Then Came You - Jennifer Weiner [62]
Hospitalization and medicine and therapy gave him back some semblance of normal . . . but then he got laid off, and lost his insurance, and began to drink again, and to substitute street drugs for the prescription medication, chasing the peace the meds had given him, that feeling of returning to himself. Now my father doesn’t work at all. He lives with a girlfriend, in Section 8 housing, his life a patchwork of stopgap measures and self-medication.
I’d closed the essay by explaining that I wanted to study public policy and political science, to change the laws so that nobody fell through a flawed system’s cracks again. That had been a lie. I liked the idea of working in government, but the truth was that I needed money to help him—to pay for rehab, or a deposit on an apartment, or whatever training he’d need to get his teaching certificate back. That meant majoring in economics instead of English or political science; it meant taking a junior analyst’s job instead of an entry-level position in an NGO or a think tank. Maybe someday, when I’d paid off my loans and my father was well again, I could do what I’d told those admissions offices I would—get a master’s in public policy, do some good in the world. But until then . . . I sighed. On the futon, Kimmie snuggled against me, then kissed my cheek.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“My dad,” I said, with my eyes squeezed shut. “My job.” I could still picture the Steinman Cox recruiters: the man in a beautifully tailored navy suit and a woman whose shoes I’d seen at Saks and whose dress I recognized from Vogue. They’d talked about opportunities and advancement, about London and Paris and Japan. Their brochures were impeccable, their website, a beautiful enticement, filled with shots of attractive young people of many races and cultures talking enthusiastically about everything they’d learned and achieved. Of course, nobody had posted a picture of an overheated office with flickering fluorescent lights, or mentioned that I’d be working in a tiny cube, in close quarters with men who were always shouting, that the walls retained the acrid smell of body odor and fish from the sushi lunches. Nobody said that eighty-hour workweeks were common, and hundred-hour weeks not unheard of when you were working on an active deal, or that your travel would take you to places like Akron and Duluth, where you’d be responsible for things as mundane as hotel and dinner reservations and making sure the Town Cars arrived on time . . . and finding the closest strip club, should your boss be the type.
Kimmie propped herself on her elbow and looked at me. “Dad. Job. Anything else?”
“My eggs,” I admitted. “I wonder . . .” I began, before stopping and shaking my head.
“Wonder what?”
“I guess,” I said, speaking slowly, “that I’d just feel better if I knew where they went. What had happened. If they were, you know, just sitting around on ice somewhere, or if they’d been fertilized.”
She tossed her hair back over her shoulders. Her eyes were gleaming with what I’d come to recognize as mischief. “I bet I could find out.”
“No,” I said. “We can’t.” I’d signed up for an anonymous donation, where prospective parents could find out only the information I’d provided, and I’d never have to meet them, or answer their questions, or ask them any of my own. Given my family history—given, in particular, my father—it had seemed safer that way. Besides, anonymous donors got a five-thousand-dollar bonus—presumably because our eggs would be easier to place, since we wouldn’t be able to judge the prospective parents and dismiss them because we didn’t like their answers or their looks or the town where they lived or the car that they drove.
Kimmie flicked her