Catastrophe Queen

by Emma Hart

  Denim companies would make a mint, especially around the holidays. Spanx were killing it on the stomach thing, after all, but they’d never quite cut it on my ass.

  That was probably the fault of my ass, to be honest.

  I switched the smart interview outfit for yoga pants and a tank top that stated that I drank well with others and went back downstairs, phone in hand. I wasn’t letting go of the damn thing until I found out if I’d gotten the job today or not.

  “What’s for dinner?” I asked, joining my mom and aunt in the kitchen.

  “Lasagna,” Mom replied, holding a pasta sheet in the air.

  Aunt Grace turned her head to look at me, the pasta sheet box in her hands, and narrowed her eyes at me. “Why are you holding your phone so tightly? Is it an extra appendage you’ve had attached to yourself?”

  I rolled my eyes and sat down at the island. “No. I had a job interview today, and she never said when she’d let me know, so just in case…”

  “You’re going to be more attached to it than your cousin James was to his penis when he was a teenager?”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Aunt Grace, but I have no knowledge of James and his penis,” I said simply. “But yes, I’m going to be attached. I don’t want to miss the call either way.”

  She nodded, handing Mom a couple more sheets of pasta. “It’s about time you got a job. Or married.”

  I choked on my own spit. “About time I got a job? I’ve been out of work for a month, and that was because the company shut down! It’s hardly my fault.”

  “I stitched t-shirts when I was your age and I needed money.”

  “Yes, but we don’t live in the eighteen-hundreds anymore.”

  Aunt Grace narrowed her eyes even more and wiggled one finger at me. “Your attitude stinks. That’s why you’re single, jobless, and living with your parents.”

  Mom froze.

  “Is that why you haven’t died yet? God isn’t ready for your shit and wants to inflict pain on our innocent souls for a little longer?” I shot back.

  Slowly, Mom turned around and looked at me, eyes wide.

  Silence tightened the air in the kitchen, and I stared down Aunt Grace for a good, long minute.

  Until her eyes crinkled, her lips curved into a grin, and her wrinkled cheeks flushed with her laughter. “Atta girl. Maybe that’s why you’re single. You’re too much of a smartass.”

  “Coming from you, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Mom pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head. “Why did I agree to this again?”

  “Because you’ve got three bottles of Jack in your closet and a Pepsi under the bed.” I quirked a brow.

  “Aunt Grace is right. You are a smartass.”

  “It’s genetic,” I quipped.

  “Of course it is.” Aunt Grace put the pasta back in the cupboard. “It’s the only way to deal with the insufferable men in this family. Be such an obnoxious smartass they go to another room and leave you the hell alone.”

  Now there was a quote for a cross-stitch.

  CHAPTER TWO – MALLORY

  Two hours later, my dad and grandpa had returned from the liquor store—and the bar, not that they admitted as much—and my phone was still call-free.

  I was okay with it. Mostly because my can of Pepsi wasn’t just Pepsi, just like my mom’s wasn’t.

  There were two ways to get through any family gathering: alcohol or a one-way ticket to Cuba.

  Since I was short on funds, alcohol it was.

  I mean, there was a reason I was such a disaster of a human being. Aside from my parents having a cringey sex life that I knew far too much about, the older generation of the Harper family was an even bigger mess.

  Great Aunt Grace was an ex-acrobat who’d turned to chain-smoking and drinking whiskey from the bottle after divorcing her fourth husband. She had a sharp tongue and penchant for criticizing everything except movies with a shirtless Channing Tatum.

  Last year, for her seventieth birthday, she’d demanded a trip to Vegas to watch Magic Mike Live, and out of the ten of us who’d gone, she’d enjoyed it the most.

  She’d even thrown her underwear at them. It was a sight nobody ever needed to see.

  As for Grandpa Eddie—well, he was special. Just a few days shy of eighty, he’d maintained all his mental faculties and had a wit sharper than a knife, and he was one of the only people who could hold a candle to Aunt Grace and make her shut up in the process. Partial to a glass of scotch on birthdays and champagne on Christmas and wine every other night of the year, he smoked big, fat, Cuban cigars and wasn’t afraid to tell you to get the hell out of his personal space.

