If You Can Get It

  If You Can Get It

  Brendan Hodge

  If You Can Get It

  IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

  Cover photo and illustrations:

  Unsplash.com & iStockPhoto.com

  Cover design by John Herreid

  ©2020 Ignatius Press, San Francisco

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 978-1-62164-345-6 (PB)

  ISBN 978-1-64229-127-8 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number 2020931927

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Acknowledgments

  Preview of The Accidental Marriage by Roger Thomas

  More from Ignatius Press

  1

  The cell phone buzzing in her hand was a reproach. Jen had promised herself she would avoid screens and spend her Sunday morning relaxing. Instead she had been checking her work e-mail, and now Katie was calling.

  Jen set the phone on the table to let it vibrate its way through the six rings that would send the call to voice mail. She smoothed out the newspaper to read the front-page article, knowing even as she did so that she was going to pick up the phone and answer it at the last moment, because Katie always got what she wanted.

  “Hi, Katie. What’s up?”

  “Um. Hi.”

  Katie’s phone skills had clearly not improved during the last few months. The seconds dragged on as Jen declined to probe why her ten-years-younger sister had called.

  “So. What are you doing at the moment?” Katie finally asked, as if it were Jen who had called out of the blue.

  “You know how it is here. Busy at work,” said Jen, turning over the page of the newspaper and scanning the inside headlines. “I’m heading into the last month before a product launch I’m in charge of, so I don’t know when I’ll next have a quiet morning to call my own. What are you up to since college? Sorry I couldn’t fly back for graduation.”

  “I’ve been looking for a job and stuff. Well. Mostly I guess I’ve been fighting with Mom and Dad. Being home really sucks now that they’re in this holy-roller phase.”

  “Mmm hmm? I bet.”

  “Actually . . .” A hesitation was followed by a rush of words. “After having been on my own for five years, I just can’t stand being back home. Mom’s always asking me why I’ve been out late. Last week she freaked out because she said I had too much alcohol in the house.”

  “That hardly sounds like her. She never noticed my stash, and that was in high school.”

  “Yeah, well she notices now. So I had to get out. I’m moving.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Well . . .” The pause was just long enough for Jen to realize what was coming. “I was hoping to move in with you. Just for a while. Until I can get a job and get my own place.”

  Jen loved her family—even liked them on most days—but it was a love that had been nurtured by having the Rocky Mountains as a privacy screen for the last eleven years. “Look, I dunno, Katie. It’s really expensive here in the Bay if you don’t have a good job. And I’m barely going to be home over the next month. Maybe you should think about it a bit. Do you have any college friends you could move in with? Maybe closer to home or in a more affordable city?”

  “How often have I asked you for anything?”

  Jen silently tallied the “Mom and Dad said they didn’t have money for . . .” calls over the past few years: textbooks, study abroad, car down payment.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I know you’re busy,” Katie pleaded. “I just need a few weeks. I’m not going to cause any trouble. I’ll stay out of the way.” The words were coming faster, and she sounded close to tears. “Please?”

  What kind of sister am I? Jen sighed. “Yeah. Okay.” Compulsively she got up and began neatening: coffee cup and breakfast plate to the sink, newspaper folded. “When are you thinking of coming? The next couple weeks are really crazy, but—”

  “I’m parked out front now.”

  “Now?” A few steps and a look out the condo’s front window showed Katie’s red Focus parked on the street, with boxes and bags visibly piled in the back seat. “Katie. What were you thinking?”

  “I’m sorry! Mom was just so—” Words apparently failed, and she began again. “Thursday night she just totally reamed me out for literally no reason.”

  “Literally?”

  “And I decided I had to get out, so I started throwing things in the car. I was going to call you, but I kept worrying you’d say no.”

  “So, you just showed up? Katie, that’s . . . Oh, it’s stupid talking on the phone when I can see you. Come up here.”

  Jen hung up the phone, opened the front door, and went out onto the balcony she shared with the condo next door. She watched Katie get out of the car, stretch, and come up the stairs.

  “You look like you overslept an 8 A.M. class,” Jen said, surveying Katie’s battered flip-flops, plaid pants, tank top, and bedraggled hair.

  “You look like Sporty Mum escaped from some Stepford Wives compound,” Katie shot back. “Ugh, I feel terrible. Can I use your bathroom?”

  Jen pointed, and Katie dived for it, leaving the door slightly ajar. From inside, Jen could hear the sound of retching. After a moment, it ceased and water ran. Katie emerged, wiping her face with the hand towel. “That’s better.”

  “Are you sick?” Jen demanded.

  “I spent the last two days living off Red Bull and Doritos and taking naps in rest areas. I feel disgusting.”

  “Why didn’t you get some decent food and sleep in a motel?”

  “Do you have any idea what they put in that fast food? There’s this stuff called pink slime in the meat, and I bet the potatoes they make into fries are genetically modified and crap. Besides, I barely had enough money just for gas. Can I take a nap before I bring my stuff in?”

