Until the Day I Die(9)
I can’t think of what to say.
“What matters is your mom is safe with me, okay? Because I care about her as a friend. And if I think she’s in trouble and needs my help, then I’m going to be there for her. I’m going to do what’s best for your mom, no matter what.” His eyes seem really tired. Sad and tired. They are green, burning like neon in the slash of light from the blinds.
“Like an intervention, you mean?” I ask. I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud too.
He blinks at me. “Maybe something like that, if the situation calls for it. Just her friends and family asking her to take care of herself. Nothing dramatic.”
“Whatever you do, I want to be included. I want to be there when it happens.”
“Of course. Of course you’ll be included.”
We stare at each other.
“But hopefully we won’t have to do anything like that. Look, Shor, I’ll talk to her, okay? Maybe you can come in over the winter break and work at Jax. And definitely over the summer, if we haven’t sold by then.”
It wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear. “Okay.”
He holds my gaze. “You’re a good daughter, Shorie. A good, lovely person.”
I grimace. I’m not a good, lovely person—I’m a human dumpster fire, and I’ve acted like a monumental shit today—but I don’t argue with him. The truth is, even though I don’t fully understand how he feels about Mom, I’m grateful that he’s here and that he’s looking out for her. I hadn’t realized how heavily it had been weighing on me until just now.
Before he goes, he hugs me and tells me that he’ll check in on Foxy Cat from time to time. I’m suddenly surrounded by his manly scent. It reminds me so much of Dad that I have the urge to leap backward out of his arms.
Grief, loneliness, confusion . . .
When he’s finally gone, I grab my laptop, settle on my narrow twin bed, and pop on my headphones. I let the music blank me out, and while I wait for my email to load, I take a deep breath, hold it, and look at my phone. Gingerly, I touch the top right corner of my home screen. The app with the mustard-yellow icon featuring half a white j.
Jax: get the jump on your taxes.
“Hi,” I say to the home page, like it’s an actual person. But that’s what Jax kind of is to me—an old friend with whom I’ve shared most of my life. And I feel things when I see that familiar mustard yellow page. So many things.
Sorrow, comfort, delight . . .
Or maybe the feelings are because of the single message in my unread private message queue. The last message Dad sent me before he died. The message I’ve never had the courage to open.
8
ERIN
Perry, Ben, Sabine, and I dreamed up Jax one Christmas almost four years ago.
For the first time in our friendship, the four of us had found ourselves restless at the same time: Perry and Ben had spent a couple of decades working at various app development companies but had grown weary of making other people’s ideas happen. Sabine was treading water, managing a chain of successful yoga studios for a company out of Atlanta.
Years earlier I’d quit my job at the management consulting company to focus on restructuring and filling Shorie’s time, something her elementary school didn’t seem capable of doing. But then, in middle school, she signed up for a string of advanced classes, joined the lacrosse team, and didn’t seem to need me in the same way. I was okay with it, honestly. I was itching to get back to the world of adults.
That Christmas night, after all the wrapping paper and ribbon had been cleared away, Ben and Sabine dropped by. The five of us gathered around the tree that Perry and Shorie had decorated with purple-striped candy canes and silver spray-painted pine cones, drinking whiskey (Shorie, hot cocoa) and throwing out ideas for a new app. Some of them were okay; some were completely off-the-wall. But it was Perry’s idea that made us all go silent.
An app that would keep people on the financial straight and narrow.
It would do everything for even the most budget impaired: deposit and allocate every paycheck into the proper categories, then, for the remainder of the month, tell customers what they could and couldn’t spend.
And here was the clincher: Perry had figured out a new way to connect merchants, banks, and credit card companies with our system to pull all the necessary data on the fly—something no one had been able to do up to that point.
After the fire burned down and Shorie wandered upstairs to try out her new watercolors, we continued to brainstorm. There was a growing feeling of giddiness in the room. A kind of premonition of something so big and transformative just around the corner. We all knew what was happening without even saying the words aloud. This was going to be it. The idea that would change our lives.
We had two to build (Perry and Ben) and two to manage and sell (me and Sabine), and we agreed to split the ownership of the company equally between us four. Perry called his father, Arch, who had owned a trio of successful shopping centers out in Texas since the eighties. Over the phone, he agreed to kick in $650,000 to get things off the ground. A loan with no fixed repayment schedule, and he didn’t even want ownership. I wasn’t so sure I wanted us to be indebted to my father-in-law, especially with the uneasy relationship Gigi and I already shared, but Perry insisted we’d be able to pay him back within the first few years.