Page 10 of Love's a Glitch
Heather bobbed her head. “See you tomorrow morning.”
Tomorrow morning. And the morning after that, and the one after that. I loosened the knot on my tie and rubbed at my neck, wishing I could crack a window and inhale some fresh air. As luck would have it, the windows on the seventh story didn’t open. There was only one other building in La Jolla that’d challenged the coastal-height limit, and while all eyes and protests were on it, my ancestors snuck this building under the radar. With everyone else upset over a seventeen-story building, who would notice seven, right?
What a legacy.
Still, it’d been one for more than six decades, and since my entire family always expected the worst of me, there was no way I’d be the one to tarnish it. Although Henry had certainly left a big mess for me to clear up. While he loved playing showboat salesman, dripping with enough money he couldn’t care less if you bought a house from him or not, he wasn’t a nuts-and-bolts guy.
Dad had wheezed for decades, but it’d gotten scarier and scarier and Mom finally forced him to go to the doctor’s office, where he was diagnosed with COPD. No more smoking—cigarettes or cigars—less stress, and more exercise and fresh air. Basically, he needed to live the sort of lifestyle I’d been living, and wasn’t that a pinch ironic? Anyway, with him cutting back his hours, no one had been paying much attention to the business and accounting side, leaving it to suffer.
Coastal Luxury Realty had already been in the middle of relaunching the new website and logo. I’d suggested we also add shifting our percentages to focus more on mansions and less on office buildings. We’d offload the older ones, cutting back on our repair and maintenance costs, and if the trend of working from home continued to become more common, we wouldn’t be stuck with vacant offices that needed to be leased to turn a profit.
Why they’d turned control of what boiled down to the future of the company to a person who never stayed in one place for more than five or six months, I had no idea. If I hadn’t heard how rattly Dad’s lungs had gotten, as well as seen the plethora of pills the doctor had prescribed, I might think he’d faked a disease just to convince me to return home and stay.
Like most nature photographers,National Geographichad been my dream publication. The first time I’d had a picture accepted, I’d called my family, practically vibrating with excitement. Before even congratulating me, they’d asked if that meant I was done “lollygagging around” and ready to come home and do the job I was trained for.
As I moved to snag my keys off the desktop, my inbox caught my eye. So many emails arrived every day that no matter how hard I worked to try to reply and cut out the unimportant, I could hardly keep up.
With every new email, my blood pressure rose, yet nothing sent it quite as high as dealing with the web designer Henry had hired. My jaw automatically clenched, the way it’d done when I’d read her earlier message.
To even mention the guys she dated was unprofessional, but to accuse me of wasting the timeIwas paying her for? How did people like that get hired in the first place? If an employee like that kept their job, what were the chances my own family would fire me, piss-poor job or not?
That’d been an inkling of a strategy back in my mind, but not one I’d deploy until Henry spent enough evenings and weekends with his family to stop feeling so picked on. Then I’d likely have to call a family meeting and inform them they had to hire someone else, along with a tight deadline so they wouldn’t drag their feet.
But if sending rude emails and not giving a client what they requested was industry standard—in any industry—it’d be more difficult than I’d first thought to earn the ax. In the beginning of my career, I’d been hungry enough for assignments to take any scrap tossed my way. Now I’d earned enough of a name that better offers came my way, but I hardly ever turned down a job or an opportunity to travel to a new place. If possible, I extended my stays an extra week or two to find out what the community needs were and helped as much as I could.
See, not picky at all. I’d just rather avoid having a seizure anytime I opened up a webpage. I guaranteed our clientele would feel the same, so that Eloise chick should just calm down with her overcomplicated designs that insisted on themselves.
And I thought it’d be working with the upper crust that’d grind my gears.
Much to my parents’ disbelief, I chose to bike or walk home in my suit every day instead of taking the company car—I’d told them that I’d happily cut the suit part out of the equation, but evidently, that wasn’t the answer they’d wanted. There were always too many cars on the road, and it was only a couple of miles. Maybe if my dad had walked instead of employing a driver so he didn’t have to even turn the wheel, his health would be better.
By the time I arrived home, my brother and his family were already there. Evidently, Mom watched the kids on Friday nights so they could have date night.
My nephew George ran up to me to tell me all about how he’d found a turtle while I hung up my suit jacket on the hook by the door and loosened the knot on my tie. “But it ended up being a rock, not a turtle. So I ask my mom for a pet turtle, but she say no.”
I glanced through the open archway of the living room where Henry and his wife, Laurel, were seated. The latter of the two was already shaking her head.
“Don’t you dare even think about it, Luke. He’s not old enough to take care of a turtle by himself, which means I’d have to take care of a turtle, and I’m already—” Laurel lunged for Charlotte, who’d wobbled in the middle of her attempt to pull herself up using the corner of the ornate coffee table in the center of the room. “Last month she fell against the edge of this”—she glanced toward the other side of the room where Mom was getting Dad settled and lowered her voice—“monstrosity and chipped a tooth.”
“Ouch.” I had to agree on the monstrosity part. It took up a large portion of the middle of the room and Mom was forever frustrated by the handprints on the glass top. She also got upset if you placed a cup on there, so I wasn’t sure what the point of a coffee table that didn’t hold coffee was. She claimed it was for decoration, and that was pretty much the point of most things in this house. It left me feeling like a kid with mud on his shoes again.
“Ouch is right. Here…” Laurel hefted Charlotte away from the dangerous piece of furniture and thrust my niece into my arms. “Why don’t you try to keep her safe and entertained for just the next half hour and see if you’d enjoy cleaning out turtle C-R-A-P and ensuring he was fed on top of everything else.”
Charlotte and I sized each other up, and she definitely won the staring contest. Her lip curled, as if she were about to cry, but then I made a raspberry type sound that George used to love as a kid, and she decided I might be okay.
Okay for all of two seconds before she dive-bombed toward the floor. I caught her by the knee, but only because I had killer reflexes. “Whoa.”
“Oh yeah. She does that.” Laurel grabbed Henry’s hand and pulled him along after her, in the direction of the kitchen. “I blame you, as you’re the only one in this family crazy enough to jump off cliffs.”
“You jumped off a clift?” George asked, his eyes wide with the kind of excitement that overshadowed the hint of fear—a sensation I knew all too well.
I recognized Laurel’s panicked expression, too, as it’d often been worn by my mom. Since she seemed so frazzled and Henry didn’t look like he’d be interfering any time soon, I kept one arm firmly around Charlotte and squatted eye-level with my nephew. “Only because I was strapped into a hang glider and had done a lot of training beforehand. But you have to be a grownup to do those sorts of things, okay, kiddo? Let’s start by jumping off the tree stump in the back yard, so one day you’ll be big and strong.”
“Like you?” my nephew asked, with such sincerity in his features and voice.
I tucked the conversation away in my back pocket, because I had a feeling that Ellie would get a kick out of it, and because it’d allow me to draw attention my strengths without coming off as bragging. If the guy she’d gone out with for coffee was any indication, she should put strength and common sense higher on her list of desirable qualities.
“You can go ahead and head out for your date,” I said to my brother and sister-in-law. “I once hid out near a den of grizzly bears to capture a roll of film with the mama and her cubs. I’ve got this.”