  Honestly, if I could grow up to be a combination of them in sixty years, I’d be more than happy.

  I’d be old, grumpy, and just this side of being an alcoholic.

  Would I get to wave my stick at people and tell them to get off my lawn, too? That was probably the only way their existence could get any better. Although, given my luck, there was every chance I’d trip over my own feet and knock myself out with the walking stick.

  Clearly, I hadn’t been blessed with Aunt Grace’s ability to balance on, well, a flat sidewalk, as evidenced by the graze on my right butt cheek.

  I couldn’t cross a road, never mind perform stunts on a tightrope.

  “I’m telling you, Helen, it wasn’t my fault his chicken ran in front of my car!” Grandpa took a long drag on his cigar and puffed it out in little circles. “The damn creatures have a life of their own! Who keeps chickens in the city? We don’t live in bumfuck country land.”

  Mom took a deep breath and slowly let it out.

  “There’s a brake for a reason, you fool,” Aunt Grace snapped at him. “Use it!”

  “I do use it. Just not when flying, feathered, little shit-droppers are in front of my car.” He sniffed and leaned back in the armchair. “They got wings. They can use ‘em.”

  Aunt Grace rolled her eyes, simultaneously reaching for her whiskey and a cigarette. “They might have wings, but their brains are smaller than their shit droppings. They ain’t gonna move.”

  “Is there a reason we’re discussing chicken poop?” I asked, looking around.

  “Is there a reason you’ve got vodka in that can of Pepsi?” Grandpa shot back at me.

  Narrowing my eyes, I met his amused gaze. “Yes. So the act of listening to you complain about chicken shit isn’t quite as painful.”

  “Better the chicken shit than Grace’s obsession with that male stripper movie.”

  Aunt Grace visibly shuddered.

  Dad’s eyes widened. “Why don’t we talk about something a little less…dividing? Mallory, honey, how did your job interview go today?”

  Everyone’s eyes looked my way. Like Mom and Aunt Grace didn’t already know.

  I shifted on the sofa. Man, I should not have been so conservative with the vodka in this can. “It went well. Better than a lot of others lately, so there’s that. I think I might have a chance.”

  “Did you tell them you’d once confused February with September?” Grandpa chuckled.

  “I did not,” I replied. “I simply forgot that February only had twenty-eight days. It’s a common mistake.”

  Aunt Grace leaned forward, silver smoke curling upward from her cigarette. “How about the time you thought it was Friday and went to school when it was Saturday?”

  “All right, enough.” I grabbed my Pepsi can and finished the rest of it before jumping up off the sofa. “I could absolutely be someone’s personal assistant, and that’s that.”

  “How?” Aunt Grace continued. “You’re a night owl, you don’t like other people, and you have the organizational skills of a two-year-old in a toy box.”

  “And you’re seventy with an unhealthy obsession with a movie star half your age, should probably have stock in Marlboro cigarettes, and you’ve got a bit of a drinking problem, but you don’t hear me shouting that from the rooftops.” I tipped my can in her
direction and left the room to the sound of Grandpa laughing so hard he wheezed.

  I grabbed the wine from the fridge and pulled a glass down from the cupboard. Not only could I not be bothered to go upstairs to get the vodka, I wasn’t in the mood to get anything watered down.

  This situation would have been fine if I’d had an apartment to go to.

  Unfortunately, all I had a was a bedroom and an aunt who wouldn’t stop bugging me if I fucked off upstairs and hid for the rest of the night.

  “Mal?” Mom yelled. “Your phone is ringing?”

  I almost dropped the bottle of wine onto the counter, only just a breath away from knocking over my wine glass. I took a deep breath and stopped to right them both before running into the living room and diving to the coffee table for my phone.

  “Hello?” I breathed into it.

  It rang again.

  “Shit!” I scrambled to press the green button on the screen and tried again. “Hello?”

