By the time Jane and I rolled into the crowded driveway of our parents' house that evening, we had done everything possible to prepare for the shitstorm of cosmic proportions that surely awaited us. The tale had been told, wine procured, and Noah safely dropped off at Lucas Lodge, to munch on pizza rolls and watch Austin and Brandon try to kill each other in Duty Beckons before passing out on the couch. To say I was insanely jealous of my nephew at that moment would have been an overstatement, but not by much.

There was one thing that had been nagging at me all day, and that was the lack of any sort of hysterical phone calls, texts, emails, smoke signals, or psychic screams from Mom. As much as I had been dreading hearing the (admittedly justified) keening of my mother over my father's sudden unemployment, the radio silence was downright eerie. It could mean only one of two things, neither of them good. Either she was in such a state of panic that she hadn't gotten around to calling either Jane or me yet, or Dad hadn't told her. From past experience, both were about equally likely. Past experience also told me that I'd find out roughly 3.5 seconds after stepping through the door. Something would happen, anyway.

Now, before I go any further, let me state for the record that I love my family. No, really, I do. But loving someone and enjoying being around someone are two different things. For example, I love skunks. I think they're adorable, fuzzy, underrated little creatures. But as much as I may appreciate the smelly little bastards, that doesn't mean I'd like to have dinner with a family of skunks every Saturday. Or ever. Okay, that may have sounded like I just called my family a bunch of skunks, but... Well, let's move on with the story, shall we? Anyway,

"I just have a hard time believing that Dad would keep anything that important a secret," said Jane. We had parked but were not in a big hurry to go in. "Especially from you. You two have always been so close." Coming from any other kind of sister, that statement might have been tinged with jealousy. As it is, Jane was born without the capacity for ill will the way some people are born without the ability to smell things. Which had long made it my duty to sniff out bullshit for her.

I shook my head. "Yeah, but how could he not have had any idea? Maybe it's all part of a plan. I know Dad wants me to..." I almost said 'go back to school' but checked myself just in time, "to get a better job. Maybe this is his weird, fatherly way of shocking me into it."

"But do you really think he'd give you no warning? He knows we have a hard time getting by as it is."

"I don't know what to think. But it is what it is. In any case I'm going to find out tonight."

"Well," she said after a pause, "if he did know, I'm sure he must have had a good reason for not saying anything."

As we approached the door, we heard something that sounded an awful lot like shouting coming from the other side. That was nothing unusual, but still the knot in my stomach tightened. Before either of us could lay a hand on the doorknob, the door swung open and our youngest sister, Lydia, collided with Jane, causing her to drop the bottle of wine she was carrying.

"No! Not the wine!" I cried.

"Oh, oops?" Lydia checked her Louis Vuitton bag for damage and then giggled. "Hey, you guys are, like, just in time. Mom's, like, having a freak out attack! Anyway, I'm off to Latte Da. Bye!"

"What's Mom freaking out abou...?" The question died on my lips as Lydia skipped out to her powder blue Volkswagen Jetta and zipped away. Jane and I stood in a puddle of shattered glass and Pinot grigio. "I'll... I'll get this," I sighed.

"No, it was my fault, I should have been paying more attention. I'll take care of this."

"No, it's not your fault, but..." That knot was tightening with every passing second, until it felt like my insides were going to turn inside out. I sighed. "Yeah, could you?"

Jane looked genuinely relieved. "Of course. You go in and see what's going on with Mom. And talk to Dad."

She didn't have to tell me twice.

If Lucas Lodge was a war zone, setting foot in my parents' house was like entering a warped mirror dimension ruled by the iron fist of a goatee'd Martha Stewart. My mother's most recent Pinterest abomination, a wall clock made of "repurposed" CDs, was the first thing to greet me as I stepped into the living room. If an inanimate object can look embarrassed by its own existence, then this clock looked embarrassed. It also wasn't working.

