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“Hey Squirt!” He rushed out of the kitchen, dusting his hands on his cooking apron and hugging me. It was more enthusiasm than I was used to from him, but he’d also been over the moon ever since I took the job atThe Union Coast. The day I told him, he spent the rest of the evening showing me text responses he was getting from old colleagues he’d bragged to about my new job.
I think he was still riding the high of it, which only made what I was about to tell them all harder.
Eloise came down from her room upstairs while I waited at the kitchen table and played a half-hearted game of dominos with my mom.
She rushed up, wrapping her arms around me with a broad smile. “I found the most perfect place in Brooklyn. I’ll have to show you pictures later.”
“That’s amazing. I’m sorry about Basil,” I added after a beat.
“Oh, it’s alright. He started getting really weird when I sold all those paintings. I think he didn’t like the idea that his work wasn’t selling and mine was. He started going on long rants about integrity and how real art wasn’t about money. It was like he wanted me to be sorry I got paid. It was just too much.”
“Well, good for you. He didn’t deserve you.”
She beamed, then shrugged. “Maybe not!” My dad swatted at her when she snuck a piece of bacon from the cutting board and popped it in her mouth. I noticed there was some fresh paint on her forearm.
“Working on something?”
“Something,” she said vaguely.
My phone buzzed and I considered ignoring it. It was probably someone from work asking about the news. But I decided to glance down at the screen. It was from Elizabeth, which got my attention.
Elizabeth:Sorry, girl. He was really persuasive. Please don’t kill me.
I texted back an appropriately confused response, then spent the next few minutes trying to puzzle out what that meant. Eloise joined in our game of dominos and the sounds of cooking grew more furious as dad got closer to finishing up the meal.
I tried to relax into the moment. Ever since I’d leftThe Squawker,I was trying to learn to enjoy the present for a change. I spent my whole life looking ahead, and now I saw the dangers in that. Life was aboutnow.I looked around my childhood home and tried to enjoy all the decorations–the little signs that my favorite time of year was coming. Each decoration called me back to various moments of my past, like being six and discreetly rubbing the sparkly, fragile santa head that hung from the cabinet doorknob in the dining room. That year, I was hoping to get a gigantic toy horse for one of my dolls that I probably would’ve never played with, but at the time I wanted it more than anything. Or there was the star on top of the tree that had a seam running diagonally through it because it cracked when I asked if I could put it on top. I’d been twelve, and my dad warned me it was hard to get right, but I insisted. It started to tip off and I bobbled it, which launched it into the wall and then the ground, where it split. We superglued it and my dad put the star up every year after that.
I sighed. The old memories were nice, I guessed. But what about the ones I still hadn’t made? I wanted to make new holiday memories. Maybe part of me had hoped this Christmas would be the one where I made memories of cuddling into Dominic’s holiday sweaters and going to parties with him where we drove home late in the snow. I knew I eventually needed to move on and accept that those memories might be made with some other guy, but I just didn’t feel ready for that yet.
Dad set the table and brought a big bowl of pasta along with his self proclaimed “famous” Italian salad. I knew his secret, though. It was just a bag mix with Olive Garden dressing and his homemade croutons.
“So,” he said once he was settled. “What are you working on at The Coast this week?”
He had taken to shorteningThe Union Coastto just “The Coast” even though nobody who worked there did that. I hadn’t had the heart to correct him on it. “Well, I wrote about some new research in psychology. It was something about gender, I think.”
He frowned. “Something about gender? You don’t remember?”
“Well, that is actually what I wanted to talk to you guys about.”
Eloise paused with her fork halfway to her mouth and widened her eyes. We weren’t twins by any stretch, but I think we had a little sisterly telepathy going on. The look on her face told me she already knew what I was about to say and wished she could retreat upstairs before I did.
“I quit today.”
My dad’s fork clattered against the edge of his bowl. He smiled, like he thought I might be joking. “Sorry, what? I don’t understand, Darcy.”
“I wasn’t happy there,” I said. “The Union Coastwas your dream, Dad. It was always just your dream. I told myself I might want it, too, and I went after it. But I was happy atThe Squawker.I had a voice there. I could actually research my own pieces and I had creative license.The Union Coastwas just… It was like a factory assembly line. The research lands on my desk and I put the words down. No emotion. No creativity. It was mind-numbing and soul-crushing.”
“Darcy,” My dad said. He looked so hurt it made me want to cry, but I’d braced myself for this. I knew it would be hard for him. “I can’t believe you quit. That was the opportunity of a lifetime.”
“To what end?” I asked. I’d never really pushed back with him like this, and my heart was already pounding. My mom was just watching us both. She had a way of disappearing whenever we disagreed about something, refusing to take sides.
“What do you mean? You were writing for one of the most respected journals in the country. That’s good work, Darcy. Important work. Someone needs to do it, and you can take pride in that.”
“It just wasn’t for me, Dad.”
“Does this have something to do with that guy?” Eloise asked. “I know you claimed you two weren’t really ‘together’, but it seemed like you two had a fight and then you leftThe Squawker.What really happened?”
“It’s nothing like that,” I said quickly. I saw my dad was narrowing his eyes, probably clinging to the possibility that he could somehow “solve” the problem of me wanting to leave.
