Arielle ran after her father, following him out the front door of the office.
Frank Carter, her own father, walked toward his car and didn’t look back.
The early spring morning was cool on Arielle’s arms because she hadn’t worn a sweater, but the sun was already high in the Arizona sky and beginning to warm the air. She yelled after him, “Dad! Talk to me!”
He stopped walking but didn’t turn around to face her. “Ari, go back inside. The staff will have a lot of questions for the HR department. My sister can’t handle them all. I’m relying on you to help them through this transition.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were selling the business? I could’ve gotten a loan from the bank and bought it from you instead of selling it to some venture capitalist guy who’s just going to plunder and ruin it.”
He shook his head, still facing away from her. “I wouldn’t saddle you with this turkey. Match Play is hemorrhaging money, and there’s no way to turn it around. I was lucky that the Last Chance company was looking for failing businesses to turn around. At least I got a little bit of my investment back.”
“But this was your retirement plan! It was supposed to double your retirement nest egg in ten years.”
Frank Carter walked away from her. “I’m not going to discuss this with you. This is my problem, and I’ll take care of it. You go back in there and take care of those people, Ari. They need you.”
With that, her father bent and got into his Honda Civic that he had been driving since before he’d retired from teaching, and he backed it out.
Arielle didn’t try to block his car to force him to talk to her. She didn’t think her father would run her over, but he would nudge her with the bumper a few times if she got in his way.
Arielle lifted her hands to her head, intending to run her fingers through her hair, but she smacked herself in the face with her cell phone that she was holding.
Typical.
She tapped the screen a few times to call her mother, who answered almost immediately. “Mom! Did you know Dad was going to sell Match Play?”
Her mother sighed, as Arielle had heard her do a thousand times. Stacy Carter sighed a lot. “We’ve been discussing it for three days. It seemed like the right decision to make.”
“Why weren’t you honest with me about this?” Arielle demanded.
“Because this is none of your business.”
“But you should’ve told me. Dad should’ve told me, and you should’ve called me and told me. You guys didn’t even mention it at Sunday dinner last weekend, and I was sitting right there!”
“Last Sunday, there was nothing to tell. The venture capitalist firm didn’t even contact him until two days ago, on Wednesday. They just finalized the deal half an hour ago.”
“And how did you know that?”
“Because your father called me to tell me the deal had gone through.”
“And he didn’t tell me? You shouldn’t keep things like this from me. It’s not fair to talk behind my back about important things that affect me. You should’ve told me.”
Her mother sighed again. “Again, other than your job, which is secure for at least another two months, it’s none of your business.”
The betrayal was ripping her apart as much as her frantic worry about her parents was. “You should have been honest with me. How can I trust you guys if you aren’t honest with me?”
“It was a business deal. A bank CEO doesn’t poll their employees every time they make a loan.”
“Dad said he got some of his retirement savings back? What the hell does that mean?”
Her mother’s sigh was both exasperated and mournful. “It means that we gambled and we lost. It didn’t look like a gamble at the time, but it was.”
“You lost? How much did you lose?”
“Pretty much everything. The company that bought it paid us about five percent of what your father has sunk into it over the years.”
“Five percent? That’s horrible! Why would anyone do such a thing? I won’t work for such a man. I’ll go back in and quit right now.”
“Well, you shouldn’t, but that’s up to you. Your father took a lower payout to make sure that everyone kept their jobs for at least two months, and those people will need you to help them transfer their health insurance and retirement benefits as they move to new jobs.”
“I won’t work for a person who would do that. It’s unethical to pay someone a nickel for every dollar they invested in a business, especially when it was their retirement savings. It’s dishonest. What kind of a psychopath would do that to a person?”
“It’s one of the better offers we got,” her mother grumbled.
“But Dad can’t retire on that. It’s not enough.”
“Your father will have to go back to teaching. The public school districts won’t hire a fifty-eight-year-old man with thirty-five years of experience, but the Catholic schools are always looking for retired teachers to teach for a few years.”
“But we’re not Catholic.”
Her mother’s tone lowered and became drier. “He’s a math teacher, not catechism.”
“But that won’t be enough. The Catholic schools pay half of what the public schools do. And they don’t have a retirement plan.”
Her mother said, “I’ve been looking for a secretarial job for the past couple of weeks to help make ends meet. I’m sure I’ll find something. I took a typing test, and I can still type over a hundred words a minute. People always need good secretaries.”
Arielle didn’t have the heart to tell her mother that typing speed wasn’t that important anymore or that ‘secretary’ wasn’t even a job title in the current market. “We can figure something out. We can come up with a plan to get you guys back on your feet within a few years. I’m sure I can figure something out.”
“I am not going to discuss our financial situation with my daughter. This is none of your business and not your problem. It’s our problem, and we will handle it.”
“But I can help.”
“We will handle it. I’m just sorry that it’s going to affect you. I didn’t like it when Frank kept hiring family, like you and his sister Molly and my nephew Joe. When Match Play goes down, it will take everyone with it. I know you’d planned to work there until you got married and had kids, and then you and your dad had some sort of a deal where you could go part-time and work from home so you could raise your kids.”
That deal had been made five years ago, which was goddamn ancient history as far as Arielle was concerned. “Why are we discussing that? I’m not even dating anybody.”
“Yes, but you’ll move on with your life someday. I don’t like how long it’s taking you to get over Nick Chauvin. You know your father and I never thought he was right for you, anyway.”
A zing of rage shot through every cell of Arielle’s body. “We don’t say that name.”
“Nick is a common name. You’re going to need to get over that, too. It’s been three years.”
How did Arielle grilling her mother about their financial situation somehow rotate back to her mom once again haranguing Arielle that she needed to get out there and date, she was wasting her twenties, and her ovaries weren’t going to be producing eggs forever. “Don’t change the subject.”
“I’m just saying that most men don’t cheat. Or at least some of them don’t cheat. Your father never cheated on me.”
Arielle squeezed her eyes shut because the conversation was going down the same well-trodden path that she tried to avoid every minute of her life. “We need to talk about Dad and Match Play and your retirement savings.”
“And I said that I’m not going to discuss any of that with my daughter. We will manage. We managed to raise three kids on one teacher’s salary. We’ll be fine.”
And then her mother hung up on her.
Arielle screamed through her teeth and shook her fists at the stupid, uncaring sun blazing in the sky.
And then she took a few deep breaths, got herself under control, and turned to go back inside the office.
The people working at Match Play were going to have a lot of questions about their healthcare plan, accrued vacation time, and severance packages.
It was Arielle’s job to get those answers for them, and she had work to do.