by Lainey Davis
Isaac squints. “I take it withholding the tuition wasn’t due to hardship?”
I shake my head. “They thought they could punish or shame me into my role as an obedient daughter en route to being an obedient wife to one of the sons of their club buddies.” I don’t like remembering these rejections, and I sigh.
“They wouldn’t even co-sign my loans,” I tell him, explaining how I attended part-time that first year until I could work things out to stop being on their tax forms and qualify for financial aide on my own.
He just stares at me for a bit and swallows.
Then, he reaches for a piece of pizza crust on the tray and snaps it in half, handing me one. “To shitty parents,” he says, clinking his crust against mine and then throwing it in the sink. “Let’s dispose of their shitty example.” He turns on my garbage disposal and I smile.
“What comes next with my trench?”
Isaac frowns toward the back door. “I need to figure out who fucked up their drainage,” he tells me. “The storm today gave me an idea.” He tells me he’s going to come over the next time it rains, bring some equipment and really study the storm runoff from the big buildings around my condo. We talk for awhile about the process, but when I yawn, he raps his knuckles on the counter.
Isaac tells me he will see me at the group run this weekend and gets his clothes from my dryer. I stand by awkwardly as he gets dressed and ties his boots. I want to tell him to come inside when he’s done for the day tomorrow. I want to see what else he will come up with to surprise me in the bedroom. But that feels too much like a commitment and I already feel weird having shared personal shit with him about my fucked up family.
When he leaves, I pull up the files Mark prepared for me about Paraguay and South America. For the first time in ages, I’m not distracted by my anxiety about financing the trench in my yard. I’m not panicked about it all sliding into the river. I trust that Isaac will make sure my house is ok.
It was true what I told him—that I paid for school with loans and created paid internship opportunities for myself before such things were popular. My summer salaries with tech startups paid my rent and because Emma and I always lived in shithole apartments, I saved enough to buy this place in cash after graduation.
A sense of unease nags at me as I look out into the black night. In many ways, I’m relying on Isaac’s word that things are going to be ok. Being beholden to people sets my teeth on edge. Takes me right back to those long fights with my parents about my education. The things they screamed at me about money and responsibility and decorum are forever burned in my brain as a betrayal.
I vowed then never again to depend on anyone. For anything. I look at the files from Mark. He had sent them to Tim as well, and I see Tim’s comments in the shared online documents. I remind myself that Tim is family with my best friend, Tim is someone I trust, and Tim trusts the Brady family when it comes to engineering.
That meeting with Mick at the diner was weird, but the man’s ideas had merit. I bury myself in my research, and try to silence the doubting voice inside my head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Zack
“You’re in a good mood for once.” Liam nudges my shoulder in the kitchen at work and holds up his coffee mug toward me. I pour the steaming liquid into his cup and clink glasses with him. We both take it black, like our father.
Sometimes I hate having anything in common with the batty old asshole, but it’s hard to begrudge someone their coffee preference.
“Missed you on the run this morning,” he says as we sip our drinks, leaning against the wall.
I shrug. I was too sore this morning to even think about the additional chaffing involved in my daily run. Tomorrow, I’ll regret skipping the workout, but this morning I actually slept until seven.
“Hey,” I say to my brother. He raises his eyebrows, and I am about to ask him if he thinks we will ever have a chance at being normal in a relationship. If he thinks a woman will ever stick with us for the long haul.
But asking him that will of course lead to questions, and I’m not ready to think about the questions I know he’s going to ask about Nicole. I blow on my coffee and stall, trying to think of how I can change the subject to something safer.
Something work related.
“You remember my roommate from MIT? Ray?”
Liam nods. “Good dude. Heard he moved to Pittsburgh awhile back.”
“Yeah,” I say. “He was at a tech startup for awhile but he’s in grad school now for machine learning.” The two of us talk about what we think that means, whether Ray builds robots or autonomous vehicles or something totally different.
“What makes you bring him up?” Liam asks the question casually, and of course he’d wonder. And of course I can’t tell him Nicole used to work with Ray, and the reason I know that is because I’m fucking her brains out every opportunity I get. I’m not sure how to talk to my brother about Nicole.
I scowl until I think of a response. “I think I’m going to call him to see if he has any ideas about Nicole’s landslide. Maybe a robot can help figure out where the water’s coming from or something.”
Liam shakes his head and chuckles. “Or,” he says, rinsing his empty mug in the sink, “you could go stand out there in the rain and see for yourself.”
He starts to walk out of the kitchen and I shout after him that I did just that yesterday, but he’s already gone.
I look up Ray and dial the number for his lab on campus, figuring he’s probably in there. He answers with a grunt on the second ring. “Hey, man,” I say. “It’s Zack Brady.”
“Zack? Holy shit! I keep meaning to call you.”
