Willa & the Extraordinary Internship

CH.5

By the time they all parted ways and headed home, they hadn't exactly kissed and made up, but Willa was feeling a lot less peeved with Cyn. By the time she pulled into the driveway of her condo, she had made up her mind to think more kindly of passive aggressive (or was it aggressive aggressive?) Cyn. Of course, all of that swiftly flew out the window the second she stepped through the door and her landline began to ring. Firmly lodged between a potted cactus and her stack of library books, her mint-green rotary dial phone had pride of place on a table of its own just outside of her kitchen. MOM showed up on the screen, and from the plummeting sensation in her stomach that had everything to do with her mother and nothing to do with the six sausages she'd consumed, it may as well have been synonymous with Satan.

"Hi, Mom."

"Sweetie, I've been browsing the Internet," her mother plunged into the litany of prospective jobs she'd just looked up, "and I've found some jobs for you!" This was her mother's newest thing. Ever since she decided to quit her job as a market researcher and sell her half of the business to her partner, she'd had ample time to improve her wayward Willa in between scheduling impromptu trips all over the globe. Her newest addiction, job board scrounging, was the bane of Willa's life. On a weekly basis, she had no fewer than five emails from her mother with links to corporate jobs in big cities.

"I already have a job," she reminded her mother for the thousandth time.

"You do?" Lila Grainger seemed confused, then laughed merrily. "Oh, your thing with Paige? But I'm talking about a six figure salary, Willa!"

Willa scrunched her nose, imagining two big dollar signs popping out of her mother's eyes in unison.

"I sent the information to your email."

Of course she did, Willa groaned inwardly, giving herself a mental reminder to redirect all her mother's future mail straight to the trash.

"Anyway, sweetie, we just wanted to let you know we're heading to the airport. Let me put Dad on, hold on a moment. Forrest!"

A second later and her dad's deep, gravelly voice said, "Hello."

"Hi, Dad."

"Mom giving you a hard time?"

In the background, Willa could hear her mother's indignant squawk and the swishing noise of what could only be one of her mother's Hermes scarves swatted at her father. "Not more than usual," she grinned into the receiver. "I just got back from Maryam's."

"Did you have fun?"

"Sort of."

Her father didn't speak, waiting for her to elaborate, or not. That was part of what she loved most about him. Growing up, her mom was a helicopter parent, always hovering within Willa's line of vision with helpful anecdotes, patronizing lectures, and steely ambition. Her dad fell on the other side of the spectrum, never pushing, but always there. A silent force of support who was always willing to talk, but rarely initiating anything Willa wasn't willing to share. Taking the leap, Willa added, "Cynthia was there."

"Ah."

"It's not that I don't like her," she hastened to say. "It's just that sometimes I get the feeling she's competing with me in some game I don't even know I'm playing."

"Isn't that the girl who wears the lipstick shade I haven't seen used since the fifties?"

She could practically hear the grimace in his voice. "That's her," she confirmed, biting back a smile.

"She seems like quite a character."

"One way of putting it," Willa mumbled under her breath. "Do you have everything? Passports, money, camera?"

"Your mother took charge of the packing. I'm not entirely sure why she wants to go to an ashram in India." Her dad still sounded a bit wary. "She wouldn't let me take my shorts and tee shirts. Apparently we have to soak up the culture and immerse ourselves in the experience. Your mom said anything we needed, we'd buy there. What kind of clothes do they wear in ashrams anyway?"

Uh. She wracked her brain trying to think of the clothes Indian men wore, but couldn't think of anything other than the flamboyant floral silk prints they wore in Bollywood movies. The idea of her cargo short and Reebok tee dad wearing anything loud and patterned was unfathomable. "Cotton, linen stuff?"

"Hm."

Willa could hear her mother saying something on the other end, and a moment later her father said, "the cab's here. Bye, sweetie, we love you."

"Have a good trip! Fly safe, I love you too," she managed to say in a garbled rush, hoping her father heard it all over her mother's insistent rushing.

It wasn't until she hung up that her father's words came back to her: she seems like quite a character. And after all, characters were meant to be written about, weren't they? Before that little kernel of justification could escape her, she had her laptop at the ready, and her fingers were flying over the keyboard.