“It’s not weird! We’re both doing a great public service here, and I’m getting better at gardening. Though those two strawberry plants did die, the other three are recovering under her ministrations. I’ve moved on to harming the herbs now.”
“Right,” Carlos said with a smirk. “I think you make out by the fruit trees and make all the old retired ladies uncomfortable, but what do I know?”
Meghan punched his shoulder, unable to deny it.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll meet my father tomorrow. We can do this!”
***
She met her father at a restaurant.
It wasn’t too fancy, because she didn’t have too much money to spend these days, but it was a good enough one to maybe butter up her father. She arrived first and sat down to wait, wishing that he had arrived already and they could get on with this. She knew that they would probably spend half a damn hour chit-chatting about nothing and eating before they got to the point, but she felt jittery with nerves.
When her father agreed to her terms, she would still have so much to do. She needed to hire someone to rework their website, which meant she needed to get some more freelance work done to pay for that; she needed to plan the anthology and write up posts and such to call for people to participate; she needed to look over some old titles and maybe relaunch some, from back when she had just started the press—they were easy money if they sold even a little bit.
For all of her confidence, she wasn’t sure that it would be enough for her press to survive, much less pay her father eventually. She had gotten money from him to avoid doing it with a bank, but maybe it was time to do it anyway…
Someone clearing their throat startled her out of her thoughts. Meghan blinked up at her father, surprised, before she stood up with a wide smile.
“Hey, Dad,” she said, gesturing him to the table. “Sorry, I hadn’t seen you there. I know we were going to meet in front of the restaurant, but they were so full, so I got a table as soon as I could.”
“That’s fine,” the man said, clearly awkward.
It seemed like time had soothed his temper somewhat, and Meghan’s shoulders drooped with relief. Her smiled turned into something truer and she sat down as well. She picked up her menu and idly combed it with her eyes. She wasn’t really hungry, but it wasn’t like she could just start the conversation—
“So what is it you called me over to talk about?” her father interrupted her thoughts again.
Meghan blinked at him, surprised. She knew he was straightforward like her, but she hadn’t expected him to be so blunt.
“Don’t you want to have lunch first?” she asked.
“I’d rather not,” he said, eyes on the table instead of her. “Look, I know you have some kind of proposition for me, Meghan, and I know that if I sit here for long, I’ll end up saying yes. But I don’t want to. All right? I don’t want to agree to whatever you say. I lent you money to—”
“I have a plan!” Meghan argued, eyebrows pulling together. “We’ll launch anthologies and smaller pieces, and try to have a bigger online presence—”
“You’ve tried that before,” he interrupted. “Fact is, it’s been three years and you still owe me forty thousand, Meghan! I did it to help you out, but you’ve been dismissive of me every time I tried to talk to you, and I’m done. I’m not your personal bank, Meghan, and health insurance for your mother only goes up each month.”
“I help you with mom’s insurance,” Meghan argued, annoyed he was bringing that up. As if she hadn’t been the one who always helped them, before she had asked him for money.
“What would really help with your mother’s insurance is an extra forty thousand in my account,” her father snapped. He subsided with a sigh, his shoulders drooping and his gaze veering away from hers again. “Look, Meghan… I know you have a lot on your plate and that being a business owner is a complicated business, but your mom’s diabetes is only getting worse, and… we think your brother has it too.”
Meghan felt a weight drop to her stomach, like she had swallowed a ball of lead.
“Andy is getting sick?” she asked, crestfallen.
They weren’t as close as they could be, she and her brother, because of how big their age difference was, but if he wasn’t well—
“Well, we’re doing some tests, we don’t know for sure,” her father said with a grimace.
Meghan’s mouth opened in shock at this, because she knew her father’s tells and she knew this meant he had brought up her brother to guilt her, that there was nothing certain about his health. She felt anger rise up in her throat.
“Dad,” she started.
He stood up before she could start, and the surprise that he would leave her without ceremony, without bothering to even eat anything, was enough to keep her quiet.
“Sorry, I do have to leave soon,” he said with a shrug. “Look, I was a bit hard to give you two weeks to give me so much money—but I do want it soon. I want at least half in a couple of months. Okay? No more games, Meghan. We’re both adults here. All right? I’ll see you later.”
She watched with wide eyes as he smiled awkwardly at her, turned around, and left.
***
Meghan didn’t call Carlos to tell him how it went, and she didn’t knock on Amy’s door, much as she wanted to. She sat down on her couch, opened a bottle of wine, and thought long and hard about what she was going to do now. She had limited power and money, which meant she had no way to help her mother or her brother and pay her father all at the same time. Her father wasn’t going to accept smaller payments, apparently, since his biggest act of graciousness was asking for half of the full amount in a couple of months.
Meghan didn’t want to close her press; she didn’t know what to do with it.
Needless to say, when she arrived at the greenhouse the next day, she was feeling a bit down. She hadn’t slept, having spent the night ruminating on what to do from now on, and it was obvious Amy noticed something was wrong—though she brightened up when she saw Meghan, her expression quickly fell. She rushed to Meghan’s side.
