Big Law (16 page)

Mom came up behind me and tentatively placed her hands on my shoulders, as if she was afraid I might turn around and attack. “Don’t worry about it, honey,” she said in a voice barely louder than a whisper. “We have tons of desserts. More than we know what to do with.”

Two hours later, everyone was helping Mom clear the table, patting their stomachs and complimenting the delicious dinner. The calm, content feeling I’d enjoyed earlier was completely gone; fretfulness and anxiousness had taken its place. Throughout dinner, I’d kept pulling my BlackBerry out of my pocket underneath the table, willing it to ring and be someone in document services telling me it was taken care of. I barely touched my food, not wanting to add to the brick of stress in my stomach, and couldn’t decipher the conver
sation going on around me, the words just blending together in one loud buzz. I had the distinct feeling that I was outside of the whole scene, like I’d been transported there by the Ghost of Christmas Past, showing me scenes of my family’s festivity.
Here you are in Christmas 2015, tethered to your BlackBerry … and you burned the gingerbread roll
…

“Can you grab the platter of turkey?” Mom gestured to me. “I want to stick it in the fridge.” She was balancing a stack of dinner plates in one hand and an unfinished bowl of green beans in the other as I picked up the platter and followed her into the kitchen. I still hadn’t heard from anyone in document services. I was going to have to find a place to FedEx the document myself, but I needed to be strategic about it so my parents wouldn’t know what I was doing. They would think I was crazy and tell me to relax—that it could wait. They wouldn’t understand.

I covered the turkey with Saran Wrap and shuffled some things around in the refrigerator before sliding it in. “Mom, I just have a quick errand I need to run,” I said in my best nonchalant tone.

“Now? But I’m going to serve dessert soon,” Mom fretted. “Where do you need to go?”

“I’ll be back in ten minutes!” I called as I was running out the door, clutching Dad’s car keys and the 234 pages I had printed on my parents’ painfully slow printer. I didn’t dare tell her I was doing work on Christmas Day. It would have broken her heart. Best just to ignore her question completely and come up with an explanation later.

I drove to the nearest FedEx Office branch, hoping it would be open, but when I pulled up all of the lights were turned off.
If you’re going to claim you’re open all the time, then you should be open ALL THE TIME,
I thought angrily, slapping the steering wheel in frustration. Didn’t anyone else
work
besides me?
Okay, what next? Think, Mackenzie, think
, I commanded, rubbing my temples with my index fingers. It had only been a few hours since his email, but I felt as if Ben were sitting in the car next to me, red-faced and angry, shouting, “Send the fucking document NOW!” My BlackBerry buzzed again.

A fax machine? What was this, 1988? Frantic, I raced to the neighborhood mini mart, realizing it was the one place close by that would be open and possibly have a fax machine.
Thank God for the hardworking small business owners
, I thought as I pulled up to the parking lot and saw the lights on and a man sitting behind the register. Good people, they are.

“It’s a dollar a page.” The clerk gestured to the fax machine. “And that many pages will take a while.” He barely looked up from his magazine. I wondered what tipped him off—the desperate, panicked look in my eyes, or the fact that I was clutching 234 pages like they held the answers to the mysteries of the universe.

I threw my credit card down on the counter and handed him my pile of papers. He didn’t move.

“Cash only.” He flipped the page of his magazine.

“Shit,” I muttered, opening my wallet to assess my cash situation. I had four singles and a few quarters. “Okay, I just have to go to the bank machine. Can you start the fax while I go get some cash?” I flashed a pleading expression. “Someone is waiting beside a fax machine for this in Mexico. It’s really important.” I hoped my tone conveyed the urgency of the situation.

“No. Prepay only,” he barked at me without looking up.

Of course.

Fifteen minutes later, after emailing Ben that the fax was on its way, I returned to the store with a pile of cash and an extremely short fuse. I slammed the money on the counter. “Okay, start it.” Breathing heavily, nostrils flaring, I glowered at him like we were about to
brawl. Not that he noticed—he barely even looked at me. I was having a stare-down with the top of his head.

He put down his magazine and slowly stood up. One by one he leisurely started to pile the pages on the fax. Precious time was ticking away and he was dawdling like it didn’t even matter. I drummed my fingers on the counter in frustration “Will take a while. Lots of pages.” He said flatly.

Forty-five excruciatingly slow minutes later, I finally got the confirmation that the fax had gone through. “Merry Christmas,” the clerk called out as I left the store, the bell on the door ringing as the door slammed behind me.

When I arrived home I found my mom in the kitchen cleaning up the dishes from dessert. “There you are!” she exclaimed, the relief evident in her voice. She put down the dessert plate she was rinsing and wiped her hands on a dishtowel. “Mackenzie, what in the world is going on?”

“What do you mean?” I fiddled with the keys, avoiding her suspicious gaze.

“You just disappeared right after dinner. Is everything okay?”

The concern in her voice made it hard to control the tears brimming in my eyes. For a moment I considered telling her the truth. That everything wasn’t okay. That I’d had a caffeine-induced headache for weeks and was pretty sure the burning sensation in my gut was a growing ulcer. That I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept more than three hours in a row or felt the sun on my face. And what I really, desperately needed right now was for her to wrap her arms around me and tell me that I was doing a good job. That it would all be worth it. But of course I couldn’t say all that. If Mom knew the hours I was working or the abuse I was enduring she’d insist on coming to New York immediately to take care of me. Or worse, I’d have to return home a failure. I was so, so close to achieving my goals, I couldn’t risk Mom’s hyper-concern getting in the way. So instead I just blinked back the tears and responded, “Everything’s fine, Mom,” sounding a little more manically cheery than I meant to. “I just needed to run to the bank.”

“The bank?” She wrung her hands. “Are you having money problems, honey?”

