Free Grateful by Kim Fielding Page A

of love life, actually.
    “Yeah, I get a lot of the same,” Julia said. “No lectures over wounding myself, but a whole lotta When am I going to get grandbabies .”
    “You don’t have a Jewish mother,” I pointed out.
    “I have a Chinese one. Just as bad. Plus I’m an only, so I get the full serving of guilt.”
    Now it was her turn to sigh. For a while we just sat there. Julie finished her yogurt, and I sipped my coffee. The break room TV blared a stupid cooking show, even though nobody was watching it. Who wants to learn to make duck confit on their break? And what is confit anyway?
    I don’t cook much. As you might have guessed, my attempts usually end in disaster. Last Thanksgiving, for instance? Against my family’s advice and my better judgment, I decided to make pumpkin pie. Didn’t sound so hard. I guess it could have ended up worse—only one hook-and-ladder truck had to show up, and for a little while, my apartment was stuffed full of well-muscled firemen.
    When our time was up, Julia gathered her empty yogurt carton and my almost-empty cup, then threw them in the trash. I’m not allowed to have liquids in my cubicle. My boss got tired of replacing my keyboards.
    “If you want, I can go with you,” Julie said as we returned to our desks. “I can pretend to be your girlfriend.”
    “They know I’m gay.” I’d been out since, like, sixth grade. My people were cool with it.
    “You could tell them you switched teams. That’d give them something new to talk about.”
    “Thanks, Jules, but I guess I’m going to have to tough this one out alone.” Then I had a consoling thought. “Maybe I’ll get hit by a bus on my way home. Then I won’t have to go.”
    “Good luck with that.”
    I didn’t get hit by a bus—not even a little one. I did, however, step into a puddle that looked a lot shallower than it was, soaking my left pant leg almost to the knee. My left shoe squelched the whole way home.
    I was supposed to pack the next day so I’d be all ready for an early start the morning after that. But I hate packing, and I kept getting distracted—Netflix was calling my name—and I never quite got around to it. Then I way overslept. That meant I ended up throwing stuff into my suitcase while my head was still sleep-blurry. I hoped vaguely that I was managing to choose clothes suitable for family holiday gatherings. I wouldn’t much enjoy spending the next several days stuck in my work khakis and polos, or in my flashy but slightly dated clubwear.
    I remembered to water my houseplants, Guy and Audrey, which I figured was a good sign. It wasn’t easy lugging my shit out to the car with a limp and a gimpy arm—I dropped the suitcase on my bad foot twice—but I made it eventually. And I pulled out of my apartment complex parking lot and into traffic flawlessly, like some guy in a car commercial where the cars are perfectly synchronized and nobody ever gets stopped by a red light and nearly rear-ended by an SUV with a texting soccer mom.
    I usually sing along with the radio while I drive, so loudly that if I have my windows down and stop next to someone else with their windows down, they stare at me. Except once, when a hunk in a Mazda started crooning with me—at least until the light turned green and all the impatient, nonromantic types behind us started to honk.
    Anyway, today was coldish by California standards, so I kept the windows up, and instead of singing, I stressed. Family does that to me. I mean, I guess family does that to a lot of people, even when the family in question is loving and supportive. Maybe even especially when they’re loving and supportive. If they were all a bunch of assholes, I wouldn’t care so much about disappointing them. But here I was, stuck in a job they thought I was too smart for, banged-up from my own idiocy, and perpetually single.
    So, yeah, no singing today.
    Traffic crawled through San Jose and then came almost to a standstill in Pleasanton, where