Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 115198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 576(@200wpm)___ 461(@250wpm)___ 384(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 576(@200wpm)___ 461(@250wpm)___ 384(@300wpm)
Why the fuck didn’t I use that ten-dollar bill to pay for the gum?
But—no! Why the fuck did Derrick fire me over something so meaningless? It’s so petty!
One thing at a time, Mental Dad reminds me.
I jog up the steps to the apartment, sliding my key into the lock, and the “Oh shit!” on the other side translates only once I swing the door open to see my roommate, Lindy, and her boyfriend Jack in a deeply compromising position on my beloved divorce couch. He’s stark naked, incredibly sweaty, and—oh God—still hard. I whip around the second what I’m seeing crystallizes. Her hands are tied to her ankles so she can’t even make a quick getaway, and he frantically works to free her while the two of them shout mortified apologies. My own apology for coming home early disappears into their chaos, and I press my forehead to the wall, wishing I could melt into it and live in the building’s foundation for the rest of my days. I would make such a good ghost.
At the sound of her bedroom door closing with a slam, I turn, leaning back against the wall, trying to decide whether the pricking behind my eyes is oncoming hysterical sobs or laughter.
When I open the fridge, I see that Bondage Lindy and Sweaty Jack have eaten the leftover lamb tagine I’d been saving for when I got home from my shift at the store. All I find inside is a half block of cheddar cheese, an old pint of half-and-half, and a couple of ancient, floppy carrots.
In my room, I fall back onto my bed and stare at the ceiling, too bummed out to even revenge-draw a cartoon Ricky. The walls around me are stacked three deep with my paintings, nearly all of them giant canvases of flowers: nature’s real masterpiece. No brush could perfectly replicate the intricacies of the shadows deep in a petal’s core, the gentle variations of color along delicate filaments, or the complex patterns of light climbing up a naked stem, but I have to try, can’t stop trying, in fact. I finished my new favorite piece yesterday morning—an enormous red poppy with a hidden galaxy of pollen in the deep black center. It’s currently leaning against the wall, partially hiding the one behind it—a tight fist of tissue-thin ranunculus petals, heavy with raindrops.
Sadly, these paintings don’t pay the bills. I have no idea what to do now, but I know I don’t want to find another job like the one at the Pick-It-Up. I don’t want to work at a 7-Eleven or a Starbucks. I don’t want to be someone’s overworked assistant, an influencer, an Uber driver, or a career waitress. I want to paint. But I am drowning in completed canvases and unable to sell a single one. The canned dream I keep kicking down the alley—supporting myself with my art—is nothing but a distant echo. I sold a few pieces after I graduated from college, even signed a manager after a buzzy art show in Venice Beach, but I haven’t had a single painting at a show in eighteen months and my manager hasn’t called in nearly a year. Whether or not I want to, I’ll have to apply at every coffee shop and convenience store I can find tomorrow.
My phone pings on the bed beside me and I immediately reach for it, hoping it’s an email from Barb and Paul at 2:14 a.m. apologizing for their dipshit son—but it isn’t. It’s a bill from the hospital for Dad’s latest chemo co-pays.
I grab a fistful of my comforter and drag it with me as I roll over, burying my face in the pillow.
Two
LIAM
There is a Safeway two blocks from my house in Palo Alto, which is great because of the convenience factor, of course, but it’s also terrible because every time I shop here, I fear I’m going to be caught on camera in the Weston Foods security room four hundred miles south in Irvine.
It doesn’t matter how much distance—geographic or emotional—I’ve put between myself and my family’s corporation, this is my one remaining childhood fear: that when the automatic doors part at any other supermarket, and I set foot inside, my perfectly groomed mother with her custom suit and not a hair out of place will receive an alert. Standing in front of a wall of screens in a security room, she’ll lean in, touching the tip of her manicured index finger to a tiny figure in the corner.
“There. Right there,” she’ll say into a walkie-talkie that feeds into my father’s earpiece. “I see Liam in the Safeway on Middlefield and San Carlos.”
It’s an absurd fear. Never mind that my mother never bothers herself with security footage, or that there are a million reasons I might venture into a non-Weston’s supermarket, including something as loyal as scoping out the competition. But this is the kind of paranoia a man lives with when his family business is the US’s sixth-largest grocery chain and has a decades-long beef with the fifth largest. It’s also the kind of paranoia a man lives with when he shuts his powerful father out of his personal life for years. (Never mind, too, that if my father really wanted to know what I do every day, he could easily find out. Raymond Weston is simply too narcissistic to imagine that the distance between us might not be his idea.)