Flock (The Ravenhood #1)(3)
Toeing the door closed behind me, I glance around the foyer where a lone table sits with a large, empty vase that I’m sure costs more than my car. There’s a grand staircase to my right and to my left, a formal dining room. Deciding to skip the self-guided tour, I cradle my phone on my shoulder as I haul my bags up to the second floor. She answers on the second ring.
“Hey girl, I made it.”
“This is bullshit,” Christy greets as I enter my designated cell and glance around. Inside sits a stark white four-poster bed my dad had delivered, along with a matching dresser, chest of drawers and vanity. It’s regal in taste, stark white, and nothing at all like me, which isn’t surprising. He doesn’t know me.
“It’s just until next fall.”
“That’s a year, Cecelia, a year. We just graduated. This is our last summer before college starts, and your mom decides to take time for herself?”
It’s not the whole truth, but I let her believe it for my mother’s sake because I’m still at a loss on how to explain it. The sad truth is my mother had a breakdown of epic proportions that led to her losing her job and scraping to pay bills she could no longer afford. Her boyfriend offered to let her stay with him, the operative word being her, not her bastard child. My mother and I have always been close, but even I don’t recognize her anymore. Despite my best efforts of being her good girl, she retreated into herself a few months ago, drinking White Russians day and night for weeks until she stopped getting out of bed. She’d all but abandoned me on her quest for a daily buzz. Though I’d tried, and desperately pressed for reasoning and answers she wouldn’t give, I didn’t know the first thing on how to help her, so I didn’t give her grief about entertaining my father’s proposed and conditional living arrangements.
Seeing her unravel like that was terrifying, and in her state, I didn’t want her going without, especially after all her years of being a single parent. When times became desperate, I asked my father to extend child support—just temporarily—to get her through financially, even though the money he sent monthly and without fail was a drop in the bucket for him—the cost of one of his tailored suits. He refused, and shortly before I graduated, he signed his last check, the act making it seem more like a final paycheck of services rendered like she’d been his employee.
In my wildest dreams, I can’t fathom how they ever coupled at any point, or how they could have been the two to conceive me because these are two people who had no business procreating. They are universal opposites. My mother is…or was until recently, a free spirit with plenty of vices. My father is a conservative with a critical tongue and militant self-discipline. From what I remember, his schedule is like clockwork and rarely changes. He wakes up, works out, eats half a grapefruit, and then goes to work until the sun sinks. His only indulgence when I was younger was a few tumblers of gin after a long day.. That’s the whole of the private information I know, due to his discretion. The rest I can look up online. He owns a Fortune 500 company that used to deal in chemicals but now manufactures electronics. His high rise is a little over an hour away in Charlotte, his primary manufacturing plant here in Triple Falls. I’m certain he built here because it’s where he grew up, and I have zero doubt he revels in rubbing his success in the noses of his former classmates, some of whom now work for him.
I’m to be another one of his employees starting tomorrow. I’m no trust fund baby, at least that was the case in the years I spent with Mom in our rented, rundown house. On my twentieth birthday, I’m to inherit a large amount of stock in the company along with a lump sum, and I know that the timeline is purposeful because he’s never wanted my mother anywhere near his fortune. His grudge for her clear in that sense. Add that to the fact he’s given the minimum over the years, keeping Mom in her respective place in his food chain makes it easy to see he has no lingering feelings for her.
For a brief time, I’ve lived on both sides of poverty due to their night and day lifestyles, and to spite his wishes, I’ll take the stock and money and go against every one of them. The minute I’m able, my mother will never work again. Any amount of success I have, I’m determined to earn for myself, but the fear of failing along with the possibility that gambling on myself would ultimately cost her is what brought me here. But in order to carry out my plan, I have to play along with his, and that includes being ‘appreciative and respectful enough to learn the business, even if it’s from the ground level.’
The hardest part of that will be to tame my mouth and silence my resentment, which is front and center since he could have spared us both an awkward year together by simply having a fucking heart with the woman who has done both their jobs as my parent.
I don’t exactly hate my father, but I don’t understand him or his unapologetic cruelty, and never will. I’m not about to spend the next year trying to figure him out. Any communication on his part has always felt mandatory and rushed. He’s always been a monetary provider, not a dad. I respect his work ethic and success but have zero understanding as to the whys of his lack of empathy and the chill of his sub-zero personality.
“I’ll come home every chance I can,” I tell Christy, unsure I can make it a promise due to my schedule.
“I’ll come up too.”
Opening the top of my chest of drawers, I toss in a pile of socks and undies, “Let’s see how Adolf feels about you occupying a guest room before you gas up, okay?”