“You don’t know that. You haven’t spoken with her since your mother’s death, and you only spent five minutes with her this morning.”
“I know she ignored both of us when Mom was sick. I know she barely acknowledged Mom’s death. She and Dylan left everything on my shoulders.”
“It was your choice to take on your mother’s illness. After the way she’d abandoned you, you would have had every right to turn your back on her.”
Frustration inched up Miranda’s spine. “Now you’re contradicting your own lectures on family values.”
“My point is that you’ve had choices, and you need to take responsibility for the decisions you’ve made. You can’t blame the hardship of caring for Teresa and footing the bill for her burial on Gypsy and Dylan. You also don’t get to make decisions for other people, and you can’t expect other people to make the same decisions in the same situations as you have. If you traded places with Gypsy, would you have made a different choice? Would you have left college to care for a mother you barely knew? One who caused nothing but havoc in your life?”
“It wasn’t about Mom,” she said, voice rising. “It was about me. About being there for me. Helping me.”
Marty crossed his arms and sighed. “Life isn’t fair, Miranda.”
He was standing in front of her with one leg. No one knew how unfair life was better than Marty, and it made Miranda feel petty. “I hate it when you do that.”
She’d suffered in her own way. Had her own limb severed when she’d lost her siblings, then her mother—twice. Once when she abandoned Miranda at fifteen to run off to Austin with her newest lover. And again, when she’d returned years later with liver failure before passing away.
Miranda thought she’d dealt with the hurts from her past, but in moments like this, she realized her wounds had only scabbed over. Gypsy’s return felt like a fresh dose of salt.
“People change, Miranda, and life is so damn short. Five years is too fucking long to hold a grudge. This is stupid and juvenile. Not like you at all. None of you kids had a choice in who your parents were or how your young lives were handled. Gypsy had no more say in what her father did than you had in what your mother did.”
Miranda blew out a breath and wrapped her arms around her knees. Fundamentally, she agreed with Marty. Emotionally, she was so damn conflicted.
“The only question now,” Marty said, “is how you want to handle this going forward. You can choose to turn your back on Gypsy, or you can choose to forgive her and rebuild a relationship with your sister. If you could get out of your own way, you’d see this is a pretty big step for her. She’s not stupid, and she had to know how you’d react, yet she came. She’s facing you. Risking just as much hurt as you would be by opening up to her.”
Realizing this conversation wasn’t going anywhere, he changed topics. “Have you gotten any work done on your business plan?”
She closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“You spend all your time waiting for everything to be just right. You use it as an excuse not to jump.”
Miranda dropped her hand and scowled up at him. “I do not. I’m working my way in the direction I want to go. It’s called planning.”
“What you’re doing isn’t planning, it’s procrastination. There are over a dozen shipping containers you got for nothing gathering dust at home. You could be starting with what you have, gaining momentum to get interest from both potential buyers and potential investors, but you’re not. You’re working your ass off sixteen hours a day and spending your weekend volunteering.”
“That job is funding my plan, and that volunteer project is building my portfolio,” she said, growing frustrated. Marty’s observations were hitting a little too close to her weaknesses. “Once this community is done, I’ll have something to show investors and buyers. I finish what I start, and I’m not taking time away from people who need roofs over their heads to further my own agenda.”
“I’m not asking you to. But you need to take a hard look at where your focus has been and shift it. Find more balance—one weekend day here, forty hours at Pinnacle, and the rest on those designs you’ve refined to the nth degree. And stop taking shifts at the bar.”
“I love the bar. The bar is my fun time. Besides, I’m saving your ungrateful ass from having to go in.”
He made a dismissive gesture. “Hell, you haven’t even gone to the local SCORE group who could help you with your business plan, talk about next steps, guide you, all for free. You have so many resources at your fingertips that you aren’t grabbing, it makes me crazy.”
She hated having her fears and flaws brought into the light. She had a hard enough time living with them hidden in locked closets.
“I’m not Gypsy, okay? I didn’t go to college. I fucking dropped out of high school,” she said, her voice rising. “You think the kind of people I’m going to be asking for money from won’t care about that?”
“You have your GED. It’s the same goddamned thing. You’re smart, Miranda. You’re clever. You’re creative. You can figure out anything you put your mind to. But you’re scared, and that fear is keeping you from figuring out what you need to know. You’re scared of people ridiculing your idea. You’re scared of people rejecting it. You’re scared of failing. You’re also afraid of succeeding.”
“Afraid of succeeding?” She pulled a face. “That’s just stupid.”
“If your idea takes off, if someone invests in your plan, you have to make it happen. You have to go all in. And you haven’t gone all in on anything since you learned to weld.”
“That’s so not true.”
“Name one thing.” He spread his arms wide. “Friends? A relationship? Your family?”
She couldn’t think of anything—all her friends were related to work. She’d never had a long-term relationship. She’d given up on her family years ago.