Inside Out - Lauren Dane [10]
But Mick wasn’t her mother, and he wasn’t just a few miles away where she could see him all the time and hang out. She’d missed that ease and closeness she’d grown up with. The loneliness of it had been difficult to bear, and it wasn’t until the last four or five months that she’d begun to deepen her friendships with what she’d always thought of as Erin’s crowd. Now they were her crowd too.
“They’re in and out of service for satellite coverage. They don’t always have phones in the villages when the team arrives. He calls when he’s not out in the field. He knows I’ll tell you guys all about what’s going on.”
Her mother’s mouth flattened a moment. “Neither one of you calls enough. Except he’s changing the world and you’re making coffee. You’re wasting your potential and working yourself to the bone trying to do everything when you could just let us help you.” Her mother buttered her bread with choppy little swipes. The tension began to build in the room. Slowly stealing the oxygen until the fight-or-flight reflex threatened to kick in.
“I don’t want to have this argument again.” And she didn’t. She wouldn’t argue and wouldn’t defend her position anymore because they’d said it all, and it was time to move on. She didn’t want to be angry over it anymore.
Her father put his glass down and began to eat. “You had a job interview sometime this week, didn’t you?”
He remembered, and that made her smile again.
“It went really well. I know them all since I’ve worked there for the last nine months. I’m already in training for the job, which really gives me a leg up. I’m good with the clients, and I really want this. That has to mean something. I’m not just doing this job until something better comes along. I want it.”
She studied her father. He’d lost weight since his last back surgery, but his color was better than it had been just a few months before. He’d never be the vibrant man he was before the accident, but he walked with a cane and didn’t have to sit every few feet. He was making an effort, and she wondered how many times each of them might have extended a little bit more and the others missed it or were too angry or hurt to respond. Suddenly it all seemed very silly to not just try a little harder.
“You look good, Pop. I forgot to tell you that when I came in.” She squeezed his hand.
Startled for a moment, he smiled back at her. “Thank you, sweetheart.”
“When will you know about the job?”
She looked back toward her mother. The tension lifted a little bit. “A few weeks or so. They have an executive committee who’ll meet to discuss final recommendations, and they have special steps to perform to comply with the grants that partially fund the position. I’m training one of the part-timers at the café to take over for me and hired another two people for staff since Erin won’t be back for a while, and I’ll be gone.”
“Good. Good. Well, so tell us then, what your brother and uncle are up to.” Her mother put another slice of roast beef on Ella’s plate, daring her to argue.
She didn’t.
Instead she filled them in on Mick and her Uncle Michael’s recent trips into the Bolivian interior to deliver medical supplies and run clinics in the villages, leaving out the part about the team getting shot at. They worried about him enough as it was.
And for the first time in a long time, when she left, she didn’t want to cry.
It had felt as if she’d finally reached the end of a long, hard road and could afford the luxury of pausing enough to look around. She liked a lot of what she saw in her life. She’d spent the last years putting her life back together. Slowly getting herself through one challenge at a time. Each one of those moments had been powerful in its own way. There were struggles to be faced and overcome. She knew she hadn’t seen the last of them in her life. But she did