The Seven Year Slip

THE WORST PART OF quitting my job, however, was figuring out how to break it to my parents, who excelled in everything they did. My parents, who never quit anything. My parents, who had instilled that same ethic in me.

My parents, who demanded that they celebrate my birthday this weekend, like they always did.

My parents, who I said yes to because I loved and didn’t want to disappoint them.

And I feared I would anyway.

“Oh, sweetheart!” Mom called, waving me over to the table where she and Dad sat, even though I could walk to the table blindfolded by now. They came into the city for my birthday weekend every year. They asked for the same table in the same restaurant on the same Saturday before my birthday, and they always ended up ordering the exact same food. It was the sort of tradition that went back as far as I could remember—a ritual at this point.

We would get lunch at this adorable little diner over on Eighty-Fourth Street called the Eggverything Café, where my mom would order the number two—two pancakes, two eggs sunny-side up, and two burnt sausage links. Not cooked, but burnt. And my dad would get the egglet supreme, which was just an omelet with bell peppers and mushrooms and three different kinds of cheese, hold the onions, and a cup of decaf coffee. I used to play a game where I never got the same thing twice, but after coming here for almost thirty years, that was an impossible endeavor at this point.

If my aunt was the kind of person who always tried something new, my parents excelled in the monotonous mundane, over and over again.

It was kind of their charm. A little bit.

As I came over to their table, Dad stood and gave me a big bear hug, his beard scratchy against my cheek. He was a big man who was spectacular at hugs—the back-breaking kind. He picked me up and spun me around, and when he set me down, the floor tilted a little. “Daughter!” he cried, and his voice bellowed. “It’s been forever!”

“Look at you! You look so tired,” Mom added, grabbing my face and planting a kiss on my cheek. “You need to get more sleep, young lady.”

“It’s been a weird few weeks at work,” I admitted, as we all sat down for lunch.

“Well, now you’re here! And as the birthday girl, you aren’t even going to think about work for the next”—Mom checked her smartwatch—“four hours at least.”

Four?

“Don’t look so enthused,” Dad added wryly because a long-suffering look must’ve crossed my face. “You never come see your parents, so we always have to make the long trip to the city to see you.”

“It’s not that long,” I told them. “You live on Long Island, not in Maine.”

Mom waved me off. “You should come visit more often anyway.”

The server remembered our faces, and she knew by now what my mom and dad ordered, and she looked at me expectantly, ready for me to try something new, but as I browsed the menu, I realized I’d tried everything on it already. “How about the blueberry waffles?”

Her eyebrows jerked up. “Didn’t you have that last time?”

“I’ll try it with that Vermont maple syrup you have,” I amended, “and the largest coffee you can get me.” She jotted it down on her notepad and flitted away.

My mom made small talk by commenting on the new upholstery on the train seats on the ride here, and how the construction on their stretch of the LIE was taking forever, and how she had to change to a new doctor who knew nothing about her medications—Mom was very good at complaining. She did it often, and with great gusto, and my dad had learned early on to just nod and listen. Mom was a universe apart from her sister. They were opposites of the same coin, one tired of new things, the other searching for them wherever she went.

My stomach had laced itself in knots, because at some point today they were going to ask about my job, and at some point—

“So,” Dad said, “how’s the book thing going?”

Too soon. It came too soon. “I, um—”

The server brought our food out, which immediately distracted my parents, and thankfully they went on to talk about how there must have been a new chef in the back, because Mom’s eggs were not cooked the way she remembered. I picked at my blueberry waffles, which seemed fine enough, especially slathered in Vermont maple syrup. My parents asked about how the apartment was doing, and I asked them about Dad’s bird condominium (a series of birdhouses all stacked together like a designer resort—I told him that he’d find himself overrun with pigeons if he built it, but he didn’t believe me until, lo and behold, he was overrun with pigeons).

After we’d finished eating, Mom excused herself to the bathroom, and Dad scooted his chair a little closer to me, stealing my last bite of blueberry waffle. “You know your mom didn’t mean it—that you look tired.”

I flipped my butter knife around and glanced at my reflection. Anyone could see that my parents and I looked related—I had Dad’s reddish nose, his soft brown eyes, and my mom’s frown. I never really had much of Aunt Analea in me, though maybe that was why I tried to be so much like her. “I don’t look that tired, do I?”

“No!” he replied quickly, from years of Mom pinning him in that trap herself. “Absolutely not. That’s why I said you didn’t. You look happy, actually. Content. Did something good happen at work?”

I tilted my head, debating on an answer. I guess this was as good a time to tell him as any. “Actually . . . I quit my job.”