  “Are the crazies in town yet?” came the familiar tones of my best friend, Jade, into my ear.

  “Is it the job?” Mom stage-whispered.

  “No, it’s Jade.” I sighed.

  “Happy to talk to you, too, asshole,” Jade sniped in my ear.

  “Hold on,” I said, standing up straight. “Gimme a minute.”

  “If that’s how you answer a phone at work,” Aunt Grace said, “Make sure you don’t have a rip in your pants.”

  I flipped her the bird and, after detouring to the kitchen, took the stairs. “What’s up?” I asked Jade.

  Laughter tinkled through the line. “Well, I was asking if the crazies are here, but I’d know Grace’s voice miles away.”

  I groaned, sitting on my bed and cradling my stemless glass. “She’s been on my back more than a hooker is on her own,” I replied. “She’s trying to be funny, but all she’s doing is bringing out my inner asshole.”

  “Your inner asshole? You mean you keep some locked away?”

  “Don’t try me, Jade Lincoln. I will kill you in your sleep.”

  “No, you won’t. You couldn’t function without me. How’d the interview go?”

  Unlike my family, I told her absolutely everything from the moment I walked through the door to the moment I finally escaped my family in the kitchen and got to take off my ripped pants.

  “Are we talking Jamie Dornan working out in Fifty Shades hot or Hemsworth brother hot?”

  “Both. Combined.” I reached for the glass on the nightstand and sipped. “I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. Of all my underwear, it had to be the flamingo pair.”

  “I’ve warned you about those,” Jade laughed down the line. “I said one day they’d come back to haunt you.”

  “But they were so cute!”

  “You didn’t pick them up?”

  “No!” My voice went so high I was I was only an octave or two from only being audible to dogs. “How could I pick them up? I told him they weren’t mine! I couldn’t admit to dropping my panties in the gutter! That wouldn’t make a good story for the grandkids.”

  “For the—Jesus, Mal. You dropped your underwear from your pants leg, in public, right after you’d almost walked in front of an extremely hot guy’s car. The only thing you’re gonna be telling your grandkids is how much of a klutz you were in your twenties.”

  “And my teens, and my pre-teens, and—”

  “Every day since you learned to walk,” Jade finished. “You should have picked up the panties. You loved those.”

  “You literally just reminded me about how you warned me about them.”

  “I know, but for my own amusement, you should have picked them up.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about your amusement, you bitch. I was thinking that I’d never been so mortified in my entire life.”

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “We can probably come up with a shortlist.”

  I groaned again and sank back into my pillow, resting my wine on my stomach. “I quit. I give up. I’m too much of a mess for this world.”

  “Oh, quit being so fucking dramatic. You’re just fine. You’re never going to see that guy again, and if you do, he probably won’t even recognize you.”

  She might have been going for comforting, but all she was doing was bruising my ego a little bit.

  “You’re probably right,” I sighed. “Still, the dream was nice while it lasted. Better than the crap happening downstairs, at least.”

  “Grandpa Eddie still angry at the neighbor’s chickens?”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe. He thinks they’re out to get him. I think he’s going to do something drastic like, I don’t know, start throwing lit matches or something.”

  She laughed. “Well, on the bright side, the matches would probably go out before they even hit the chickens.”

  “Do you think they’d go out if I threw some at Grandpa?”

  “He drinks so much he’d just go up in flames from being in the same room as the flames. How the hell is he eighty?”

  “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know. We could bottle that shit and sell it.”

  “No kidding.” She paused right as the sound of Aunt Grace screaming about someone being a cheater broke through the air. “Oh no. Did they—”

  “Bring out Trivial Pursuit?” I sighed. “Sounds like it. Gotta go. I’ll call you if I hear anything from that job.”

  “All right. I have bail money if you need it. Ciao.”

  The chance that I would was pretty great.

  ***

  My ears were ringing.

  It was really irritating. And it wouldn’t stop. Over and over and—

  Oh, shit. That wasn’t my ears. That was my phone!