“No, Mom! Why would you think that?”

“Well, the presents you gave …” she trailed off into an awkward silence.

Oh God. The presents. I’d already erased my family’s embarrassing, stumbling “thank yous” from my memory. What was I thinking giving my family that cheap junk? Now poor Mom was undoubtedly wondering if she needed to take out a second mortgage on the house to cover whatever financial mess I’d gotten myself into.

“Mom, I can assure you I’m not having any money problems. Everything is fine. Really. I just needed to zip out to the bank machine because I won’t have time to go tomorrow morning. I’m leaving really early,” I reminded her.

She nodded, but didn’t say anything.

“And Christmas just kinda snuck up on me this year …” I mumbled, pulling out a chair from the kitchen table and collapsing onto it.

I could feel her examining me and briefly wondered if this scene was going to play out the same way it always does when Mom thinks there’s something wrong: She locks eyes with mine and repeats “Are you suuuure you’re okay?” and that’s enough to bring on the water-works and the truth from me. But it didn’t happen that way today. Maybe I’d been more convincing than I thought, maybe she was following her natural impulse to avoid conflict, or maybe she was finally letting me figure things out on my own. If she doubted my explanation she bit her tongue.

In the next room, the TV blared, interspersed with hoots of laughter as everyone watched
National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
for the fifteenth year in a row. My favorite movie of all time.

All I really wanted to do was curl up under a blanket on the couch and laugh along with them. It was even coming up to my favorite part—the part where Eddie kidnaps Clark’s boss after Clark tells him the one thing he wants for Christmas is his boss wrapped up with a bow. Cracks me up every time.

“Well.” Mom took a deep breath, walked over to the refrigerator, opened the door, and pulled out a plate covered with tinfoil. “We tried to put off dessert until you were back, but after an hour everyone got restless.” She popped the plate in the microwave and
punched away at the buttons. “I’ll just stick this pie in the microwave to warm it up.”

I cursed Ben yet again for making me miss out on Mom’s apple crumb pie when it was fresh from the oven. I started to fantasize about someone kidnapping him and bringing him here wrapped up in a bow so he could see how his actions affected a family’s holiday and learn the error of his ways. Maybe he’d even award me the StarCorp secondment on the spot. It had worked for Chevy Chase.

“Ice cream or whipped cream on top?” Mom asked.

I felt my BlackBerry buzz in my pocket. “Ice cream,” I answered distractedly as I pulled it out and surreptitiously checked the message.

Crisis number two thousand eighty-four resolved.

The next morning I walked into the kitchen to find Dad at his station at the stove, making his famous pancakes. Mom will defer to Dad for only two types of meals—pancakes and barbeque. After years of making pancakes on Sundays and holidays he has honed his skill into the best pancakes I’ve ever eaten. In the summer he’ll put fresh blueberries in them and it’s probably my favorite summer memory—the first blueberry pancake of the season. “You’re up early,” I said, grabbing a mug out of the cupboard and pouring myself some coffee.

“I couldn’t let you go back to New York on an empty stomach.”

Dad has never been an emotional guy. Mom showed her love with gushy physical displays and notes left in my lunch box. Dad, on the other hand, was a man of few words. Growing up, getting a “Good job” and a pat on the back from him was as effusive as it got.
That didn’t mean he didn’t show his love, though. He just showed it through his actions instead. And waking up at 5:30
A.M
. to make me breakfast before my 7:22
A.M
. train home was a true act of love.

“Where did you disappear to last night?” he asked as he poured a ladle of batter onto the griddle. “It’s not like you to miss dessert.”

“Just had an errand I needed to run,” I responded vaguely.

“Mmm.” A sudden, prickly silence filled the room as he stirred the bowl of batter then poured another ladle of batter on the griddle. “Listen.” He cleared his throat. “Mom thinks there is something going on that you’re … uhh … not telling her. She said it’s not like you to keep disappearing.”

I rolled my eyes. Burn one gingerbread roll and skip out on one dessert and suddenly it’s a family crisis.

“She seemed to think … uhh … that I should talk to you about it.” Dad’s eyes were fixed on the bubbling pancake. “So, is there anything you need to talk about?”

Poor Dad. I think if he could describe his version of hell it would include being forced to utter the sentence “Is there anything you need to talk about?” Don’t get me wrong, he doesn’t shy away from conversation, but the topic has to be within his realm of comfort—politics, books, sports, TV. Asking an open-ended question that could lead to a talk about feelings—or worse, to tears—would be agonizing for him. If Mom was sending Dad in to do her dirty work now she must think something is really wrong.

“Dad, really there’s nothing to talk about,” I answered in a tone I hoped was reassuring.

“It’s not boy trouble, is it?” I noticed the tips of Dad’s ears turning bright pink and knew that this moment was just as excruciating for him as it was for me. If he broke out the “Are you using protection?” I was going to have to open the oven and climb in.

“No, Dad! I’m just really busy at work. That’s all. I don’t know why Mom thinks that’s so strange. Geez, I thought you and Mom were happy that I’m a hard worker.”

“Of course we are. We
are
,” he repeated, looking decidedly more at ease with the direction of the conversation. “And you’re still enjoying work, right?”

“Mm hm.” I nodded. I don’t remember ever telling my parents that I
enjoyed
work, but no use arguing semantics. Besides, in Dad’s eyes a job that was paying more than he’s ever made would be like winning the lottery on a daily basis. Of course that would be enjoyable.

“Good. I’m glad to hear it.” Dad smiled. His work here was done.

“Did you ever get a hold of Uncle Mike?” I asked, trying to change the subject. Uncle Mike was the one sibling of my father’s that hadn’t been able to make it to Christmas dinner. He’d spent Christmas in Portland with his daughter, Amelia, who had a new job and couldn’t get away for Christmas.