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Hell, the last time we chatted on the phone, she spent forty minutes telling me a sad story about a woman who was diagnosed with leukemia. She knew the woman’s life in such detail, I thought it had to be one of our relatives and I had just missed that part, but as we got further into the nitty-gritty of the woman’s weekly chemotherapy routine, I found out it was just some random person my mom found on Facebook and had been stalking her page ever since.
A woman like that, God love her, can’t be trusted in this kind of situation.
I need the likes of a supportive sister and someone who shouldn’t receive a cyber-restraining order from other people’s Facebook profiles. I need my sister. I need Sam. Scooping my phone up off the counter, I dial her contact and wait impatiently through the rings.
“Hey, Brookie,” she finally answers, and I expect to hear my nephews in the background, but I hear a much larger, far boom-ier voice instead.
“Is that Dad?” I ask, wiggling my tongue against the feeling of tingling on the roof of my mouth. It’s fair to say I’m feeling much looser than normal, thanks to the power of the pinot.
“When is it not him at this point?” she retorts, her tone a mix of weary and completely giving up. For some strange reason, it makes me smile.
“You’re not going to live there forever, Sammy. It’s just temporary.”
“It doesn’t feel that way.”
“What doesn’t feel what way?” I hear my dad remark in the background. “Like you’re a good Catholic? Because you aren’t. Hell, none of us Bakers are. Our family sin card has a perfect score,” he mumbles before moving just out of perfect earshot. “Two divorced daughters…”
Something, something, something, I can’t hear.
“Dear old dad,” I laugh. “The pride is just dripping from his every word.”
Sammy laughs. “He really only gets this unbearable late in the day. I think he’s crankiest when his sleep stores start to deplete.”
He must be in another room because he doesn’t say anything back to Sammy’s quip, and if I had to guess, that’s the reason she felt brave enough to say it.
Our dad is a seriously good guy—he would do anything for us—but no one has mastered the art of complaining while complying like he has.
Life just wouldn’t be the same if he weren’t telling us all—including himself—how wrong we were getting it.
But when the shit really hits the fan, he is always the first to show up.
He was there when I got drunk at seventeen and called him crying because my friends wanted to drive home.
He was there when I told him I was divorcing Jamie and moving to New York City to become a writer.
In that same year, he was there when Sammy got pregnant with my oldest nephew Seth before her wedding to the douche otherwise known as Todd.
And he was even there two years later when she had to have an emergency C-section to deliver my youngest nephew, Grant.
The man is rock solid when it comes to support. I wouldn’t trade him, that’s for sure, but if I thought I could get away with it, I’d definitely buy him a muzzle.
“Listen, I’d offer for you to come visit me in the city, but I’m getting ready to go on tour for Netflix. I’m not going to be here for the next three weeks,” I say without thinking, my freely imbibed consciousness far less capable of censoring information.
“Holy shit, Brooke!” she exclaims through a snort. “Way to bury the lede! We really do not live the same lives. But man, I’m happy for you. This is so huge!”
I wrinkle my nose and plop down on the sofa, curling my feet up under my butt. “Is it still huge if I don’t want to go?”
“What? Why?”
“Ah, I don’t know.” I groan. “Just…all those people, a motor home for three weeks, having to shower and get ready every day—it sounds like a lot.” Not to mention, my editor—whom I wrote explicit sex scenes about inside a book we’re supposed to be editing together—will be driving me.
“Please don’t make me fly to New York just to strangle you. You’re doing it. Living it. I mean, Brooke, come on,” she whispers. “A freaking Netflix tour? You made it. You, Brooke Baker, made your dreams come true.”
Tears sting my nose unexpectedly, and I rub at it vigorously in an attempt to head off the actual eye liquid. I know she’s right—I, better than anyone, know how hard I worked to get here. Still, there’s a part of it that doesn’t feel real, a part of me that doesn’t feel like I belong.
Impostor syndrome, I guess is what a professional would call it.
“I’m scared…going out there with people.” I pause and take a deep breath. “They’re going to see right through me, Sammy.”
