My streamlined palmcuts a knife edge through the water as I propel myself forward with alternating arms and a four-beat kick. Each stroke is a seamless, rhythmic motion designed for peak fluidity and efficiency, and to minimize drag. Thankfully, it’s all muscle memory, or I’d be screwed, my head lost to a vortex of swirling answers to the questions asked of me earlier. Smart, sassy answers, not the rubbish I provided. Why do you want this job? I don’t want this job; Ineedthis job. Way to go, Bri, you couldn’t have sounded more desperate if you tried. A CEO and his very experienced, dapper assistant bore witness to you practically throwing yourself onto the mahogany and begging with clasped hands. Wait, youdidbeg. Oh, for fuck’s sake, could this get any worse? My feet mesh into a messy blur of unsophisticated five beats per stroke until I feel like I’m actually having one—a stroke, that is. I crash into the edge of the pool and rip the goggles and cap from my face and head, my breathing more gasping and as messy as my feet were in that last lap. Inhale the chlorine-addled air; exhale the pain. My lungs heave as I float there, chin resting on crossed arms until my respiration returns to normal. This act seems to take a ridiculous amount of time. Water beads on my goose-pimpled skin, each puffy exhale an attempt to assuage the feeling of hopelessness. If I can’t watch it dissolve into the pool drain, hopefully I can breathe the rest away under the rippling waternear the lane ropes. Get out of my lane and into another. I admonish all the negative thoughts and ways I’d completely and utterly fucked up today’s meeting. Pen will be disappointed and has every right to be. The lost agency commission alone is more than I earned in acquisitions. Mom and Cait will be devastated; another layer of tortured emotion piled onto their already heaping plates.
By the time I heave myself out of the pool and drip-walk over to my towel, I can just see the barest hint of sky beginning to welcome the twilight. The brilliant blue of the day dissolved into violets and gold, announcing early evening, and I still have to shower, dry my hair, and go to my parent’s house for dinner for Liam’s twenty-seventh birthday. My brother, Liam, is the comedian of the family, and I’ll plant myself next to him for a huge dose of his unbridled positivity and quick wit. His partner, Geoffrey, at thirty-five, is softly spoken and the polar opposite to Liam’s court jester role. Together, somehow they just work. Now, if only Geoffrey had a proposal planned before dessert, then the family focus could move off Caitlin and her woes, off me and the inevitable questions about a job I no longer have, and onto something perfect, positive, and long overdue. Love.
The house thrumswith its own pulse of chatter as I push through the unlocked door and into the passageway crowded with family pictures, before an eight-month-old is placed into my arms.
“Here’s your aunty Sab to save the day, Niamh,” my sister-in-law coos, off to the kitchen to receive a glass of wine held out to her by her husband, and my oldest brother, Connor. Heplants a wet kiss on his wife’s cheek with amwah, as I circle the table still clutching a wriggling niece.
“She sure smells better now, hey,” my dad says, chuckling at his own joke before downing a hefty gulp from his pint. He sends a wink across the table at Ryaa, Kynan’s girlfriend who is heavily pregnant and due any day now; a sure sign that this is all in store for her soon. The good, the bad, and the smelly.
“She was stinky,” my nephew says, looking up from his toy cars zooming along the worn timber floor. Niamh blinks up at me while I’m still holding her like a sack of groceries and breaks into a huge gummy grin. Thegoosandersof baby babble is what I needed tonight, and I drink in her baby scent as those chubby hands wave around before clutching and refusing to release a lock of hair. Mom’s sister, our aunt Maeve, works in tandem with her to serve dish after dish of braised beef and roast vegetables, mashed potatoes and buttered green beans, fried chicken and corn casserole. Somehow, both women have a knack for turning a couple of bags of groceries into a spread fit for an army. If the Bible has the story of fishes and loaves, the Broes do the same with meat and potatoes. Making food go further was a divine skill when fourteen or more could be huddled around our dining table at any one meal.
Glasses are replenished with liquor of choice while Dad bickers with Connor about football and world politics. Caitlin sits next to Geoffrey, his quiet calm mirroring her own.
“I said no phones at the table, boys. Turn ‘em off or fucking leave without food,” my mother groans, rolling her eyes at her sister to show she’s raised a cave full of savages.
