extensions and corporate filings waiting to be reviewed with little more than, "It will get done."
"Yeah," I muttered to myself. "It gets done because I do it."
Millie wasn't fond of my urgency either. She worked at one of the high-profile management consulting firms in Boston and couldn't conceive of anyone leaving an international financial services giant for a small accounting shop as I had a few years ago. She couldn't understand that shop having enough business to require anything more than nine-to-five either.
"You can go fuck yourself, Millie."
I washed that thought down with another sip and toggled to the next résumé. A quick scan had me copying and pasting my standard "thanks but no thanks" response but I stopped short of sending it when a man edged into my row.
"Hi there." He flashed an amiable smile and gestured toward me in a way that announced we'd be discussing something rather than sitting beside each other in relative anonymity for five hours. "There was a mix-up with seat assignments. My wife is in the back"—he gestured toward the tail end of the plane—"with our sixteen-month-old."
I bobbed my head as if I understood but I was stuck on the age-in-months thing. When did months stop being the unit of denomination? How many months old was I? Four hundred and…and twenty-five. Shit.
"That's a lot of months," I murmured.
He shrugged, shoved his hands in his pockets. "Yeah, the time really flies." We nodded as if we were talking about the same thing before he continued, "Would you mind switching seats with my wife?"
I blinked down at my watch, once again disappointed to find the lifeless screen. I didn't want to be the prick who wouldn't move to make things easier on a family but I had a routine. This day hadn't allowed me to maintain much of it but this was my seat. This seat. 5A. I didn't mind bumping back or forward by a row or two so long as I stayed in the right-hand window seat.
The one time we'd traveled together, Millie had railed against my preferences too. Real business travelers didn't get hung up on that kind of nonsense, I was told. She could go fuck herself. Truly.
It seemed there were multiple benefits to morning drunkenness, one of which being that I required six days to answer simple questions. When I struggled to respond, he waved at the tray table where I'd spread out my laptop, phone, and earbuds. "You've settled in here. No worries. I'll ask the person seated with my wife if she'll move."
I bobbed my head as he stepped into the aisle. "Yeah. Okay."
With that crisis averted, I returned to my email, quickly sending the rejection message before toggling to the next. My approach was simple: scope out recent experience, check it against education, and then scan for finance or accounting keywords. Anything involving revenue, audits, P&L, budgets, margins, expenditures, financial analysis. I could manage this task asleep, or—as this day would have it—drunk.
There was no mention of profit or loss on this résumé, no keywords worth clinging to, no connection to money math whatsoever. It was a dog's breakfast of scattershot jobs and schooling. I found myself shaking my head in dismay as I skimmed the document. How did anyone live a life marked by this much incongruence?
I understood that much of the world didn't operate like me. Most people didn't live by the billable hour and they didn't keep their lives as ordered as a cash flow statement. There was no greater proof than my siblings Linden and Magnolia. We were triplets, for fuck's sake, but we couldn't be more different.
Linden was an arborist and—god help him—only earned a living because I processed invoices, deposited payments, and managed his personal bills. Otherwise, he'd be a thirty-five-year-old man who performed actual tree surgery but had no money and lived with his parents because he never remembered to cash his checks.
My sister had a better handle on business administration but she'd invested a solid portion of her twenties waiting for lightning to strike. Lightning, divine intervention, the arrival of her fairy godmother, whatever. Something had hit her because she owned a sought-after landscape architecture firm but I'd survived years of sitting on my hands to keep from shaking sense into her.
They were my only siblings and—without a doubt—my favorite people in the entire world but our brains functioned in radically distinct ways. It'd worked in our favor when we were kids. Magnolia had always been the spirited one,