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“Why exactly did ya get fired?” Nan cuts in. Her expression is far from neutral. While Dad treads softly, Nan stomps around a topic with steel toed combat boots and kicks it in the balls.
“Umm…a tweet.” I fill my mouth and chew. Stalling is my friend right now.
“A tweet?” my grandmother barks back.
“Yeah, you know––Twitter. Have you heard of it, Nan?”
“Is that what the President does? Sending those little messages?”
This has all the makings of a super awkward conversation. “Uh, yeah, pretty much.”
“You lost your job over one of those little messages?” she repeats in total disbelief. Nan is turning 81 in July. She thinks the “world has gone to shit,” as she has repeatedly tells me. I don’t blame her one bit.
“Yep.”
“What did you tweet?” Dad says, jumping back in, his attention on me too acute for comfort.
“I…I…Remember when I broke the story out of college?”
“The quarterback? The one who beat his wife?” Dad adds.
“Girlfriend. Yes.” Dad’s not much of a football fan. Baseball and NASCAR have always been his thing. “He died in an accident two months ago and…and I posted the article I wrote. I tried to remind people that he wasn’t exactly a great guy.”
Silence. I don’t hear a peep out of them for two whole minutes. In the meantime, I’m sweating. This could go either way. What will not happen is that we’ll just move on to a different topic. Because if there’s one truth I would stake my life on, it’s that nobody ever keeps their opinions to themselves in my family.
“You lost your job because you told the truth?” Nan is a freaking role model. “What kinda shit is that?” Except for the cussing. Nan cusses a lot.
“Mother…”
I’m convinced Gene was an anointed saint in a past life. I’ve never heard him utter a single off-color word or remark.
“What? I’m sorry if it offends your lily white sensibilities, son, but this country is officially dead if a person can lose a job for being truthful.”
“When did this happen?” Dad doesn’t look as convinced of my righteousness as Nan.
“The day of his accident. Everyone on social media was talking about it.”
“Carrie...”
“Dad, they were talking about his Super Bowl wins instead of the fact that he beat a woman.”
“The man has family, Carrie. Parents––maybe siblings. Was he married?”
As a matter of fact, he had gotten married. I remember the shock of seeing the wedding pictures on TMZ and the Daily Mail. He tied the knot six months after winning his third Super Bowl, a mere year and a half after the arrest.
I absently nod.
“I’m not defending the guy, sweetie. He hurt a woman and the law should’ve seen to an appropriate punishment. But think of his family…they’re blameless in all this. They’re the ones you hurt by going after him.”
Dad and his moral high ground. I can always count on him to make me feel like a gutter rat.
“Dad, I don’t want to discuss this anymore. I honestly don’t think I did anything wrong and they fired me for it.”
A moment of silence falls once again. Then Dad sighs. “Well, I need help around here. Maggie’s retirement snuck up on us.”
“She told us last year,” Nan announces, throwing Dad under the bus. Then she winks at me and I bite the inside of my cheek to hide the smile.
“Be that as it may, I didn’t prepare for it. Maybe I was in denial. Maggie did everything around here…” Dad leans back in his chair and takes a sip of his craft beer. “I’ll pay you half of what I was paying her.”
That’s almost as much as I was making at my old job. Journalism does not pay in the monetary sense. And without the expense of rent, I can build a nice little savings account pretty quickly. Which means I can move back to L.A. faster than I had anticipated. The worst is finally behind me.
“Throw in health insurance and we have a deal.”
By ten, I’m back at the Austen, showered, and tucked in bed scrolling through my Twitter account. I don’t know why I continue to torture myself with it, but I do. As painful to revisit as they are, I read each and every one of the life-threatening direct messages and nasty comments and start blocking those accounts. I refuse to cave to the vicious mob and delete my account. It would imply that I did something wrong and despite what my father thinks I don’t believe I did. Besides, If you can’t stand the court of public opinion, you have no business being in a line of work that gets you this level of scrutiny.
The sound of the shower running gets my attention. It’s coming from the wall that my headboard butts up against.
Turner…Jake…Scrooge, whatever, is turning in early. Or maybe he has a gentleman friend coming over. God help that poor soul. And God help me if I have to listen to them doing the dirty.
