Free The Rules of Inheritance by Claire Bidwell Smith

prepare us both for this, but it obviously hadn’t worked.
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    No matter what happens, Claire, he had said, we should feel grateful that I’ve had as long as I have. No one ever thought I’d outlive your mom, yet here I am.
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    I nodded at him.
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    Except the thing is that I’m not that grateful.
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    I’m sick of cancer, sick of hospitals and doctors, and I’m sick of fucking radiation.
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    I don’t expect my father to live forever. I’ve already come to the conclusion that I will probably be parentless by the time I am thirty.
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    But not yet. I’m not ready.

    IN A BIZARRE COINCIDENCE my dad’s radiation treatment starts the same day that I begin at Big Fancy Magazine. When we found this out, I immediately offered not to take the job. I’m going to just take care of you instead, Dad, I told him.
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    Are you kidding? Your mother would kill me if you didn’t take this job.
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    It’s true. My mother may have imagined great things for me, but a job at Big Fancy Magazine , one of her favorite glossies, would have blown her away.
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    We argued back and forth about it a bit longer, but by that time my father had already started carrying a copy of the magazine around with him, proudly showing it to anyone in his path.
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    My daughter works here, he would exclaim, flashing a recent issue featuring an Oscar-winning actress on the cover.
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    And so it was decided. Each morning, Monday through Friday, my father will drive to a hospital in Loma Linda, where the doctors will zap his mouth with radiation. And I will drive to work so that I can spend eight hours taking orders from a demanding magazine editor.
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    The day I completed all the paperwork in the Big Fancy Magazine HR offices I drove to the beach and put my toes in the great, swelling Pacific. I allowed myself to imagine some incredible life unfolding before me. For no particular reason I pictured myself living in Paris, traveling through Uganda; I saw myself penning insightful and meaningful journalism, stories that truly explore the unbounded humanity the world has to offer. Well, I could hear myself saying to some faceless biographer, I started working at Big Fancy Magazine when I was twenty-four and it all just unfolded from there.
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    I think about this as I wait in line for the smoothie. I bet West Coast Editor has already forgotten my last name.
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    Back upstairs, I step carefully into her office and set the smoothie down on her desk.
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    She takes a sip without looking at me. And then she coughs, choking on it.
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    Blueberry? Her eyes are narrow slits. I think it’s the first time she’s looked at me all day.
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    I wanted peanut butter, she says.
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    She pushes the smoothie away, swiveling back to her computer. I am officially dismissed. I deduce that I’m getting the silent treatment from her for the rest of the day since she e-mails me duties and tasks from behind her closed office door—curt little sentences written in lowercase letters.
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    As per her instructions, I spend the afternoon dropping off a sack of her high heels to be resoled, buying groceries, and delivering them to her house, carefully wedging a bottle of vodka into the freezer, just as she said to. I fret over the brands I choose at the grocery store, knowing that I could easily be reprimanded for buying the wrong kind of protein bars.
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    My dad calls in the middle of it all. I’m trying to let myself into her house, my arms full of grocery bags and an armload of West Coast Editor’s dry cleaning.
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    Hey, kiddo, he says.
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    Hi, Dad, I respond breathlessly, trying to sound chipper.
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    How’s Hollywood?
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    Oh, you know. Demanding.
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    He chuckles and tells me about his morning radiation session. He has been characteristically upbeat about it all, making friends with the nurses and preparing a new joke every day for his radiologist.
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    I wedge