“Glyndon Seamus, my ageing eyes must be deceiving me because I swear I see a cell phone in that meaty palm of yours.” Dad looks up, wide-eyed in protest, before sliding the phone across the seersucker tablecloth and into his back pocket. “Aye,no phone here, woman.” Dad takes another swig from his drink. He glares at Connor before rolling his eyes with a smirk.
“And Bub, don’t think I’m not disappointed that you came in alone and not with that handsome Ben.” Molly Broe has an uncanny ability to converse with multiple people at once. Dad can’t save me any more than I can him.
“We broke up, I told you that.”
“Shame. Must be hard working with his brother at the next desk over.” Her penciled brows lifted with a questioning pause. Well, it’s not a problem anymore, I wanted to snap back, but instead bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper.
A dish of salad goes flying when Maeve steps on a bright blue matchbox car in her wedge sandals.
“What the fuck?” she screeches as the car careens into the baseboard before Thomas wails and chases after it, checking it over for damage. Chippy, our twelve-year-old Airedale cross, begins hoovering up the spilled lettuce and tomato like a child inhaling candy from a burst pinata.
“Kynan, get the dog before it eats any onion and we’re back at the vet for another two hundred dollars. Fucking hell,” Mom moans, eyes on Chippy like she is his personal parole officer. Daughters of an Irish publican, they drop the word fuck like a comma.
Aunt Maeve joins the chorus. “You can’t be leaving your bloody toys around when adults are moving about with food, boy. Go wash your hands and sit down, okay?” She deftly kicks the rest of the cars into the corner with the precision of a FIFA striker.
Tommy bounds over to the sink with a goofy grin and climbs up on the timber stepstool Dad made for us when we were little. He squirts four pumps of hand soap before Connor assists his son, sandwiching his tiny hands between his huge ones. It’s chaos. Glasses clinking, Niamh wailing when thesteaming corn casserole was moved out of range of her grabby fist. We are a burgeoning portrait of deliberate lines, thick and black against the ivory paper. Dad is the first stark layer of charcoal laid onto the paper to form the bones of the work, the structure and heavy lifting required for the image to take shape. Mom and Maeve place serving spoons into the many Pyrex dishes, both talking a mile a minute to no one in particular. They are the softened background pigment resulting from the blending sponges, knowing what is needed and when. Connor, Liam, and Kynan are the mechanical pencils adding depth and detail; without them there would be none of the masculine boldness, none of the moody shadows and lowlights. Because Ronan is still backpacking through Europe, he would be the negative space. This moniker isn’t meant as an insult, but to highlight the value of leaving the paper pure and untouched, adding nuance and contrast to the building piece. And me? I’m an eraser. Trying to the best of my ability to erase the looming debt that could hang over my parent’s heads like a guillotine. Some specialists refuse to even consult with uninsured patients. How the hell will this work without the money from the Mercer job? I use a variety of erasers in my work to soften heavier tints and expunge others. “What you take out of a piece is as important as what you lay down,” my art teacher once said. “See through someone else’s eyes, Sabrina,” he’d say over and over when he talked about perception and depth. Only my baby sister can’t even see through her own without those blooming jellyfish coming to spoil the party. If I could give her my eye, I would, but I can’t. Well, I’m going to give her my very best effort at a solution for this messed-up prognosis, no matter what.
While I churned endless laps through the water earlier, OnlyFans drifted into my consciousness, before drifting out almost as quickly. The myth about people making six and sevenfigures from feet pictures is just that: a myth. If my feet weren’t disgusting, perhaps I could be tempted. Especially if it meant I didn’t have to show my face and, God forbid, someone recognized me.
I’m almost through the last of my food when my phone begins to buzz.
“I swear to fuck, you assholes want me in an early grave,” Mom rants, clutching the base of her throat and imaginary pearls to hammer the point home.
“Not mine, darl,” my dad protests.
“Fuck, Bubble!” Liam says, throwing me under the bus with no mercy. Gee, thanks, bro.
“Bubble, of all the people, why do you insist on graying the hair of the woman who birthed you?”
The short answer is, I don’t. I love my family beyond the limits of boundless universes, and would do anything for any of them, including flicking Liam’s ear as I move.
Trying to extricate my chair from the sandwich of Liam’s bulky frame and smug face, and my dad’s admonishing, all the air in my throat seizes when I see a text from Penny.
Pen
Do you have anything to share about today?
Me
The interview? No. Why?
Pen
