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Okay.
I get it now.
“What are you getting at, Mother?”
I know what she’s getting at. I just want to make her say it. This is our thing. We test each other. I’ve talked to many a therapist about breaking out of this mold. Nothing ever works. I fall into the same damn pattern every damn time.
“What do youthinkI’m getting at, Weston?”
And so, we continue with our dance, going ‘round and ‘round to see who blinks first. It’s usually me, just like it is this time.
“You’re upset you weren’t invited, is that it?”
She sniffs. “Oh, I don’t know that I’m upset. But an invitation would have been nice.”
“But you know you’d never come. Dad wants nothing to do with EastSide. Besides, this was for investors only.”
Well, also people next door to us with space we might want to expand into.
“Oh, honey. Why don’t you let us invest?”
She elevates crazy-making to a professional level.
“Mother, you and Dad didn’t want to invest. You were adamantly opposed to my entering the restaurant business, remember? Said it was silly, a losing proposition, for dreamers. That restaurants never make money, and that my imminent failure would bring embarrassment to the family.”
I don’t have to think hard to remember their objections to EastSide, because when they hurled them my way, the harshness of their words seared my psyche like an ugly tattoo. I’d like to forget it. Be the bigger person. Move on. All that shit. Not sure it will ever happen.
And what was left unsaid, but understood by everyone, was not so much that a failed restaurant on my part would embarrass the family. No, the embarrassment part stemmed from my refusal to seize a predestined role in the family business. Dad’s vanity is such that any independent decision made is a rejection of him and everything about him.
Why would I want anyone like that at my party?
14
LIVVY
“Jewel, what’s this sticky stuff?”
I high-step out of whatever’s on the floor of Pawsh Pets, readjusting the house slippers I forgot the change out of before I left my apartment.
Jewel opened the shop for me today, leaving me a little extra time in the morning to feel sorry for myself and the insult I am still stinging from at the hands of the bistro boys from EastSide.
Even if they did take Mrs. Perkins’ dog out to go potty.
The nerve of those jerks. To waltz right in—during business hours! When I have customers!—and ask me to bail on my much-loved boutique so they can have more tables to push more of their carnivorous delicacies.
They can go right to hell.
I’m not going anywhere.
“Oh hey, Livvy. How are you this morning?” Jewel asks, running up from the back of the shop, all casual and stuff even though she’s supposed to be hanging out in the front of the store, where we greet our customers.
“The floor’s sticky, Jewel. What happened here?”
She nods enthusiastically. “Oh my God. It was the greatest thing. You see, I spilled my smoothie. Fucking thing went splat, all over. But Harry”—she turns to point to the orange devil himself—“slurped up the entire thing.”
She puts her hands on her hips and shakes her head like she can barely believe her good fortune.
Um, not so fast.