Mom's lamentations were clearer now, and I could catch bits and pieces of them as they wafted down the stairs. Phrases such as "how could he" and "what am I going to" seemed to confirm my fears. If I could get just a bit closer it would-

"LIZZY!" My heart leaped out of my chest and ran away to start a new life in Argentina. The shrieking figure of my second-youngest sister pounced at me. She was sobbing and plastered in a strange greenish goop.

"Oh my God, Kitty!" I said once my blood pressure had stabilized. "Holy cannolis, you scared the crap out of me! What's wrong?" ...this time?

"Liiiizzy," she wailed between sobs, "I need helllllp. Mom made me (sob) take over in the kitchen even though she (sniff) knows I can't cook, and I was doing my best but (sob) then the sauce started exploding on me, and then something in the oven caught on fire and-"

"Caught on FIRE?" I had become aware of a burning smell and dashed to the kitchen, all thought of parental drama banished as visions of Charlotte's charred apartment danced through my head. The oven door had been flung open to reveal a rave party of fire within. A pot of unidentifiable and awful-smelling green sludge was boiling over on the stove, sploppinginto the flames below, which gladly gobbled it up and belched out an acrid smoke in return.

"Ohhhh shit, grease fire, grease fire!" I heard myself yell, and in a moment I was rifling through the pantry, yanking ancient cans of soup and newer boxes of gluten free pasta off the shelves. "C'mon, baking soda, where the hell does she keep the fucking baking soda?" A jar of pink sea salt shattered on the tile floor.

As I frantically searched for a way to keep my childhood home from becoming an insurance claim, I failed to hear Kitty re-enter the kitchen until I heard her shout, "The fire is in the oven, Lizzy! What are you doing?!"The next sound I heard was running water. Spurred by some primal response, I spun around to see Kitty filling up a large glass with water, and then raising it to pour onto the flame.

"NO!" I leaped forward, knocking it out of her hand. The glass sailed in a beautiful arc across the kitchen, soaking Kitty and landing with a loud THUD! against the refrigerator followed by a KRISSH! on the kitchen floor. Suddenly I realized. The fridge! Ignoring my sister's renewed wailing and the crunching of broken glass under my shoes, I jerked open the refrigerator door and found my Holy Grail lying behind a mostly decomposed cabbage. "Gotcha!" I grabbed the box of baking soda, tearing off the top and shoving my screaming sister out of the way.

What followed remains in my memory a blur of fire and baking soda and foul-smelling smoke and tears ("In other words, another Saturday evening at the Bennet household," as Charlotte would so helpfully summarize it when I told her later), and through it all I'd be lying if I claimed to have had anything like a coherent thought other than aaah aaah fire fire fire diediediediedieeeeeee. However, if I had been able to think anything, it would have been something like, What a wonder and a blessing it is that my mother is not here to witness this right now, sometimes the stars really do align to help you even though your kitchen is on fire. And the universe, knowing that would have been my thought, helpfully shifted those lucky stars out of the way.

"Kitty, would you stop making so much noise in here? You know how much stress I've been under and I-"

Mom froze.

Kitty froze.

I froze.

And the gears of time ground to a shuddering halt as my mother's eyes went from my sniffling sister, to the glass shards and food detritus on the floor, to the still-boiling-over concoction on the stove, to the smoke, to the fine dusting of white powder that now covered everything, to me. And then they groaned back into motion again.

"Oh. My. GOD," Mom gasped. "MY SALMON LOAF!"


Alas, there was no saving Mom's salmon loaf, and it and the weird bubbling goop (which I later found out was supposed to be a non-dairy cream of kale soup) were ceremoniously interred down the garbage disposal. Jane had finished her sweeping of the front porch only to resume it at the scene of the attack. With the spectre of my mother's cooking no longer looming over the evening, I assumed Jane would whip up something incredible from four ingredients she would find in the back of the freezer, or something. That, at least, gave me something to look forward to later. I left the three of them in the kitchen - Mom berating Kitty for allowing her culinary masterpiece to combust, Kitty blaming the whole thing on Lydia, and Jane insisting that it was all somehow her own fault - and went upstairs to find my dad.

