Page 1 of I Can't Even

Chapter One

“Jules, you have to come home. It’s Mom.” Sophie, my older sister, spoke with the gravity of someone imparting dreadful news.

“What about her?” I frowned at the coding on the computer screen in front of me as I gave my sisters, who were on speaker phone, half of my attention.

“She’s...she’s dying,” Emily, my younger sister, said. There was a catch in her voice as if she had to force the words out.

“Again?” I asked.

“Jules!” My sisters wailed together, sounding perfectly horrified by my callousness.

“What? You know it’s true,” I said. “This is seasonal for her, like allergies but so much more dramatic.”

I deleted some bad code and retyped what I thought the program needed. The pictures I wanted to use on the webpage I had designed were too big so I typed in a smaller ratio hoping to make them fit.

“Not this time.” That was Emily, the closest to our mother, probably because she still lived at home despite being twenty-five years old.

“Puleeze, the last time I fell for Babs’s overwrought death summons, I dropped a client and raced home only to have her blind date me with a podiatrist.”

I heard one of them snort. My money was on Sophie. As the oldest of us Blumer sisters, she was delightfully snarky, although she pretended she wasn’t.

“Three hours spent talking about feet. It was the worst dinner of my life. I still can’t look at a crouton and not see a plantar wart.” All true.

“Oh, ergh, I think I just threw up a little in my mouth,” Em said.

“Jules, I know Mom can be a meddler,” Soph began.

“You think?” Fearing I would get distracted and forget, I saved my work. “Or have you forgotten that she went to the furniture store where you bought your new living room set, canceled your order, and replaced it with one she liked better?”

“No, I haven’t forgotten,” Sophie said.

“She means well,” Emily protested.

In addition to being the closest, Em was also the most loyal to our mother, Babs. I had no idea why since Em’s life was by far the most stifled by our mother’s overbearing manipulative interference.

“Em, she hasn’t let you cut your hair or buy your own clothes without her approval since...oh, wait...that would be ever in this lifetime.”

“I value Mom’s opinion,” Emily said. I huffed out a breath and she insisted, “I do. She has excellent taste.”

“Oh, my god,” I argued. “Mom dresses you like you’re a librarian and not one of the cool ones.”

“She’s got you there,” Sophie said.

“You have no cred here, Soph,” Em disagreed. “Mom has been overreaching in your parenting of the twins since you got knocked up your freshman year of college.”

“Hey!” Soph protested. “That’s a low blow.”

“And yet, also true.” I exited the software program I was using.

“Shut up!” Sophie snapped.

See? This was why we didn’t speak very often. It rarely stayed civil for more than a few minutes.

“Babs treats both of you like puppets on a string.” Yes, I was a bit smug, but that’s what happens when you’re the smarter middle child.

I stood up and stretched, putting my fist into my lower back for that little extra pop. My tiny studio in Brooklyn was not big enough to pace end to end, so I lapped the futon that folded out into a bed in the center of my apartment.

Spaghetti and Meatball were sacked out on their cat tree, ignoring me. Why Spaghetti and Meatball? Because I rescued them from an alley where they’d been dumped in a plastic bag behind Decusati’s Italian Ristorante. Spag was a long and lanky orange tabby while Meat was a round black blob, so it had made sense at the time. Actually, in the five years they’d crashed with me, their shapes had not changed an inch so still accurate.

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