with my head for kicks.
Bottom line, the freaking cat somehow snuck out, and I spent a day and a half making up a story of how a door-to-door salesman broke in and stole him. Elmo showed up a few hours after Jackie and Charlie got home, basically giving me the finger, and my sister didn’t murder me. See? Happy ending.
“Elmo hates me. He was planning to kill me in my sleep.”
“Elmo is a cat. He doesn’t have the ability to plan––”
“Says you. I found him standing over me in the middle of the night, ready to smother me with a pillow.”
“If he wanted to smother you, he would’ve sat on your face.”
Elmo is as big as my car. She’s not exaggerating. “Please. I’m begging you. This is the last time.”
“That’s what you said last time and the time before that.”
“What are big sisters for, right?”
“For knowing when to say no. You need to go home and get your shit together. Dad needs someone to help out––Maggie is retiring. Did he tell you?” Maggie is the assistant manager of Comfort Cottages, my Dad’s hotel in the Adirondack Mountains in New York.
He might have, and I missed it.
Jackie shrugs, expression completely void of any sympathy. “It’s perfect timing.”
Yeah, no. No, it isn’t perfect at all. I hate the cold. I hate it with the burning heat of a thousand erupting volcanoes, one of the many reasons I’m happy to call Los Angeles home. My head is shaking before she utters the last vowel. “Lake Placid? Hell no.”
“Yes.”
She can’t mean it. “No, Jackie, please. I can’t go back there.” For so, so, so many reasons. My childhood was not a happy time in my life. Let’s just leave it at that.
Steely resolve shoots out of her big brown eyes and my stomach drops. Crap. That’s her courtroom look. I’d have a better chance of moving a mountain than change her mind.
“It’s too cold. You know I can’t handle the cold.”
“Dad needs help. Nan can’t move around like she used to. It’ll be good for you and them.”
She means it. I am quietly devastated. The food I just consumed sits like a ball of lead in my gut, making me queasy.
“You’re really not going to let me stay here?” It never even crossed my mind that she would refuse to help. Jackie is the one I’ve always been able to count on to come through for me.
“I’m going to do something even better for you––I’m going to let you figure it out for yourself.”
An eerie silence takes over the room. I haven’t been home since I left for college eight years ago. Dad and Nan come out to LA every other year, so it hasn’t been an issue.
I’ve been dreading this day, even though I knew it was coming. Except I wanted to return the hero, hoisting trophies above my head. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Instead, I have to drag my sorry ass home unemployed and broke. This is not how I saw my life going.
“Fine. But I get to borrow your cold weather wardrobe,” I mutter, resigned to the abject humiliation I’m bound to face. Jackie has a killer wardrobe. If I’m going to get dragged in real life, I’d like to do it in style.
“One coat,” my sister, the master negotiator, counters.
“The Ralph Lauren Navajo coat.”
“Get real. No, absolutely not that one.”
“We’ll see.”
Chapter 3
“Did I get you with my elbow?” says the guy seated to my right in the aisle seat. Yes, he did as a matter of fact, for the third time as he adjusted his noise canceling headphones.
“That’s okay,” I answer, shrinking even more into my middle seat.
Let me tell you what hell looks like. In fact, let me tell you what hell looks, smells, and sounds like. Hell is the second to last row on a late flight from O’Hare to Albany sitting next to an oversized overweight giant who smells like a combination of sautéed onions, feet, and low rent booze, who breathes so loudly it almost drowns out the engines roaring next to my head, and not being able to recline and read because an angry six-year-old keeps kicking the back of my seat while he screams, “I want grilled cheese!”
The flight from hell lasts six and half hours due to two connecting stops. Six and a half hours of my life that I would like to permanently scrub from my memory. In general, I’m a good sport about stuff like this. As a journalist, roughing it