We meet for lunch near campus, since it’s easier for me to get around the city than it is for him to leave his robots unattended. I watch in fascination as he orders the same bland food he’s always survived on, while I coat my sandwich with several different types of hot sauce. Ray tells me that machine learning basically means he writes computer programs that help computers make predictions, put pieces of information together and “learn” what to expect next.
He talks with his mouth full of buttered noodles. “You still doing stuff with geotechnical engineering?”
I nod, and tell him a little bit about some of the dam restorations I’ve done. His eyes glaze over until I say, “I actually am working right now on a landslide project for someone you know. Nicole Kennedy?”
Ray’s eyes bulge out of his head. “The medusa?”
“What’s that mean?”
He gestures toward his head and mimics a spiral motion with his finger. “Curly hair looks like snakes, eyes will turn you to stone if you piss her off? I never met anyone else who could make a bunch of programmers fall in line and keep to a schedule.” He reminds me that programmers usually work late into the night and sleep all day, and apparently, Nicole managed to get them to flip their schedules to regular business hours so they could actually meet with developers and investors when she was at the tech company with Ray.
“So she’s got a landslide problem? Where?”
An hour and two bowls of buttered noodles later, Ray has explained to me that his thesis project is actually related to landslides. And he asks me to consult with him on his research. He’s building special cameras and a computer program that will analyze the images to predict where the earth might slide away.
He’s using some of the hillier streets in Pittsburgh to start this project, but aims to branch out to bigger applications. “There’s more money in industry,” he tells me, shrugging like I don’t already know that industry is the bread and butter of engineering companies like Beltane. “If I can help prevent one coal mine from collapsing, it’ll fund program development to aid foreign governments and shit whose entire road systems are washing away every spring.”
Our conversation is such a contrast to the way things happen at work, where I’m always feeling blindsided or like my reports aren’t being read.
I leave the mee
ting with Ray feeling electrified, energized about my work for the first time since before I got sent to Nicole’s yard. I squeeze in a few hours of measurements and studying blue prints for her problem, but then I hole up in my office and really dive into the work Ray asked me to look over.
He rides his bike to my office and pulls up an external hard drive with hours of video footage of different hillsides around the region. “It would take a human hours to watch all this film, right?” I nod, rolling my eyes. Ray clicks around and explains that his program is teaching the computer to watch the footage and pull out anything forbidding.
“That’s where you come in,” he says, looking around. “Hey, Nicole’s not here is she? She’s not going to come in here and yell at me?”
“No, man, I told you this landslide thing is in her back yard. She’s at her house.”
He seems relieved. “Ok, well I need you to help me tell the program what to look for.”
And just like I’d done with Nicole, just like I was doing for my own documentation, I explain to Ray some of the signs of an impending landslide. But this time, I’m using formulas and quantifying soil disruption. I’m in full geek mode, talking numbers with my former roommate, who’s lapping it all up excitedly, typing furiously while I talk.
“This is so great, Zack,” he says, leaning back in a relaxed posture I’m not used to seeing him in. We break for the evening and I toss his bike in the back of my truck, giving him a ride back to his apartment.
“I thought Nicole said she didn’t yell at you too much,” I say at a red light. “She mentioned that you always had your shit together.”
I can see his eyes bulge wide in the dark. “She is the most intimidating woman I’ve ever met,” he says slowly, swallowing.
“Hm, can’t argue with that,” I tell him. Except I don’t find Nicole intimidating. I find her exhilarating. I admire how she is in charge in every environment, and how she tries to intimidate me in the bedroom, but then seems to love it when I take back control.
I can’t tell any of this to Ray, so I drop him off and promise to call him soon with my input.
I should probably clear this side hustle consulting gig with my dad or my uncle, but I decide not to say anything about that, either. It feels important to me to keep these things to myself. Delicious secrets that are just for my enjoyment, nothing I have to share with my family and nothing any of them can yank away from me.
Dad has finally filled Uncle Kellen in on his Paraguay scheme, so in the morning, we have a team meeting about it first thing. And by team, I mean me, my dad, and my uncle, all trying to make sense of what my dad isn’t saying in between his observations and stories.
My dad, as usual, is not paying attention and is instead cracking open pistachios. I know he’s listening, and that this is just the way his mind works. I know that he has raging ADHD and came of age long before there was any medication for that. I know all this, and still I take it personally when he doesn’t pause to acknowledge my part in this arm of our business.
This is just the same as always. Dad will be way past thinking about Paraguay before we even get there, and we haven’t even really planned out what is going to happen on that trip…which isn’t our company’s trip.
I tug at my hair and scrub a hand along my chin. My uncle wants me to put together some bullet points about the landslide-related projects Beltane has completed, and I fight my urge to point out that this seems more appropriate for the head of the department to prepare. In fact, the head of the department should be the one going on the trip with my dad. Kellen moves on to talk about my brothers’ work and ends the meeting to move on to the electrical department.
