problematic at all," Zelda replied. "I could get down with a good flea market."
"Would you get out of here?" my mother yelled in the same exasperated, put-upon voice she used when we would dump our backpacks, shoes, coats, and sports gear in a heap in front of the door. "Now, Zelda, I have to tell you about the specialty cocktails we have planned for next week. They're just adorable. Do you like Moscow mules? Because I've convinced my future son-in-law he does and that's why we're putting one on the menu."
Zelda gave me a quick wave and I forced myself to head in the direction of my father's den. The conversation we needed to have today was long overdue, and after the new business I'd secured last week, it couldn't be put off any longer.
The glass-paneled doors to the den were open as always and he was seated behind a heavy banker's desk, his silvery white head bent over a page of old-fashioned ledger paper, mint green with slightly darker green column lines. His left hand rested on his ten-key adding machine, the tape curling as it calculated sums.
This was one of the most familiar sights of my childhood, one I associated with home more than my mother's cooking or piling into bed with my siblings because we hadn't learned how to sleep apart until we were seven. It was the rhythmic clack of keys and the grunt of adding machine tape, the scent of dusty paper that lived only in this room, the wide ridge of my father's shoulders against his desk chair.
This was home to me.
And I had to go to war with my home.
That made it sound dramatic in gross, silly ways but my father and I couldn't agree on anything and we couldn't muddle along in that way any longer. It was the three-legged race from hell because I had none of the leverage but all the responsibility to get us across the finish line.
I rapped my knuckles on the door and waited for his acknowledgment. Interrupting someone engrossed in numbers by speaking words was rude. Almost as rude as speaking numbers.
He beckoned me inside with one hand, his other still consumed with keying in figures. It wasn't a power move. My father didn't do anything like that. He wasn't a shark and he wasn't out for blood. The truth was he lived with a singular vision for his accounting practice and when he'd invited me to leave my work at one of the world's leading firms to join him, he'd hoped I'd come around to share his vision. I should've known his willingness to move in new directions and accept change and do the things I proposed wasn't rooted in reality but deal-sweetening concessions he'd never intended to actualize.
I dropped into the chair positioned in front of his desk, a mauve-and-burgundy situation my mother gleefully collected from the side of the road one day. It was better now that she'd gotten rid of the fleas.
A ring of laughter floated in from the kitchen as I folded my hands in my lap. I wanted to sprint in there, tuck myself next to Zelda, and witness every laugh, every meaningful shrug, every glance. There wasn't a moment we hadn't shared since Denver and now…now I didn't know how to exist without her right there.
My father tore a strip of tape from the machine and stapled it to the ledger. He preferred paper to any accounting platform in existence. It was one of his most old-school quirks, one I accepted with gritted teeth and waning patience. There were tons of reasons it was better, safer, and smarter to store this work digitally but his ways were forged in fire. And it wasn't a matter of him coming up in an era when computers and accounting software packages didn't exist. They'd existed. They hadn't been the first line of defense back then but he'd learned his way around an Excel spreadsheet to be sure.
Regardless, he kept his work in handwritten ledgers which he handed off to his secretary to key into a software program so antiquated it was operated on a computer with a floppy disk drive. Since those files were technical dinosaurs, I couldn't translate or reformat them unless I wanted to do it all manually. And the process of hand tabulating followed by ancient computer processing was time intensive. This was a problem because my father also accepted every client who walked through the door, without concern