“Nothing. It’s nothing,” I told her. I was already trying to figure out how to fix it—there had to be something I could do. My phone vibrated with another text, this one accusing me of ruining her future prospects for medical school.
“This isn’t my fault!” I wrote in the group chat, and that was when we heard my dad in the kitchen. He had been doing his cleaning routine, some of it with my help, but now there was a new explosion of noise: yelling and swearing.
“Oh, no,” I also heard my mother murmur. She looked worried and Morgan was clearly scared.
Dad burst out from the back a moment later. “Why the fuck are you all standing around here?” he shouted. “Can’t you get anything done? I’m the only one working, as always! Molly, get your worthless ass in gear.”
“Dom, don’t talk like that,” my mom tried to argue, and he turned on her to yell more specifically about her failings.
I looked at Shane to see his reaction to our family drama. He had never met my dad or probably even seen him, since he never went into the kitchen. My father and I were about the same height, but he was a lot heavier. He had always reminded me of an elephant seal, especially when he got angry because his barrel chest expanded even more—he seemed to puff up all over as he yelled and swore at us.
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 beensurprised 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 agenerally 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.”