“Did something happen?” she asked, worried, catching Meghan’s hands in hers. “You’re looking like you didn’t get a single minute of sleep last night.”
“I really didn’t,” Meghan said with a sight, leaning forward until she could hook her chin over Amy’s shoulder. Amy promptly lifted her arms to hug her, and Meghan sagged with relief. Why hadn’t she gone to see Amy yesterday? She felt like an idiot for not going to her, now. She already felt much better. “I met my father yesterday,” she told her. “Long story short, he lent me some money some time ago and now is demanding that I give it back to him. The press isn’t doing well, and I really, really don’t have the money. I don’t know what to do.”
“Oh,” Amy said. “I’m sorry… I don’t know either. It must be really shitty to have your own dad making trouble for you like that.”
“Yeah,” Meghan murmured. “Me and Carlos had some ideas and I was going to try and talk to him, but he didn’t hear me at all.”
“I’m sorry,” Amy said again, drawing away for a moment. “Come on, let’s water the plants. Maybe what you need to do is not think about it for a while.”
“I can’t afford not to think about it,” Meghan told her instead, shaking her head. When Amy took a step back, toward the plants, Meghan stayed where she was, and their hands slid away from each other. “He wants me to give him twenty thousand in two months. I have some savings, but I can’t just empty all my accounts for him, and I hadn’t been planning on losing so much money now, and—”
“Stress will do you no good,” Amy tried. “Come on, you don’t have to worry about it right now.”
“Amy, what do I do?” Meghan asked instead, looking up at the other woman with wide, fearful eyes. She had been afraid Amy wouldn’t help her, she thought, that Amy would be too unmotivated to think of anything, but Amy had made that dinner for her and Meghan was sure, now, that Amy had a fire hid
den there somewhere.
That Amy was going to tell her that they would sit down like she did with Carlos, that they could brainstorm and figure out what to do.
Amy was silent for a moment.
“Meghan, I don’t know,” she said, eyes veering away. She shrugged minutely. “I’m not a business owner, I can’t help you. I can distract you from the stress, but I can’t tell you how to get your money. I’m sorry.”
You’ll distract me, but you won’t help me solve it, Meghan thought, and suddenly felt very alone.
Chapter Nine
Amy sat at the island of Brenda’s kitchen and stared at the toast in front of her. She wasn’t lost in thought as much as she was focusing on one single thought that wouldn’t stop echoing around her mind like a bell. I don’t know what to do. Meghan was in trouble and Amy didn’t know what to do. She barely had money to buy herself a new phone two months back, and she definitely didn’t have twenty thousand to give Meghan. There was nothing she could do for her.
“You need to stop worrying about things you can’t control,” Chelsea said as she set a mug full of milk coffee in front of Amy, before dropping down to the seat beside her. “I know you like your new girlfriend, but it was really unfair of her to go to you and dump her problems on you like that.”
“It wasn’t unfair,” Amy argued, shaking her head, even though at the time it had felt so—that Meghan had cornered her and demanded answers of her she couldn’t have had. “I’m glad she’s trusting me with her problems, you know. It’s just that it’s so outside of my scope. I mean, I don’t know how I would pay it if I were one thousand in debt, much less forty. But I do want to help her…”
“You’re saying yourself there’s no way for you to do it,” Chelsea argued, sipping her own coffee. “You need to focus on yourself, Amy, not her.”
“Well, you need to stop chit-chatting with my mom behind my back,” Amy muttered into her own cup.
Chelsea sent her a dirty look. “Should I just ignore her and walk away when I see her at the supermarket? I’m just saying, Amy, that if your girl every actually needed your help, you would have no way to do it because you have no independence! You have no money, no job, you don’t have your own place. The best thing you can do for both you and her is get some stability.”
Amy looked down at her toast again and didn’t say anything. She wished more than anything that when Meghan had come to her, she could have said something like here, I have it, take the money and forget about this, everything is going to be fine. But the world didn’t work like that.
“You know I won’t be able to leave my parents’ house even if I get a job,” Amy said softly after a moment of silence. “It’d be too expensive to rent somewhere close to them when I could just stay there, and none of us want me to move away.”
“If you work for some time and save the money, you’ll be able to pay rent anywhere,” Chelsea retorted. “Amy, you need to talk to your parents. Together, the three of you can come up with something. You can work something out. I’m not telling you to get a job and immediately move out and start throwing money down some landlord’s pocket, but… there’s options, you know. You need to talk to them.”
A lightbulb went off in Amy’s head. She turned to her friend with wide eyes.
“Talk,” she said. “Chelsea, you’re a genius!”
“Oh, God, are you finally listening to me?” Chelsea asked, disbelieving.
“What if I try to talk to him?” Amy asked with a wide smile, gripping her friend by the shoulders. “You don’t know Meghan, but she—she’s got that look on her like she’s the most confident, strong woman around. What if it just hasn’t hit her father how hard things have been for her? An outside perspective can help!”
“Oh, no,” Chelsea said. “Amy, don’t! You can’t fix this for her! You shouldn’t go around doing something like this when she hasn’t asked you to do it.”