I smile as he leaves, thinking about how Orla will be giving a presentation during the meeting and will probably get promoted soon. It won’t be because her dad is in charge. She really knows her shit. I realize that Nicole actually reminds me a lot of Orla. Neither of them take an ounce of crap from anyone, and both of them are the smartest person in a lot of rooms.
Suddenly, I get angry at myself for having these feelings about Nicole, and angry that I’m not standing up to my dad. Nicole’s stirring up a sense of yearning I work so hard to keep buried. I know my mom has fucked me up when it comes to relationships and yes, I fucking know I have issues with my dad and constantly seeking his approval.
I can’t even bring myself to press the issue of my promotion with my father or tell him about my consulting gig, but I also can’t bring myself to quit Beltane and go work somewhere I’m not just going to be known as Mick Brady’s kid.
This is why I don’t do relationships with women.
I’m too fucked up. I can’t let myself yearn for anything resembling intimacy with a woman, because I have nothing like that to give in return. I leave the conference room and know that I need to get out of here. I need something to distract me, to help me stuff my problems back down where I can manage them. I need to avoid the swirling feelings I have about work, about Nicole.
I drive toward her house anyway, hoping I can drown myself in numbers and data.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Nicole
I’VE DECIDED WE need to do some focus groups. It feels inappropriate for me to go into any more meetings with Augusto or to travel to Paraguay without polling donors and potential donors. We need to find out where and how people are likely to spend their philanthropic dollars.
When I bring this up to Tim during our one on one meeting, he tunes me out and latches on to discussing infrastructure projects in South America.
“Tim,” I interrupt. He looks up at me, surprised. “You’re not listening to me.” He squints and frowns. “What do you even care about infrastructure? You’re a lawyer. You work with rich, athletic clients about their contracts.”
I blow out a breath and sink back into my chair. He just stares at me, but starts nodding. “Ok, wow.” There’s a long pause.
“I’m sorry I interrupted you and I’m sorry I shouted, but I’m feeling a little steam rolled with this initiative, Tim. I feel like you’re not letting me do what you hired me for, which is to direct our company strategy.”
“I can see how you feel that way,” he says, speaking slowly. “But I also feel like you’re being close minded about this approach. It’s a sound idea.”
We glare at each other and I close my eyes. I rub my temples and try to refrain from pounding on the table. I’m not sure if part of me wants to see him crash and burn spectacularly at this or what exactly is happening. I just know I’m off my game. “You know what, Tim, you’re right.”
I stand up and gather my things. “I’m going to work from home and get you some numbers and Mark will write something up about our approach for the meetings in Paraguay.”
I storm out of the office before he can say anything else that might cause me to yell something I’ll later regret.
I tell Mark I’m going to work from home for the rest of the day and that I’ll call him later, but I know I need to calm down before I can even think of doing anything else work related.
I change into my running things and I fully intend to bang out a really respectable three miles and get back to my game plan for work, until I see Isaac in the trench in my back yard.
He’s staring at neighboring buildings again, frowning, seated at the edge of the crack with his legs dangling down into the abyss where I sort of dreamed of once building a fire ring.
I approach him cautiously, fighting the urge to nudge him with my sneaker because I don’t want him to fall in the pit. “Isaac?”
He looks up and puts a hand over his eyes against the glare. “Nicole. I didn’t think you’d be home so early. I was just…” He waves his hands around vaguely.
“Come for a run with me?” I try to keep my tone light, but the truth is I’m excited to go for a run with Isaac. I’m glad to see his dark hair and think about his ass with that tool belt slung around his hips. He’s the first person today who hasn’t irritated me.
Isaac
grins. “Let me go grab my stuff.”
I follow him out to the truck and he reaches into his passenger seat for his duffel bag. “Is it already-used sweaty running stuff?” Another grin.
“You know it.” He takes off his muddy boots and tosses them into the truck, walking to my front door in his socks, and I follow him again, not sure what’s driving me to do it.
I could just wait for him outside, but I want to be around him in case I think of something I want to tell him. He cocks a brow at me when I stand in front of the bathroom. “You’re going to watch me change? Into sweaty tights?”
I purse my lips, trying to decide. “No,” I say. “I guess not. But I think I’m going to peel them off you after.”
“We’d better get going, then.” He growls and grabs my hand, tossing his phone on my counter and pulling the door shut behind us as we take off toward the trail. Only a few other runners are out in the middle of this wintery day. February in Pittsburgh is mostly gray. The temperature can fluctuate between zero and sixty degrees, depending on the day, and today is one of the cold, damp-air yucky ones.
I don’t mind it when I’m running with Isaac, though. I actually feel my head clearing and am beginning to see why it could be valuable to expand my friend circle beyond just Emma and her relatives.
Isaac and I chat about the unpredictability of the weather as we run, both of us noticing that unpredictability is upsetting to us. He tells me that his friend Ray calls me Medusa, and I snort with laughter, remembering the startled expressions on all those guys’ faces when I led meetings.
