Three little girls turn their heads.
“But Cole—”
“Mackenzie go inside if you have to go potty! Sorry Holly, what did you say? Goddamit, like the dogs don’t do enough damage to the grass….” Fluffy glances over at him from his spot in the shade and growls. Cole shakes his head and tosses him a hot dog that has been charred beyond recognition.
“Look, the truth is my job is totally dead-end, anyway. I’ve got to make better money so that I can save up and then take a year off to write a book.” Not a bad plan. I’d come up with it during a Roseanne rerun—one of the episodes after the Connors win the lottery and we find out that Roseanne the writer had been imagining the windfall all along (a dreadful ending to a perfectly good sitcom, but inspirational for my purposes nonetheless). Since I couldn’t count on winning the lottery, I needed to find a way to make good money fast.
“I don’t know…”
“Please! I need you to get me in.”
“Olivia! Olivia, goddammit! Skyler’s playing with dog poop again!”
“Come on, Cole—you’re union. You make tons of cash and you get amazing benefits.”
“Yeah, compared to you, maybe, but I have all this to pay for.” He makes a vast sweeping gesture with his spatula, indicating the yellowing sliver of lawn and modest house owned, for all intents and purposes, by the bank. “You don’t want to work on the line, Holly. And you’d suck at it, anyway.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“Yes, you would. It would kill you. Shit. It’s killing me. You think this is what I wanted to do with my economics degree?”
Before I can respond, the back of my mom’s red helmet of hair blocks my field of vision. “Cole, your brother wants another cheeseburger,” she says, holding out a paper plate.
“Mike, you lazy bastard!” Cole yells. “Come and get it yourself! You’re ten feet away! Ma, he’s ten feet away…”
Mike, who’d been dozing in a lawnchair for three hours, flips him the bird, inspiring a hard punch from his wife, Lindsey.
Cole shakes his head and puts another burger on the plate for my mom to bring him.
“That’s his fourth one,” Cole says. “No wonder he looks more pregnant than Lindsey.”
My three older brothers are nothing if not virile. Cole has three, Mike’s waiting on his fourth (as if the twins weren’t enough), and Bradley, who lives in Detroit, has two, but his wife Bonnie is also pregnant.
“Cole, you’re not listening to me.”
“Why should I? It’s a stupid idea.”
“Hey—I think it’s a great idea!” Mike pipes in from behind.
“Shut up, Mike. No one’s talking to you.”
I’ve learned the hard way not to expect any genuine support from Mike. (My brothers really are a bunch of jerks—until the age of thirteen, I honestly believed my mother was planning to sell me to the circus when I was born, but that my father had discovered her plan at the last possible moment and intervened, saving me from a life of shoveling elephant shit.) Cole’s the only one of them who takes any responsibility for the endless teasing and torturing they subjected me to while growing up, and I’m pretty sure that’s because Olivia talked some sense into him over the years (she’s like the older sister I never had). Mike and Bradley still snap my bra strap, and sometimes even practice wrestling moves on me when my parents leave the room.
But old habits die hard, and Cole feigns intrigue. “So tell me, bro—why should I get her a job?”
“Well, she has skinny fingers, so she might be useful for fixing the machinery…”
“True. Go on…”
I can see exactly where this is going. “Shut up, Mike! Cole, don’t listen to him,” I beg.
“…and she wouldn’t be a distraction to the other guys, that’s for sure.”
“She wouldn’t? Why not? Because I was kinda thinking she would…”
“Naw…no boobage!”
Cole stifles a laugh and elbows me playfully in the ribs, while Mike endures two more punches from Lindsey.
“Fuck off. Both of you.” I grab another beer and make my way back to George.
“What was that about?”
When I tell her, she laughs. “Great idea, Norma Rae. So this is what you’ve come up with after a week on the couch?”
“Could it be any worse than what I’m doing now?”
“Uhhh, yeah.”
“At least I wouldn’t be broke.”
“Please. You would not last a single day working on an assembly line,” she says between bites of an empty hot dog bun. Apparently, she’s decided that fat is indeed worse than carbs. “Your brain would revolt.”
“I’ll adapt. I’ll write my book in my mind while I work,” I inform her. (I’d thought it all through very carefully.) “The blue-collar experience will also contribute to my growth as an artist. And what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, you know.”
“Maybe, but it also hurts a hell of a lot.” She shakes her head and starts in on another bun.
“G, I am so sick and tired of being broke. And I’m tired of saving up for months to buy a proper pair of black boots.”
I’ll admit that it took me quite a while to realize that just because I had a real job didn’t mean I could actually be Cosmo Girl and go out and buy all the pretty things I saw in In Style magazine. It required more than three years of scrimping and saving for me to pay down the unholy credit-card debt accrued during my first six months at the Bugle—something George will never let me live down. Despite that initial lapse in judgment, however, I remain a proud member of the Spend-a-Lot-on-Your-Bag-and-Shoes school of fashion. A true classic never goes out of style, and expensive accessories have the power to redeem the rest of a lackluster wardrobe.
“Well, no one said they had to be Jimmy Choos,” she says coolly.
They were my one splurge this year; an investment certain to yield years of pointy-toed pleasure.
“Yeah? Well, I’m even more sick of having to shop online. I can’t believe I live in a city that doesn’t even have a Prada store….”
“As if you’d be able to shop there, anyway! You can’t even afford the Saks outlet!”
“Maybe not, but I bet just knowing a Prada’s around is a damn good feeling.”
“If you want to move to New York, just do it already, Holly! You’ve been talking about it for years. But if you decide to stay, then we can probably both agree it doesn’t really matter if Buffalo has a Prada store or not because unless their spectator pumps come in a steel-toe version, I highly doubt they’d pass the safety codes at the factory. And if they did, it would spoil your plan to save up enough money to take a year off, anyway!”
She’s right. I am afraid. Afraid of New York—where real writers live, where rent exceeds my current annual income, where people toss last season’s Jimmy Choos out with the trash. Why did it all have to be so damn hard? Why couldn’t I just be one of those lucky people who has everything she wants, from guys to Gucci and back again? I quietly eat the icing off my third slice of birthday cake.
“This party sucks,” I conclude.
“No available men.”
We survey the scene. Aside from my brothers, my