She sighs. “You know you’re much too good to keep working here.”
Her honesty surprises me. A greedy little part of me wants to ask for more praise. Instead, I smile at her. “You know I need unemployment, Constance. You’re not going to sweet-talk me into quitting. I might only have a studio apartment, but this is Seattle, after all, and I’m not made of money. Besides, all your talk about Fred has sweetened me on him. I just might keep him around after all, but that starter won’t feed himself. Only the organic, stone-ground best for my little yeast baby.”
“Always with the joking,” she says, shaking her head a little. But there’s an almost fond quality to it, like she’s remembered that if I’m a monster, she’s my Victor Frankenstein. “What will you do?”
I want to tell a story that hasn’t been told. To discover something. To find a spark.
But I just shrug. “I guess we’ll see.”
Two hours later, I’m sitting at home at my kitchen counter, next to a glass of wine, Fred, who lives in a mason jar, and an Amazon box containing all the worldly possessions I had at Beyond the Sheets. It is well before five, but drinking seems like the appropriate response to being suddenly unemployed.
There isn’t much in the box considering I’d worked there for six years, but if pens are frowned upon in that office, so are hard copies of anything. I only had a few framed pictures in my cubicle. My two older sisters and my nephew. And my parents, frozen forever in time.
Beth was distraught when I started packing up my desk, but I was quick to assure her that Constance took issue with the wild yeast, not my article about the grandson. A white lie, maybe, but Beth is one of the good ones. She deserved it.
She asked about my plans too, making it clear she’d follow me if I decided to start a rival dating blog.
“And I’m not the only one,” she said in an undertone, her gaze darting around the open-concept office. There was something so cloak-and-dagger about the way she did it that I almost laughed.
Starting my own blog would be comfortable and, dare I say, easy. But I’m sick as hell of being comfortable. Which is why I’ve spent the last hour emailing the editors-in-chief at half a dozen publications I admire more than ours, places that don’t just publish fluff pieces, but which are interested in real, investigative journalism.
None of them are currently hiring, but Constance’s motto—be bold—has its merits.
My phone rings, and my sister’s face flashes on the screen. It’s a picture of Maisie with her mouth open, her head thrown back in laughter, and it makes me grin every time I see it. Not her, so much. She always nags me to change it, saying she looks like a demented clown—the perils of having curly red hair—but there’s no way that’s happening.
With about two months to go, give or take, Maisie’s at the stage of pregnancy where any man could confidently make the assumption that she has human life growing inside her bump, not the remains of a delicious burrito. She and her husband, Jack, are about to go to a little beach house in the Outer Banks this weekend for a three-week babymoon. They both deserve it. She runs a nonprofit dog shelter, and he works at his family brewery, and neither of them is the sort to take time off.
“Is it happening?” I tease when I pick up the call. “Did you have to cancel your trip because you’re on your way to the hospital?”
But a sob comes over the line, and my back goes rigid. Maisie is not a crier, even at the height of all of her pregnancy hormones. Old fears quicken inside of me, reminding me of another phone call. The one that changed everything. Again. “What’s wrong? Is it the baby?”
Her sob cuts short. “No, nothing bad happened. I mean, nothing that bad. It’s just that Ein bit the dog-sitter when she came over for her meet and greet with him and Chaco. She has all this experience with old dogs, but he took an immediate dislike to her. And there’s no one else who can watch them on such late notice. My friends all have kids or pets for him to potentially terrorize, and I’ll be honest, I’m not feeling great about having him around the baby. Like, am I going to have to constantly keep them separated?”
Einstein is her very old and very grumpy corgi. He’s a bit change-phobic, and now his whole life is being upended. He’s got plenty of sweet mixed in with his surly, but this scenario is not bringing out the best in him. Chaco is his much more pleasant and upbeat companion.
“I don’t think you need to worry about the baby,” I suggest. “Ein might be a grumpy old man, but he’s incredibly short. How would he even get to the baby on those weenie little legs? Besides, doesn’t he have barely any teeth left?”
He probably won’t be around by the time my niece is a toddler, in the grabbing and chasing phase of childhood, but that’s a depressing thought, and I know Maisie won’t want to hear it.
“I guess,” Maisie says, sounding down-to-her-bones tired. “But we’re going to have to cancel the trip. You know, I was really looking forward to this.”
“No! Absolutely not,” I say in horror. “You can’t do that. This is, like, your first vacation outside of visiting Mary and me in forever.” Mary being our older and less fun sister.
“I don’t know what else to do.”
She sounds so hopeless, so defeated, and it strikes me that I can be her hero. She was mine, once upon a time, and I’ve always wanted to return the favor.
Besides, I’m newly jobless. What else do I have to do? I can spend three weeks in Asheville and come back recharged and ready for whatever comes next. It’ll be like a mini vacation.
“I’ll do it,” I blurt. “I’ll watch them.”
“Constance is going to give you three weeks off, just like that?” Maisie asks doubtfully. “It’s Tuesday, and we were supposed to leave on Saturday morning. I’m surprised she even let you take a personal call at the office.”
Here’s the thing. She and Mary don’t know about the fallout of the grandson article. Or my new predilection for wild yeast. They don’t know that I’m in the thick of a somewhat late quarter-life crisis, and for the time being, I’d prefer to keep it that way. They’re both the worrying type, at least when it comes to me, their “baby” sis, and I’d rather tell them about my joblessness once I’ve landed a new gig. So I tell a white lie. “I’ll write some pieces while I’m there. You know, like the ‘Microdates for Microbrews’ one. That one got thousands of comments.”
Some of them expressions of amusement or go get ’em, girl. Some of them of the slut/tease/bitch variety.
“Are you sure?” Maisie asks, and I can’t blame her for sounding dubious. After all, I usually avoid going home. It brings back memories that I’d prefer to keep firmly tucked in my backstory, like I’m some kind of Seattle dating superhero. For a second I question the soundness of this venture, and then I find myself saying, “Yes. I’ll book a flight right now. Asheville, here I come. Watch out Beer Bros.”
“That’s not a thing,” she says, laughing.
“Is so a thing,” I say. Because it kinda is. She lives in our hometown in North Carolina, where there are an unreasonable number of breweries per capita, and her husband and his family own one of them.