Jeannie and I had never been close. After I’d turned about five (to her thirteen) and was no longer as cute to play with, she had started treating me with a general disdain.
“I’m still Mom’s favorite,” she used to whisper to me throughout my childhood. “She’ll never love you as much as she loves me.”
For all of our squabbles and differences, I knew that deep down we loved each other. It was just that she had an opinion about everything in my life. Her way was always the right way, and she couldn’t see that she might not in fact be correct. We’d barely spoken since I moved to France, because she was so horrified that I had left Brett without trying harder to work things out.
“You have to forgive him if he’s made one little mistake,” she kept telling me. “It’s not like Robert has always been perfect! At least Brett makes a lot of money and will provide for you. Where do you think you’re going to find someone else like that when you’re almost thirty?”
Now, since I’d had no choice but to come crawling back to her and stay in her guest room until I figured out what I was going to do, she had basically been proven right. As I crept into bed that night in the immaculately clean, freshly dusted, Febreze-scented room that had been prepared for me (complete with Jeannie’s perfect hospital corners on the bed), I had a bad feeling about how the next few weeks would go. There was no question about it: I needed to find a job and get out of here as soon as I could.
“You know, if you had just tried to work things out with Brett, none of this would have happened,” Jeannie said the next morning as I sat sipping coffee and she sat making airplane noises and “flying” little spoonfuls of Cheerios toward Odysseus’s mouth; upon each landing, he would wave his arms wildly, shriek, and knock cereal and milk into the air. It was a little hard to take Jeannie seriously when she had soggy O’s in her hair, milk splashed on her cheek, and a three-year-old who seemed wholly uninterested in obeying her.
“There was nothing worth working out,” I said with a sigh.
Jeannie blinked at me blankly. “But you dated him for three years. And he has a great job.”
“No Cheerios!” Odysseus screamed at the top of his lungs, sending another spoonful of cereal flying around the kitchen. “I want chocolate!”
“Odysseus, sweetie, you can have chocolate later,” Jeannie said in a high-pitched baby voice that drove my crazy. At three, Odysseus was old enough to be talked to like a human being rather than a poodle. “Now it’s time for Cheerios! Open wide for the airplane!”
“Waaaaaaaaaaaah!” Odysseus screamed, his little face turning beet red as he waved his chubby arms around. Jeannie sighed and went over to the pantry to get some Cocoa Puffs. The moment he saw the box, his screams subsided.
I rolled my eyes. “Jeannie, it doesn’t matter that Brett has a great job,” I said once she had commenced with shoveling spoonfuls of Cocoa Puffs into the contented Odysseus’s open mouth. “He left me. Then he started sleeping with Amanda. How am I supposed to be okay with that?”
“Em, you’re almost thirty,” Jeannie said, spooning more chocolate balls into Odysseus’s mouth. Chocolate-colored milk dribbled down his chin in little rivers. “You’ve got to wise up. If your fiancé’s looking elsewhere, maybe there’s something you’re not doing at home.”
“Oh, come on, Jeannie,” I snapped, feeling suddenly angrier at her than I normally did. “You can’t really mean that! I must not have been screwing him enough so he had to go and sleep with Amanda?”
“Not in front of the baby!” Jeannie snapped.
“Screw, screw, screw!” Odysseus repeated in delight, little globs of mushy chocolate shooting every which way.
“Sorry,” I muttered, glancing guiltily at my nephew. “But seriously, Jeannie. I can’t go back to him.”
Jeannie sighed and put down the spoon. She turned away from Odysseus, who immediately knocked over his sippy cup and began eating fallen Cocoa Puffs off his high chair tray by picking them up with his tongue, in between muttering screw, screw, screw thoughtfully to himself.
“Emma, I’m just trying to help you here,” she said. “God knows Mom and Dad don’t have anything useful to say. I’m the only one in this family who seems to know how to make a relationship work.”
I decided to change the subject before I was forced to pour the remaining milk-sodden Cocoa Puffs over Jeannie’s perfectly sleek hair. “So I think I’m going to see if there’s an opening at any of the restaurants on Park Avenue,” I said, referring to Winter Park’s shopping and restaurant district.
“You want to waitress?” Jeannie asked, her voice rising incredulously on the last word.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s not like I can go back to Boy Bandz. And there’s not really a music industry here, you know? I can start applying for PR jobs, but who knows if that will work out?”
“But waitressing?” Jeannie looked at me with what appeared to be disgust. “At the age of twenty-nine?”