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03: Send Out the Best

03: Send Out the Best

            Tuesday is a jogging day. When Mom arrives home from work, carrying papers and files of new assignments and deals that the company has just landed, she struggles to get out of the car sometimes; too busy laughing at the banter between the presenters on whatever radio station it is that she listens to. I know that sometimes, she can spend another half hour in the car, watching the house, listening to the radio, and willing herself to find the motivation to get out of that silver Merc and come inside. There’s always an iced tea in the cup holder, ‘Tracey’ scrawled in the familiar print of her regular barista, Marina, who works the afternoon shift when she’s making her way home from the office. Marina always adds more ice cubes to her order than she does any other customer. The car is always tainted with a mix of strawberry, perfume and apple freshener, which follows Mom for a good ten minutes after she’s got inside the house, until the incense sticks she has lit take the smell away.

            Mom closes the door behind her, letting out a deep sigh of relief that officially, her time thinking of work has ended, but unofficially, there’s only so much worrying which is spent fretting over if the interns will be able to pull through for her because she’s just now decided that letting them feel as though they have some responsibility is good for them. The iced tea hangs between her fingertips, green straw chewed down at the tip, completely flat, and the logo of Starbucks facing her thigh. The papers have been haphazardly shoved into a black binder some dog eared, creased, brand new and others with coffee stains from where her assistant was in such a hurry she accidently tipped over her cup of low-fat mocha with an extra shot of caffeine.

            Her hair is bundled into a bun, blonde strands falling in curls around her pale face, the rest resembling fuzz on the top of her head. The simple line of eyeliner she spent so much time drawing on at 6am in the morning has faded into a line of grey, barely noticeable behind faint eyelashes. There’s always a second of apprehension when she arrives home, a moment where she stands still, then kicks off her timberlands and pads her way in her fuzzy socks with penguins on, to the kitchen where Dad already has a glass of iced tea waiting. He usually takes it out of the fridge once the front door closes.

            “Work well?” Dad asks, preparing to look through a recipe book which sits, abandoned, next to the microwave oven. Dad knows exactly each recipe, having thumbed through the shiny pages so many times before he’d be able to recite them blindfolded. Whenever he finds one he, and the rest of us, like the sound of, we don’t have the ingredients, or the correct equipment, for instance, we don’t own a sieve.

            Mom placates him anyway, never once mentioning, after years of the same routine that we’ll probably end up having another chicken meal or order in, but as it’s Tuesday, and today is jogging day, I know Mom will request for something healthy. “We secured the Adair deal.” I thumb through the contents of the fridge, before setting on taking out the bottle of Sunny D.

            The sexual connotations of the orange bottle gave Mom some hassle, especially when Byron would start to giggle, in his young teenage stage, whenever he opened the fridge, looked at the fridge door, and the bottle of Sunny D would glare back at him under the harsh white lights from the refrigerator. 

            Dad lets out a low whistle, “Fantastic. Is this the big-shot in San Francisco who wants the security system but hasn’t got the engineers? How many is he willing to hire?”

            “However many it takes, that’s why it was so important.” We keep straws for Mom, and she takes her time choosing a blue one, swirling it around her tall glass of ice tea, redirecting each ice cube in a particular direction which suits her. “We’re planning to send out the best, and those who will benefit the most from it.”