  Rolling over with my eyes still closed, I threw my arm out to the nightstand and swatted at the surface for my phone. My pinky finger barely connected with it, yet a dull thud told me I’d sent the phone flying straight to the floor.

  It stopped ringing.

  “No, no, no!” I opened my eyes and flung myself over the side of the bed, just missing the corner of the nightstand with my forehead, and grabbed the phone.

  It still worked.

  Thank God. I’d only missed the call.

  It was an unknown number, but one that was familiar to me. I stared at the screen for a moment with sleep in my eyes until a text popped up that I had a voicemail.

  Immediately, I called, rubbing my eyes to wake up a little, and hit the button to listen to a new message.

  “Hello, this is Casey Owens from Reid Real Estate. I’m calling for Mallory Harper regarding our interview for the personal assistant position yesterday. I’ll be in the office until twelve-thirty. You can reach me at…” She trailed off, reciting the number, and I scrambled out of bed to grab a pen and paper from the desk under my window.

  I’d missed it, so I listened again and jotted down the number before calling back. It was picked up after three rings.

  “Good morning, you’ve reached Cameron Reid’s office. Casey speaking. How may I help you?”

  “Hi, Ms. Owens?” Great, my voice cracked. I cleared my throat. “This is Mallory Harper returning your message.”

  “Oh, Mallory, hi!” Her voice brightened. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”

  “Not at all—sorry, we have family over, and I just missed your call. What can I do for you?”

  “Actually, I was calling to tell you that I was very impressed with your interview yesterday.”

  Well, thank God someone was.

  “If you’re still available, I’d like to offer you the position. Pending a trial period, of course.”

  Holy shit.

  “Wow. Thank you so much—of course. I’d love it.” Woohoo! Finally!

  “Great! Can you come in tomorrow morning so we can get started on your training? Say, eight-thirty?”

  “Oh, of course. That’s not a problem.”

  “Brilliant. I’ll see you then, Mallory, and congratulations!”

  “T
hank you,” I said, dazed. “Goodbye.”

  I hung up and dropped my phone.

  Holy shit. I got the job. I actually got the freaking job.

  Yanking open my door, I almost tripped over the rug in the hall as I made my way to the stairs. “Mom! Dad! I got it! I got the job!” My footsteps thundered against the stairs as I ran down and into the kitchen. “I got the job!”

  Aunt Grace looked up from her paper. “But you didn’t get any pants on.”

  I glanced down. She was right. I was in a tank top and panties. Damn it. “But I got the job!”

  “What job?” Grandpa groused from behind me. “Are you a hooker?” He shuffled past me into the kitchen. “Where’s my breakfast?”

  Mom rolled her eyes and hugged me. “Well done, sweetie. Go put some pants on and then you can tell us all about it.”

  The urge to make a snarky comment about the irony of her telling someone else to put their pants on, but I was on too much of a high to do that. Or even care that I had my ass out, to be honest. As long as I remembered to put them on the next day, I was good.

  “Mallory. Put your pants on. Don’t be like your mother,” Aunt Grace snapped, giving the snark for me.

  “Aunt Grace!” Mom gasped.

  “She ain’t wrong, Helen.” Grandpa looked around the kitchen. “Where are the pancakes?”

  Mom gritted her teeth. “I didn’t make them yet. Oliver had to run to the store for milk, and he isn’t back.”

  Grandpa muttered something under his breath and popped out his teeth. At the table.

  “Eddie! Nobody wants to see those gnashers! They’re bad enough in your mouth when you smile like a serial killer!” Aunt Grace shouted, reaching over with the straw from Mom’s glass of water and prodding the dentures with it.

  Mom gasped.

  That was my cue to leave.

  Granted, my cue probably should have been when Aunt Grace told me I had no pants on, but whatever.

  The front door opened right as I stepped onto the bottom stair. It was Dad, returning from the store with a brown bag tucked against his body.

  “Run. Save yourself,” I hissed at him. “It’s a mess in there.”

  He looked at my legs. “Are you aware you aren’t wearing pants?”