I Hate Football Players

13: Family Ties

I knew from his daily updates, but I asked anyways. "How many cars did he sell this month?"

Pride filled her voice as she answered, "Six new, eleven used. Hoping for another tonight."

"That's good," I murmured and stirred my bowl.

Buying a car was a big decision, which fluctuated Dad's income. To make up for it, Mom was a manager at an insurance company. Both were respectable, traditional, boring jobs. Jake and I wanted nothing to do with either.

"He got Friday nights off for the season."

"Of course, he is," I muttered to my mound of meat. The season. Not Christmas, not holidays, and not fall. Jake's shadow of football influence again.

Her lighter tone fell flat on my melancholy. "Dad wouldn't help today anyway. Glad I have you."

Dad was a hot mess in the kitchen, but Mom was a cooking wizard. Her love of it was infectious, and I'd been contaminated. Making something out of ingredients and getting my hands messy was fun, almost as fun as reading.

Except for pizza. I was ruined there.

"What are we listening to today?" Mom's knife paused mid-slice, and she raised an eyebrow at Saul Bellows' audiobook flowing from my phone.

"The Adventures of Augie March." I smiled at my book selection. "It's on my English Lit reading list."

"Not sure which fact I should comment on more." Her brown eyes sparkled, the same dark chocolate she passed to Jake and me. "That you'd rather hear a book than let your Mom get her dance groove on, you're getting into your English Lit reading list before school starts, or you're cheating by using an audiobook."

Ouch. Mom burn. "It's not cheating if the book is on the optional list." I pretended to scowl. Mom's dance moves were terrible anyways. No one needed to see her flat ass jiggling and pelvic rolls. No one.

"Sure, but you have to explain the eagle catching a lizard symbolism. I never get this part," she muttered at our current chapter.

I smiled since there wasn't any symbolism here. My phone's robotic reading voice was interrupted by sniffling nasal sounds from Mom's onion pile. Her shaky breath was too much for me to remain silent. "Mom?"

"Fuh-fine." She sniffed in a long, dragged-out breath that jingled her gold necklaces. "It's the onions."

"Onions, huh?" We both knew that her watery eyes weren't from any onions. "Let's switch then."

"Fine. It's not the onions," she confessed as one hand wrung the other's fingers. Her eyes shone with tears, and her voice husked thick, "This is Jake's last season, your last year. We'll be touring college campuses soon."

"I can't wait." I grinned at the word 'college,' dampened by one tiny, insignificant missing detail: I hadn't shared that my early applications were sent to schools nowhere near California.

Mom eyed me with a tight grip on her knife. "Which schools are you considering?"

"Umm..." I fixed my gaze on the meatball seasoning that my hands stirred. "Some east-coast. You know, Harvard, Yale, and Cornell."

Her knife clattered on her cutting board, which she palmed to stillness. "Eleanor Grace!" Her eyes stretched until her irises were surrounded with white. "Out-of-state tuition aside, do you know how expensive those schools are?"

"I know," I grumbled. "And no football scholarship."

"It's not that, honey. But your father and I don't have enough kidneys to sell to afford that." Her smile contrasted with the panic in her eyes. Mom's words were an arrow shot to my chest. We lived comfortably, but the extra money wasn't lying around. Despite my dashed hopes for my car aside, the new phone for my birthday was a big deal for them. "You can't consider community college? Stay at home?"