She can go take a long walk off a short pier. I get a text from her a moment later.
“I need to talk to you. It’s v v important.”
Of course it is. She wants back in my good graces after recently running up my credit card and losing or hocking (the jury is out but my money’s on hocking) our grandmother’s jewelry to fund her drug habit. I’d texted my parents the day before to say I was here, I was safe. Mom also knew where I’d be working. No one else but my folks needed to know.
Mom understood I needed a time out. She knows Jon dumped me but doesn’t know about Steph and I haven’t bothered her with the sordid details of how Cait has been taking advantage. She knows about the jewelry, though. She and Dad have cut Caitlin off and so she has stopped trying to get money and sympathy from them. I need to do the same. My sister has hit rock bottom and I can’t continue to enable her.
She’s so predictable. She’ll try to get back into my good graces and get my guard back down, and then she’ll strike out again, like a viper. Not today, bitch.
I stuff my phone back in my bag and feel an immediate onslaught of guilt for thinking of my sister as a bitch.
I have to work on that. My guilt. I forgive so easily. That’s how I wound up a doormat.
I hear Grams whisper in my mind.
“It’s loyalty, sweet cheeks. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in that.”
We were close. Very close. And she passed away a year ago and I still feel that loss deeply, which is why I lost it so bad on my sister. It was bad enough she’d put me in debt to the tune of five thousand dollars on my Visa card. It’d sting paying that money back and it would take me months of living lean to pay that debt down, but at the end of the day, it was just money. The money didn’t have memories attached, like the colorful butterfly broach I’d play with, while sitting on Grams’ lap at weddings and funerals. She always wore it on memorable occasions. Grams had a big jewelry box filled with precious memories.
Money wasn’t the necklaces and bracelets that I’d seen on her neck, around her wrists, when she read us bedtime stories or dried tears on my face when I’d experienced whatever heartache was a part of growing up. She had several antique rings with large interesting gems. Fancy earrings. Our family wasn’t wealthy. Not at all. Mom’s a bank teller and Dad works as a factory foreman.
But, Gram’s parents had been rich, back in their day, and some of that jewelry came from Grams’s mother. Most of it wasn’t my style and I’d never wear it, but I wanted to have it, because it was hers. Maybe one day have some of it made into jewelry that I would wear.
Our family was close. Family dinners on Sundays. Birthdays. Special occasions. Caitlin, two years older than me so in the position to be the responsible one, had said she couldn’t find it, that she’d taken it to have it appraised, but it was in her car when it got repo’d. Mom went to the company to see about getting the box back and was told it wasn’t there.
Thankfully, I had one item left. A tiara with real diamonds and emeralds in it. It’s a bit gawdy but as a little girl, I’d loved it. The only reason it wasn’t in with everything else is because it was inside my giant dollhouse, on the fireplace mantle inside my dollhouses’ living room. Mom worried it was too valuable to be left in a dollhouse, but Grams had waved her off, telling her it was just a trinket and that I was a careful girl who would be responsible with every trinket in my care, whether valuable or sentimental.
I’d pulled it out of Mom and Dad’s attic before leaving for San Diego and packed it.
Caitlin accused the repo man of stealing all the jewelry. I believe she pawned it all before her car got repo’d. I’d said that if she did that, she just had to tell me where to, so I could go and buy it all back on plastic if I had to. And that was how I’d found out that she’d stolen my credit card and run it up.
“I didn’t hock Grams’ jewels, honey, but I did kind of use your credit card.” She winced and gave me an apologetic look. I was tired of that ‘look’. “I’ll pay you back, ASAP”
Asap? More like, a sap. A fool. The one duped. Always the sap.
Caitlin had been under a cloud of what she’d called bad luck. She’d gotten an eviction notice, had her car repo’d, and lost her job.
Bad luck, my eye.
She was still doing drugs, and her Ponzi scheme eventually unraveled so she resorted to stealing from family. I’d been letting her stay with me. Now Steph could deal with her until it was time to vacate the apartment.
No longer my circus, nor my monkeys, as the saying goes.
Cait is twenty-eight and is acting like she’s seventeen. I’m twenty-six and I act like I’m thirty-six.
What I wouldn’t give for one more family dinner with Grams, with the old Caitlin there.
***
San Diego is a breath of fresh air. Salty sea air
that’s free of the things that made me want to run away from home. It was perfect timing that made me run into Mr. Carmichael in the copy room at work, which led to that impromptu meeting in the boardroom where I had an on-the-fly interview about my social media and internet marketing skills.
When he offered this job on the spot, I decided I’d rock it. I’d rock San Diego. And I’d rock my new life. Perfect timing.
I hadn’t told my folks yet that I wanted to stay beyond the three months. I hadn’t given them the full picture of why I needed to get away. Let’s see how this goes first.
I love everything about the idea of living this city so far and hear great things about working for Carmichael Consulting.