But Amy remembered the face Meghan had made at the greenhouse a few days ago when Amy had told her there was nothing she could do to help her: her expression had fallen and her shoulders drew in tight, like she was trying to keep standing tall when her body wanted to droop in disappointment.
She pictured the face she would make if her father suddenly called her and told her everything was all right, when she found out Amy had helped her, and made her decision.
***
A part of Amy knew that this plan was probably not going to work out, but she wanted to do something for Meghan, anything, because the woman had looked so stressed the last few times they had seen each other. Amy knew that the chances of Meghan’s father listening to her, that anything would come out of this, were basically nil—but maybe after she was done, she would be able to go to Meghan and tell her that she had tried.
Maybe, hopefully, that would be enough to bring Meghan’s spirits up. If all failed, Amy was planning on dinner again.
The next time they saw each other, for a casual date in Meghan’s place and not the greenhouse this time, Amy asked for her phone with a flimsy excuse and Meghan handed it over to her easily. It was child’s play to memorize her father’s number and register it on her own phone a bit later.
She called him early the next day, before she could lose her nerve.
“Mr. Crichton?” she asked. “I’m Amy, a friend of Meghan’s. I’ve been worried about her, and I was wondering if you would meet with me to talk about her for a moment?”
What parent would deny that?
***
It occurred to Amy when she greeted the man that this was Robert Crichton, Meghan’s father, and that Amy was effectively doing the girlfriend thing known as meeting the parents completely wrong. But even though her heart was beating like a rabbit’s inside her chest and her hands were sweating cold and her smile was probably as plastic as she was feeling, there was no turning back. Amy had a plan and by god she would follow through. She wanted the satisfaction of telling Meghan that she had tried—she wanted Meghan’s happiness.
They met at a café close to where the man worked, two bus trips away from the apartment complex Amy hadn’t really left in weeks. At least she would be able to tell her parents that she left the house to do something when she met them for dinner today.
“Mr. Crichton,” Amy said politely, a bit awkward, sitting very still and wondering when it would be socially acceptable for her to get herself a coffee. “I’m Amy, thanks for coming.”
“It’s nothing,” the man said, shaking his head, as he sat down. He raised his eyes to her—Meghan’s own dark eyes, Amy noticed with a pang in her heart—and she realized he looked truly and properly worried.
Maybe this will work after all, Amy thought.
“Did something happen to my daughter?” he asked, leaning toward her. “I spoke to her not long ago and she seemed fine.”
“It’s just…” Amy started, looking away, wishing she had something in her hands to hide behind. “I live right next to her, you know, and it’s been obvious to me how stressed she’s been. She hasn’t been sleeping well, and she’s been drinking and partying more, and work has been hard…”
“Is she sick?” her father asked, a furrow appearing between his brows.
“She told me about her thing with you,” Amy blurted out, then winced at her own lack of finesse. “She told me about her financial problems, that is,” she corrected herself. “Of course, she didn’t tell me much, but I know that she owes you some money and that you’re asking for it back.”
The man’s expression snapped shut so definitely, it was like Amy had just watched a door be snapped shut in her face.
“My daughter isn’t sick, is she?” he asked, voice growing thunderous for all that he didn’t raise it. “Did she ask you to come and do this?”
“No!” Amy denied, cringing where she sat. “Please, Mr. Crichton, I care about her so much and she’s been so stressed, if you could just try and work with her—”
“So, she didn’t put you up to this, you’re just shovin
g your nose into other people’s family business?” he hissed, standing up at once. “What I do or don’t do with my daughter isn’t any of your concern, Amy!”
“Please,” Amy tried one last time, even though she knew this was doomed, that she never should have come here, that she shouldn’t have done this. “I just want her to be okay, I care about her so much—”
His expression twisted. “What do you mean, exactly?”
Amy froze.
What did she mean? She had meant exactly what she said, that she cared for Meghan very much, that Meghan was her girlfriend and that Amy wanted to see her happy, and not so stressed, without those bags under her eyes. It occurred to Amy, looking up at the confused but suspicious face of that man, that not all people were as blessed as she was with their parents.
Strong, independent, confident Meghan was still in the closet.
Amy looked at that man and knew. Like all parents, he suspected, and Amy was here giving herself to him on a silver platter.
“Nothing,” she said, voice coming out higher than she had meant to. “I just—she’s a dear friend, that’s all, and I admire her so much because she’s a business owner, and my boyfriend owns a, um, a bakery so I know how hard that is,” Amy babbled, lying through her teeth and hoping that it would have the desired effect.
The man relaxed marginally, but still scowled at her and left without another word.
***
Amy sat with her parents at the table and felt absolutely no comfort at being home again for the first time in weeks. She wanted to enjoy her family and her father’s cooking and the familiar banter between he and her mom, and she absolutely couldn’t. She also couldn’t tell them what was wrong—the thought of admitting just how much of a colossal mistake she had made was humiliating. She couldn’t tell them.
She would have to tell Chelsea, who knew she had gone to talk to Meghan’s father, but she wanted to bury this six feet under and never think about it again.
Neighborly Love Page 6