I had managed to glean two important things from my mother. A) She had been on the phone, complaining at my Aunt Phyllis about the Oxbridge banquet, when I walked in the house; and B) she had no idea that her husband was recently unemployed. Suddenly, the very scenario I'd been hoping for became the greater of the two evils. As much as I'd been dreading having to deal with the meltdown, it now seemed worse to have it still on the horizon.

Making my way to the end of the hallway, I found the study door closed as always. I stood outside for a moment and mentally rehearsed the speech I'd prepared. I don't remember all of it now, but it had a good bit about honesty and broken trust and forgiveness and getting through the hard times ahead as a family, and probably lots of other lofty ideals that I hoped, rather than believed, to be attainable. "Knock knock," I called from outside.

"I'm not in here!" came the reply.

Clever. But I knew his Achilles heel. "Then I guess this big plate of oatmeal cookies is going to have to eat itself." The door burst open at about the word "going".

"Well, if that's the case, then I suppose I can..." Dad's face fell when he saw I was empty handed. He fixed me with an accusing stare. "You said you had cookies."

"You said you weren't in there."

"Harumph. Well played, daughter."

I followed him in. My father's study was remarkably under-furnished, the only part of the house utterly devoid of any knick-knacks, DIY craft projects, or bizarre home improvement techniques (since I'd left home, the floor of my old bedroom had been covered in pennies and lacquered over). Wall-to-wall bookshelves, a Mr. Coffee, a battered old desk, and a single chair were its only inhabitants. As with his office at the university, there was no second chair, similarly for the purpose of discouraging visitors.

"Here we find ourselves again, my child," Dad said, stumping back to his desk. "But if you think you can extract more news of miraculous discoveries from me this way, it will not work. I follow a strict one-major-find-per-decade policy. Unless," he continued, easing into the chair with a slight wince, "you are here on another errand of mercy from your mother, in which case, it will certainly not work."

"Dad," I blurted, "I know about the department closure." I hadn't expected my voice to catch the way it did on the word closure. "I was outside Dr. Leigh's office, and I heard him talking about it." So much for the speech.

"Ah," he said. I waited for him to say something else, but he apparently had nothing more to say. He seemed resigned. Unconcerned, even. A new emotion bubbled up within me.

"So when were you planning on telling me?" I demanded. "Tonight? Next week?"

"Lizzy..."

"It's been almost forty-eight hours, and you couldn't have possibly sent me, I don't know, even a text to tell me that I won't be making rent next month?"

"Lizzy."

"Were you just going to let me show up first day of summer sessions to find everything gone?"

"ELIZABETH."

I stopped. Dad was hunched over his desk, in that moment looking more exhausted than I'd ever seen him. It was in that moment that I realized, for the first time, that my father was getting old. It's funny how time just keeps stretching out like a rubber band, until it suddenly snaps and hits you.

"Hey, I'm sorry," I said, feeling embarrassed and slightly ashamed. "I'm just, you know... this is a lot right now. I didn't mean to..."

"No, you did mean to, and you had every right to mean to," he said, polishing his glasses. "I ought to have told you sooner. Much sooner."

"But why didn't you?"

"My dear, why do we ever put off doing the unpleasant? I'd anticipated our funding would be cut years ago. When no such cutting occurred, it was easier to pretend it never would. I'd built my little hermitage in a fool's paradise, and yesterday's meeting was the eviction notice."

"And now we're homeless."

"I am," he said. "As for you- but you heard what Dr. Leigh said about you."

"About me?" This was unexpected. "No I, uh, I heard that the department was getting cut, and then I sort of. Ran away." I assumed I'd run, anyway. I actually had only a hazy memory of fleeing the building. I didn't really know where I was going until I was halfway to Charlotte's house.

