“What?” César asked again, breaking me out of my thoughts of the past. “Tell me why you’re sitting there sighing.”
“I don’t want to be the non-contributing roommate,” I finally said.
He stared at me. “You’re contributing a lot, a hell of a lot more than I am. You’re contributing our baby.”
Well, yes.
“You’ll regret it if you don’t jump on this offer from the Woodsmen,” he continued. “The same thing happened to my parents before I was born. My mom got offered a position teaching at the university in Mayagüez but she already had a job that made more money. My dad told her she had to take it, that they could get by on less and it would make her happy. She’s never been sorry. Anyway, we won’t need to get by on less because football pays pretty well. We’ll be fine.”
I didn’t know how I felt about how he kept saying “we.” I swallowed.
César shook his head. “Man, how cool is this, Camdyn? They’re hiring you for a job that you created. You made them see how they needed you! Good for you. It’s awesome.”
I felt a surge of happiness. “Thank you.” He was right—this was awesome and I couldn’t pass it up. “Ok, I’m going to do it.”
“It’s the right decision.” He pointed to the salad. “Eat your vegetables.”
I crunched away. He made really good dressing so you could barely taste the leaves and other green things.
“Now, are we ready for the onslaught?” he asked.
His parents, sister, and grandma were arriving tomorrow to spend the weekend and go to the baby shower. As in, they were arriving tomorrow to spend the weekend with us, staying in the guest bedrooms, and many other members of his family were flying in the next day as well. Like, 20 of them, but at least they had booked rooms so we wouldn’t all be bunking in the pink palace together. On top of that, my sister Ellie was also coming in on Saturday morning. She was staying in a hotel too, rather than squeezing in with César’s relatives or staying with our father in the house she had grown up in. “You’ll be too crowded, and I’m not ready for a weekend with Dad,” she had explained to me.
“I think the preparation part is done,” I said to César. “We’re stocked up with all the groceries you bought, the bedrooms have flowers, I brought home some bottles of pinot gris from the winery so they could try it and I got the amaro that your grandma likes to drink after dinner. And her cigars.” But I wasn’t sure if I was quite ready for them in other ways. Like, if they started to talk about marriage again, I thought I might do another run outside, and this time, it would be into a pile of frozen mud instead of onto a beautiful beach.
“Good,” César said. He started to go over what he was planning to cook for dinner the next night, an elaborate, four-course thing that seemed to be worrying him. I tried to talk him down from a flaming dessert and we went to bed, but I didn’t sleep for a while, and I could hear him moving around in his room, too. I even heard him sigh.
The next day, I let the Woodsmen know that I would be happy to take the position they offered, the one I had made up myself, for myself. Then I had to tell Euna, which I wasn’t looking forward to. In spite of the fact that we weren’t friends, we had been working together for ten months, mostly just the two of us. I expected a drawn-out conversation and I didn’t want to talk to her about the baby.
I knocked on her office door and she held up her index finger, signaling me to wait. I stood there as she scratched away with a pen in a binder, the one I recognized as the Camdyn Riordan Log of Shame. She read through what she had put down, and I wondered what else I had done that she was writing up. It might have had something to do with the zero-work thing I had been pulling lately. “Yes?” Euna finally asked me. “What is it now?”
I handed her the envelope I carried. “That’s my letter of resignation, Euna. I’m going to be leaving my job here.”
“Oh, thank the Lord.” She stood up. “Thank the sweet baby Jesus, thank you mother Mary! Thank you—”
“Ok, you wanted me to go,” I interrupted her. “Got it. How many weeks’ notice do you want?”
“You’re free to leave right now, you and…” She pointed at my stomach, her nose thinning as she sucked in air and whitening to the point that it looked frostbitten.
I’d had no idea that she knew about the baby. The clothes I had been wearing to the winery had covered everything. It would have been difficult to spot that I had one human body under them, let alone two.
“We couldn’t fire you, not in your condition, because people like you always sue, but holy of holies, we wanted you gone. You and your constant retching, sleeping in your car like a hobo, all the ‘doctor’s’ appointments.” She air-quoted. “The pale, woe-is-me face.” She imitated that and my mouth dropped open. “The crying, all the crying. We had hoped that your connection to the Woodsmen through your uncle would draw in more business, but you were useless for that. Oh, this is wonderful, I have to let everyone know.” She pushed past me to rush down the hall. “David! Barton! Great news!” I heard her call.
Well, that was a little hurtful. Apparently, I was a worse employee than I had even thought, and I was going to have to fix