  Jen went to open the door to the spare bedroom, but Katie threw herself down on the couch, pulled one of the cushions over her head, and was still.

  For a moment, Jen stood, contemplating the motionless form before her and the fading prospect of a quiet Sunday. Still, the interruption was quieted for now. She went back into the kitchen for another cup of coffee. Maybe there would even be time for a run before Katie woke up.

  When Jen emerged after her shower, feeling damp but virtuous, she ventured back into the living room and saw that Katie remained motionless on the sofa: one leg hanging off, plaid bottom in the air, her head under the cushion, as if the couch were some monster that had paused halfway through consuming its victim.

  Nonetheless, her sister’s presence somehow constituted an obstacle to the planned lazy day. The couch and its occupant continually drew her eye, and Jen found herself cleaning the condo, moving the filing cabinet out of the spare bedroom, shifting books off its shelf and onto the one in her own room, and generally reorganizing to accommodate two rather than one.

  Memories of the first weeks after Kevin had finally moved out came back to her. The sense of “no one else here” had been overpowering. However increasingly unwelcome that presence had been in the final months, the lack of it, after three years, had been palpable, and she had cleaned, replaced furniture, reorganized, and redecorated until she no longer expected to see him sprawled in the recliner or crouched over a cup of coffee in the kitchen. Now “someone else here” seemed to radiate through the condo, and she felt the need to deconstruct the order that had been hers and her
s alone, rather than allow the presence of a new resident to violate it.

  Six o’clock found Katie still asleep and Jen sitting in one of the armchairs opposite the couch, staring at her phone. She called Mandarin Garden and ordered dinner. Their “Should be there in twenty-five minutes” promised a clear end point to the conversation if it became difficult. Then, with that protection, she called her parents.

  “Hey, Dad. It’s Jen,” she said when the familiar voice answered. Instinctively she drew her legs up and wrapped an arm around them, as if she were a child again, creeping into his easy chair to tell him about the unfairness of some teacher or the betrayal of some friend. Dad had always been the sympathetic one to talk to, even if she had drawn no more than an “mmm hmm” from him while the game played in the background.

  “Hi there, sweetie. It’s been a while. How are things at work?”

  It was always his first question and one that she could not resist answering, so she did.

  “Good. Good.” She launched into a narrative of the project, but he cut in at her first pause. “I’ll get your mother for you.”

  “Dad, wait.”

  “I know your mother wants to talk to you about Katie.”

  “And the Cubbies are playing?”

  “Sixth inning and down three against the Phillies.”

  “All right, Dad.”

  For a moment Jen could hear a mixture of TV sports and her parents’ conversation in the background, then her mother’s voice.

  “Jen, I’m so glad you called. So Katie’s with you?”

  “Yeah, she got here this morning.”

  “Oh, praise God!”

  “You could have called and told me she was coming if you were so worried, Mom.”

  “Oh, well . . .” She could picture her mother’s dismissive gesture. “Katie gets upset so easily. I half thought she’d come back after a day or two. I didn’t think she’d really drive all the way to California. You know Katie. She doesn’t stick to things.”

  “What happened between you two? She’s been asleep since she got here.”

  Her mother gave one of the earth-shattering sighs that Jen remembered well from her teenage years. “I don’t know what it is. She’s been so difficult since she moved back in. I just ask what any good parent would ask: tell me where she’s going, be home by midnight, come to Mass with the family, don’t drink all the time in her room. You’d think I was trying to keep her under lock and key! She came in at one thirty on Thursday night, smelling like alcohol, and when I asked her if she had any respect at all for our family rules, she just exploded. Cursing. Digging up all sorts of old family laundry. I don’t know what got into her. You were never like that.”

  “Mom, what are you talking about? There were never any kind of family rules when I was a teenager, much less home from college.”

  There was a pause.

  “Well,” said her mother, in a tone that warned against contradiction. “I think we always had respect for ourselves as a family.”

  “We may have respected ourselves, but we did it pretty separately. Things were a little different with you then, remember?”

  She let the last word hang for a moment, but her mother refused to rise to the bait.

  “Besides, you can hardly expect Katie to want to follow rules now that she didn’t have when she was sixteen.”

  “All I can do is my best as a mother,” her mother replied with dignity. “I’m sorry if I failed you girls at times back then, but I’m trying to do the best I can now.”

  It was Jen’s turn to sigh. “Yeah. I know, Mom. I’m glad you’re better.”

  Mother and daughter were silent for a moment.

  “So, you two had a big fight about house rules, and she left. She’s not pregnant or on drugs or wanted by the police or anything crazy like that?”

  “Oh . . . Do you think she is? I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “No. No, Mom, I was kidding. I just mean, there’s nothing really big wrong, is there?”

  “I worry a lot that she struggles in her spiritual life.”

  “Her what?”

  “She never wants to come to Mass with us. I don’t think she prays. But I think it bothers her. Even that degree of hers, studying all those Eastern religions—I think she was just trying to run away from what she knows is true.”

