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)
“Oh, don’t worry,” I say, forcing my gaze away. “They have help.”
Anna laughs. “Help being pregnant and birthing children?”
“No, I mean nannies.”
“Look how quickly you dismiss all that work.” Anna lifts her hand, flicking water back at me. “Your mom birthed four babies and helped your dad manage an empire. Blaire birthed four and is married to Alex. Of course they have nannies.”
We bob in the water while I sit with this. She’s right. So why am I diminishing what she’s done, just like my father does? When I poke at it, resentment builds.
“I have a complicated relationship with my mother,” I admit.
“I get it,” she says easily. “Is it like, your dad is a dick, and your mom enables it?”
I stare at her, wondering how she so concisely summed up the pathos I spent the better part of my twenties working through. “Something like that.”
“But back to Alex…” Anna says, her voice somehow soothing even when she’s pressing at all of my bruises. “Maybe you two are so competitive because it serves your father for you to be at odds with each other.”
This makes me laugh a little. Nail on the head. “You think?”
“You drive Alex crazy because he can’t ever beat you even though he’s the older brother. He’s probably jealous because you’re tall and hot and smart and he’s short and—”
“Annoying. You can say it.”
“You two don’t seem to bring out the best in each other,” she says instead.
I laugh wryly. “No.”
“Why not try being nice to him?”
It takes a second for me to know I’ve heard her right. “Nice to Alex? Why?”
“Uh, because it doesn’t seem like anyone else is? Because you’re his family?”
“Spoken like someone who has no family.”
The second the words are out of my mouth, we both go silent. Fuck. What a terrible thing to say. “Sorry. That wasn’t great. Let’s strike it from the record.”
“All good.”
“Do you…” I reach up, cupping my forehead. “Please tell me you have family. Otherwise, I’m going to dive into the monster soup.”
Anna laughs. “My dad, yeah.”
“No siblings?”
“No.”
“You’re—”
“Don’t say lucky.”
“I wasn’t,” I say. “I was going to say, are you close to your dad?”
“Yes.” She smiles. “Very.”
I pause over this next question. “And your mom?”
“Well,” she says, drawing out the word, “you have daddy issues, I have mommy issues. We’re evenly matched.”
She doesn’t elaborate, so after a few quiet moments, I change course. “I realize I never asked why you switched your major.”
She smiles up at me, squinting against the sun. “You mean telling you I was shitty at all the coursework wasn’t a sufficient explanation?”
I laugh. “Fair enough. But now that I’ve spent some more time with you, I guess I’m surprised you ever chose it to begin with. You lack the typical med student—”
“Intensity?” she finishes for me.
“I guess so,” I say, quickly adding, “That’s not an insult, or at least I don’t mean it as one.”
“Oh, trust me, I know this about myself. Whenever someone asks me what my Enneagram is, I’m like, ‘Whichever is the lazy, affectionate, cheese-loving one.’ ” She shields her face from the intense sunlight. “And, I don’t know. In hindsight I went premed for all the wrong reasons, related to the aforementioned mommy issues. She left when I was five, though she’d pop in and out without pattern or warning, which made it hard to ever move on from her leaving in the first place. My mom was an attorney, my dad is a mechanic, and I think when they first met, she was attracted to the hot blue-collar guy, the kid from the other side of the proverbial tracks. But as an aspiring adult, now I see how those kinds of surface attractions wear off. She didn’t hide her feelings about his coworkers or things like how his hands are never fully clean, even after scrubbing. Even as a kid I absorbed the sense that his was a job, not a career, and that there was a value difference there, in her mind.” Her rib cage expands and relaxes with a deep breath. “It sucks, honestly, but when I was starting college, I chose what I thought would be a career. We hadn’t spoken in a few years by that point, but I was still trying to make myself lovable to her.”
“You were just a kid. You weren’t doing it to reject your dad.”
Anna smiles. “I know. Dad knows, too. Once I figured out that I chose premed for the wrong reasons, it was easy to choose to do what I loved, rather than what might make someone love me. The bottom line is that my mom was never really interested in being a mom. But David Green more than made up for it.”
She says this like any other fact: it’s hot today, the sky is so clear, my mother wasn’t ready to be a mother. For a breath I’m so envious of her easy vulnerability. My siblings and I were raised with our shields up, swords drawn. It’s taken me years of therapy to be able to talk about what’s going on inside me, and I’m still not very good at it.