“Would it feel like you earned it?
Would you live with a purpose?”
Performed by Brantley Gilbert
Written by Bell / Jr. / Brunswick / Wall / Berryhill / Gilbert
We were putting the last remainingornaments on the tree, but the moment wasn’t the serene one it should have been. Instead, my stomach was lurching, and I was fighting to keep my cool.
“I don’t understand why you won’t tell us who he is,cailín deas,” Mom said, frustration leaking from every pore regardless of the “sweet girl” endearment she used.
“You’ve been home for barely a day, and I’m already sick and tired of this question,” Cassidy said. Her tone was neutral, but her eyes were flashing.
“Why does it matter, Mom?” I asked.
She turned to me with eyes narrowed. “Don’t start. If you’d been here this fall, we would have been able?”
“To do what, Mom? What exactly could I have done?”
Dad jumped into the fray. “Cassidy, we just want to make sure the man takes responsibility for his actions.”
“I don’t want his money, Dad. He offered to pay for the abortion. I told him no. End of story,” Cass said.
The man wanting her to have an abortion was new information. I could never see Cass going that route. As a little girl, she used to cry when we killed a bug, her heart so tortured by the loss of any living thing that she couldn’t stand it. It was the same reason she’d become a vegetarian once she found out where meat came from.
I put the last ornament on the tree and decided I needed an escape from the drama. If I felt that way, I was sure Cassidy was even more ready to fly the coop.
“I was thinking of heading downtown to the Holiday Open House. Want to come, Cass?”
“Yes!” she all but screamed.
“It’s going to snow,” Mom said.
“Okay?” I said with a frown. It wasn’t like snow was an unknown commodity for us, having grown up in upstate New York.
“It’ll be slippery.”
Cassidy rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to fall.”
“She’ll be with me,” I told Mom, but she looked at me doubtfully.
“Let me go get my snow boots,” Cassidy said and went down the hall to her room.
“I’m going out to the apartment to grab my gear,” I hollered after her, heading in the opposite direction.
Our house was so old that nothing connected. Rooms were cut off from each other by walls. The hallway to the bedrooms required a U-turn through the living room and dining room before you could get to the kitchen. It made me feel claustrophobic these days. The house needed a remodel. It needed walls torn down so that everything could be open and breathable, but my parents wouldn’t hear of it, even when the kitchen was barely serviceable with its antiquated appliances and chipped laminate countertops.
I’d offered the renovation as a gift, but Dad had been insulted, and Mom had cried. They wouldn’t take a penny from me, even when I told them how much money I’d made off the last album, without even considering the tour. I hadn’t been bragging. I’d just wanted to show them I could afford it. Instead, it had backfired on me as if I was rubbing my money in their faces.
The back door squeaked when I opened it—more work needing to be done that would be denied if I brought it up. The cold hit me so hard I shivered right down to my bones. I hurried from the house, leaving my parents and their pride behind as I mounted the steps to the apartment above the garage.
I’d abandoned my tiny, sloped room in the house for the apartment ever since I’d made my first album. Growing up, it had been rented out to college students, but once I’d “made it,” I’d taken over the lease so I could keep it as my private getaway. It was the one and only way I was able to infuse any of my income into my parents’ pockets.
The lights in the apartment were all on, and Marco sat on the pull-out couch in front of the TV. He’d declined our request to join us for dinner and tree decorating, saying he had calls to make, but I wondered if he just felt like he was invading our privacy. I didn’t want him to feel that way. He was almost more family to me than the people in the house.
“Cass and I are heading downtown to the Holiday Open House,” I told him, as I pulled on a thick winter jacket and a pair of snow boots I had sitting by the door.
He gave a curt nod, joining me at the door and donning his own gear.