  “Sheesh, Mom, we only used to ever go to church on Christmas and Easter.” As soon as she said it, Jen knew this would elicit some kind of guilt-ridden response, and she elected to take the easy way out. “Shoot, I’m sorry. The Chinese food is here. I’m sure it’s going to be okay. I’ll talk with you in a few days and let you know how she’s doing. Tell Dad I love him.”

  Jen sat staring at the darkened phone for a moment, then crossed the room and shook her recumbent sister’s shoulder. “Katie. Time to get up. Dinner will be here in a few minutes. Let’s get your stuff in from the car.”

  The sisters sat across the dinner table from each other with well-heaped cartons of Chinese food between them.

  “I called Mom and Dad and told them you’d got in safe,” Jen said.

  Katie rolled her eyes and hunched her shoulders forward. “Mom tell you I’m some kind of a drunk or slut or something?”

  “No. She was pretty calm compared with the old Mom outbursts.”

  “Gotta love the meds.”

  “Is it a lot better?”

  “Yeah. Remember the way she used to just refuse to talk to people all day when things were going wrong? There’s never any of that now. She talks, she asks how you’re doing, she wants to be around you. It’s nice actually. The last couple years, it’s like getting to know her for the first time.” Katie paused, staring out the darkening back windows for a moment. “That’s the good part. The bad thing is that once she got herself together with the meds, she had this religious conversion—reversion, I guess. I think it’s helped her in a lot of ways, but the moralizing is a total buzzkill.”

  “I heard a bit of that on the phone. I can see how it would be frustrating to move back into that.”

  Katie nodded but didn’t respond.

  “Isn’t that kind of your field, though? With the religious studies degree?”

  “Yeah, well, I picked religious studies because I wanted to learn about other world religious traditions, not because I wanted to live with the local branch of Nags for Jesus.”

  “I suppose you could have done that without the student loans. What do you do with a religious studies degree anyway?”

  Katie put down her chopsticks with decision. “Don’t even start on the ‘what do you do with that degree’ crap, Miss Business Degree! Do you seriously think I haven’t heard that one before?”

  The vehemence of Katie’s response brought Jen up short. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t asked myself why I studied something like that in such a terrible economy. It’s not like I can just go down to the local religion shop and get a job. But I couldn’t imagine wasting college on something I wasn’t interested in. I mean, seriously, what do you guys learn in four years of studying business? How to balance a really big checkbook? Watch the last century’s greatest television commercials?”

  “There’s a lot that goes into running a business that’s worth studying,” Jen began.

  “Yeah, fine. I know. Maybe I’m just talking smack. But I’m probably going to have to spend the rest of my life dealing with business stuff. College seemed like the time to deal with the important stuff in life. And there’s so much there. I mean, sure, a lot of Christians are self-satisfied, but when you look across the world at all the different religions, it’s like you’re seeing lots of bits of one big picture. Religion tells us something important, about humanity at the very least, and maybe something more.”

  Katie poked at her food for a moment.

  “But if you want the religious studies answer, I think the issue with Mom right now is that with her recent reconversion she’s adopted a strongly law-code-based notion
of morality along with a sort of prosperity theology, meaning that she sees virtue primarily as following specific rules and believes that if she could just get me to follow those rules, I’d be happy and do well in life. Whereas, if she’d put aside Scripture Soup for the Soul and read the book of Job out of her own Bible, she’d see that real Judaism and Christianity have never said that God’s will for your life is some kind of virtue-operated vending machine that pops out good fortune.”

  “Oh.”

  Katie shrugged. “See, I learned stuff in college. But you don’t care about all this stuff, do you? How’s work? You got some kind of a promotion a year ago, didn’t you?”

  “I got the job almost a year ago. I’m a product-line manager for AppLogix.”

  Katie looked blank.

  “You’ve probably seen their iPhone apps. PocketDJ?”

  “Oh, yeah, I know PocketDJ. Everyone had that at college last semester. There was even a guy who hooked it up to the student-union stereo system and DJed a whole party off it. You work on that?”

  “A product-line manager is a cross-functional position. I’m in charge of talking to all the teams working on the project and making sure that they’re meeting objectives, getting the product to stores on time, advertising them correctly, the whole thing. And the product line I’m working on is the PocketDJ Player that will be in stores this Fourth of July.”

  “What do you mean ‘Player’? Is it a new version of the app?”

  “No, it’s a dedicated device for PocketDJ. It’s got a touch turntable and sliders and everything. Really slick industrial design.”

  “But . . . what’s the point? People don’t want to carry around another thing in their pockets. They want to use PocketDJ on their iPhones. That’s the whole point: that it’s a turntable on your phone.”

  Jen shrugged, stacked the dishes, and carried the leftovers into the kitchen. This was the frustrating thing about working on such a visible project. Everyone thought they could just go with their instincts and predict what consumers would want. No one realized how much research went into product planning.