over my phone so that he could see what was currently making more stress for me.
He raised his sunglasses and squinted at the screen. “Your professor is failing you for falsifying evidence and doing a generally terrible job,” he summarized, and I explained what had actually happened.
“This is what comes of letting others meddle. ‘Group project,’ my butt,” I told him.
“You can’t depend on people and you have to be the one watching out at all times.
Even my mom has done ridiculous stuff. I have to go over our books every week and I should do it even more frequently. I have to be on top of everything.”
“You don’t ever do anything wrong,” he stated, but then looked at me sideways.
My thoughts went back to when I hadn’t bothered to count the jugs of vegetable oil in the restaurant supply delivery. And there was also that video…
“I make mistakes,” I admitted. “I need to watch myself better, too.”
Maybe I sounded calm and maybe even resigned, but I wasn’t.
“We don’t get many grades in that class,” I said.
“If my professor sticks with the F, then I might not pass. That would mean I might not graduate and I have to. I’ll lose my scholarships and I can’t keep paying tuition.
This has taken me much too long already. Five years!”
“That’s not so bad with how many hours I’m guessing you put in at Walter’s. You need a job that actually pays money, not working for that guy.” We were already leaving that guy behind us as we pulled out of the parking lot and I looked back again, thinking about my mom.
And Shane was right about the job. “I’ll find one. I’ll also graduate and get my own apartment, eventually,” I promised. “First, I need to straighten this out with my professor.”
He drove me home so I could do that. He stayed in the living room, working on his reports, while I went upstairs to coax some life into my laptop so I could try to convince my professor that I wasn’t an idiot in the way that she thought.
I hadn’t faked graphs and lied, but I had made the mistake of handing in a project that did those things.
I wrote to her to explain what had happened and how, ultimately, it was my fault for not controlling the other people.
I was able to show her the edit history and I sent over a previous version, one I had done alone.
I asked if she would be able to grade that instead, at least for me.
The other people in the group could figure out their own problems.
I waited a few minutes for an answer before I returned downstairs to find Shane. He was now in the kitchen, seated at the table with my brother Max. I walked in mid-sales pitch.
“It’s pretty much bound to succeed. It really can’t fail,” my brother was telling him. “It can’t lose because it’s me. It’s me, I’m the guarantee. I’m the guarantee.”
“This situation is entirely crappy and it’s me, I’m the guarantee.” I must have mumbled part of that out loud because they both looked up at me.
“I was just hearing all about your brother’s business idea,” Shane said. “As I explained to him, I don’t have extra cash to invest right now. Unfortunately,” he added nicely.
“Shane, you don’t want to miss out on this opportunity. You’d be getting in on the ground floor of a business that’s going to explode.”
“Why would you want to be on the ground floor of something that’s going to explode?” I asked. “It seems like you’d want to run away.”
“Is it your purpose in life to piss me off?” Max asked me.
“You know about mopping floors and filling ketchup bottles, not how to start your own business. Stay in your lane.” Then he turned to our guest and smiled.
“What do you think? You’ll kick yourself later when this thing explodes.
I mean, when it gets to be highly profitable. ”
Shane stood up. “I’m not giving you any money,” he announced. “My job is to watch football players and drive around in my truck, and I still feel qualified to tell you that you have a bad plan that’s destined for failure, even with you as the guarantee. See you around.”
I trailed after him, back into the living room, where he looked at me and shook his head. “I remember what you said about the people you live with—”
“Jackoffs,” I filled in.
“What the heck is wrong with your family?”
“Let’s go,” I said. “I bet that my dad will leave Walter’s soon and he’ll come back here, since he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. I don’t want to see him again right now.”
I was pretty sure that Shane said something about avoiding my father for the rest of his natural life, but he was already on his way out the door so I wasn’t sure.
And speaking of people who had nowhere to go…
yes, I meant myself. I was always at the restaurant, school, or hiding in my bedroom. What would I do now?
“I guess I could hang out in the library at my college. It’s open for a few more hours,” I mused, checking the time. I had been avoiding the library ever since the video release, but that was dumb. I probably should have faced the people laughing at me, even though I didn’t want to.
“You could come with me,” he said. “I have things to do.”
“Sure, I’m in. What do you need?” I asked.
“You agreed very quickly. What if I said something terrible, like gravedigging?”
When I’d been a thirteen-year-old idiot, I had hung out in cemeteries and taken selfies with the tombstones, which I hoped would convince everyone that I really was cool. Really, I was! “I would prefer to avoid graves,” I said.
“Me too. I’m going to rent an apartment today,” he said.
“A nice one?”
“I think so.” He nodded. “I looked at one that sat on top of a mechanical room and another with a wavy orange line about midway up the wall.”
“Water damage?” I guessed. I had seen that when we’d had the flood at the restaurant.
He nodded again. “It came in from the parking lot. I said no to those places.”
“Do you want me to go over the lease for you? I’m pretty good at reading boring stuff,” I said. “I do it for the restaurant all the time.”
He was nodding but also kind of shaking his head, more like wobbling? It didn’t really make sense as a response.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Are you saying yes or are you saying no?”
“I don’t really need help with that, but it would be nice.”
I still watched him, not fully comprehending, but then my phone started to ring.
Usually, that meant something awful because it was either my mom calling to sigh and say that she needed me at the restaurant, or it was my dad yelling and cursing about another problem.
But this was my professor, so it could have been even worse.
We talked for a while as Shane’s truck crawled down the road and when we hung up, I was so relieved that I was shaking.