Dad’s mouth dropped open. He blinked his big brown eyes. “Erm . . . do you . . . have an offer somewhere else?”

“No.”

“Then . . .”

“Yeah.” I looked away. “I know it was a stupid decision, but . . . I sort of realized over this summer I wasn’t all that happy where I was, and I know it wasn’t smart, but the moment I turned in my two weeks’, I felt this knot in the middle of my chest come undone. It was a relief.” I glanced back at him, hoping that he could understand, even though he’d never quit anything in his entire life.

He thought about it for a good half a minute. That was really what I loved about my dad. He was kind and patient. He evened out my mom, who was loud and quick and bombastic, so I always liked to tell my dad big news first before surprising Mom. “I think,” he finally said, choosing his words carefully, “that nothing lasts forever. Not the good things, not the bad. So just find what makes you happy, and do it for as long as you can.”

I set down my butter knife, and put my napkin over my plate. “And if I can’t find that?”

“You might not,” he replied, “but then again, you might. You don’t know what the future holds, sweetheart.” He scrubbed my head like he did when I was little, and gave a wink. “Don’t think too much about it, yeah? You have some savings . . .”

“And I can sell Analea’s apartment,” I added quietly.

His eyebrows shot up. “Are you sure?”

I nodded. I’d been thinking about it for a while. “I don’t want to live there forever. It just feels too close to her, and I’m tired of living in the past.”

Somewhat literally, too.

He gave a shrug and sat back in his chair. “Then there you go, and your mom and I will be here if you ever need anything—Ah! My love!” he added with a start when he realized that Mom was standing behind us and probably had been for a while. “How, haha, how long have you been there?”

She towered over us, and turned her sharp gaze to me. Oh, no. “Long enough,” she said cryptically.

Dad and I gave each other the same look, a silent pact that we’d dig up the other person if Mom decided to dump one of us in an unmarked grave.

Then Mom sat down in her chair, turned to me, and took my face in her hands—her fingers were long and manicured-pink to match the flowers on her blouse—and said, “You quit your job, Clementine?”

I hesitated, my cheeks squished together between her hands. “Y-yes . . . ?”

She narrowed her eyes. Before she retired, she was a behavioral therapist, and she employed a lot of those skills to handle my father and me. Then she let go of my face, and gave a tired sigh. “Well! This certainly wasn’t a plot twist I was anticipating.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be. I’m glad,” she added, and took my hand in her cold ones. Her hands reminded me of Aunt Analea’s. Mom and I never really saw eye to eye, and even though I tried to be like her, I ended up being more like her sister. “You’re finally doing something for you, sweetheart.”

That surprised me. “I—I thought you’d be angry.”

My parents gave each other a baffled look. “Angry?” my mother echoed. “Why would we be that?”

“Because I’m quitting. I’m giving up.”

Mom squeezed my hands. “Oh, sweetheart. You aren’t giving up. You’re trying something new.”

“But you and Dad always find a way to make something work. You do things over and over, even when it gets hard.” I blinked back tears that stung in my eyes. Of course I’d find myself having a midlife crisis in the Eggverything Café, where all the servers wore splattered egg graphics on the fronts of their shirts and had egg puns on their name tags. “I feel like a failure for not being able to just push through.”

“You aren’t. You’re one of the bravest people we know.”

Dad agreed, “Hell, you had a conversation with a stranger in a cab and decided to be a book publicist. That’s braver than anything I could do. I spent ten years deciding to be an architect.”

That was true. I had caught a cab with a stranger from the Monroe the day I came back from that summer abroad, and he asked about the book I was carrying—it had been the travel guide I’d painted in all summer abroad.

Mom said, “You will be happiest when you’re on your own adventure. Not Analea’s, not whoever you’re dating, not everyone who thinks you should do what you’re supposed to do—yours.” Then she clapped her hands together, and signaled for the server to bring us the check. “Now! We are almost done! Who wants to get celebratory birthday ice cream after this from the cart out front of the Met and go for a walk in the park?” she asked, her eyes glimmering, because it was the exact same thing we’d done for—well, you know. I tucked their words into the soft matter of my heart, and I followed my parents to get frozen ice cream sandwiches, and we walked through the park on this glorious golden Saturday at the beginning of August, pretending like it wasn’t too hot and too bright, even though we’d done it a thousand times.

There was something nice about doing it again, sitting at the same park benches, feeding the same ducks in the pond, so well-worn and natural. Not safe, really, because each trip was different, but familiar.

Like meeting an old friend seven years later.