"Well, if you had eavesdropped upon the entire meeting, you would know that your services will still be needed. Until fall quarter, that is." Seeing my confusion, he continued. "There are all your dusty old trinkets to brush off and send away to their forever homes, after all."

"Of course, the artifacts!" My babies! I hadn't even thought about what would happen to them. I made a mental note to never have children. So that gave me until at least, what, August? It wasn't an ideal amount of time, but I could probably-

I shook myself out of it. "Okay, so I have a reprieve. But what are you going to do?"

He looked up sternly. "Elizabeth Laverne Bennet, you let me worry about that."

I winced. "Was the middle name really necessary?"

"Yes. And let it be a warning to you. Take care of your own problems, and let this old man take care of his own, or I will invoke your middle name as many times as it takes to subdue you."

"Pretty sure that's a violation of the Geneva Convention. Anyway, you won't take care of your problems. You'll just sit around and wait for death."

He smiled. "Then let me do that."

"Will you at least tell Mom?"

"Of course."

"Soon?"

"...Yes."

"Tonight?"

"Dad."

"I'll... try," he said. "If I have an opportune moment."

"Just wait for Mom to stop talking for a minute, and then jump in with it."

"My dear, if I wait that long, she'll learn the news from my obituary."


Jane had once again worked her culinary alchemy, magically transforming the eccentric contents of my mother's pantry into a mouth-watering quiche lorraine. Of course, I was far too tightly wound to actually eat any of it, but it did smell amazing.

"Oh. My. GAWD!" Lydia gasped, plopping into her chair. "Is that a QUICHE?"

"Um, yes," said Jane, nervously. "I hope that's okay."

"I have been OBSESSED with quiche lately!" Lydia whipped out her phone and took a picture of her piece. "Megyn had, like, SIX quiches from Palomino's at her birthday party last week? And, like, Jocelyn asked if any of them had shrimp because she's, like, allergic? And we said no but Krystyn handed her, like, the one with seafood in it? And her lips swelled up so much that she couldn't even TALK, and her stepdad had to pick her up. It was SO funny!"

Jane gasped. "Oh no, that poor girl!"

Lydia shrugged. "Nah, she's, like, cool with it now. She posted on Flitter that her nurse was, like, this totally hot guy? I was SO jealous!"

"Jane," interrupted Kitty with a note of panic, "is that bacon? You know I'm a vegetarian! I wish someone would remember that!"

"Yes, Kitty, I did remember, which is why I didn't add any bacon. Those are bell peppers."

"Oh," said Kitty, somewhat put out. "Well, at least someone cares." She glared at Mom.

"And just what is that supposed to mean, young lady?" Mom demanded.

"You were making Salmon again tonight!"

"Oh, Kitty, fish isn't meat." Mom made a dismissive gesture. "And in any case, you made sure we didn't have any, so I don't see how you get to complain."

Kitty started to tear up. "That's not fair, you know I can't cook!"

"Anyway," interrupted Jane with a tight smile, "um, Mary! Have you finished your screenplay yet?"

Our middle sister, Mary, was staring at her phone. A few moments passed before she looked up. "Hm?"

Jane smiled encouragingly. "You know, the one you were telling me about last week? The the one about the people trapped in the elevator?"

Mary blinked a couple times before the question registered. "Oh. No, that one's on hiatus. I'm working on something else now."

"Oh? How exciting! What's it about?"

"Well..." Mary put down the phone. "It starts out with these five screenwriters, and they get trapped in a garden shed and-"

"OH. EM. GEE!" squealed Lydia, who was staring at her own phone, "Tanner Fleet and Enrique Modas broke up AGAIN!" Kitty and Mom got up and rushed over to see what Lydia was looking at, all three of them talking over each other. Mary snorted and went back to her phone. Utterly defeated, Jane picked at her dinner and sighed.

Only Dad and I had remained silent throughout dinner, nothing unusual there. He had brought a book to the table and was currently hiding behind it. I cleared my throat until he looked over it. Any day now, I said with my eyes. Don't make me do this, his face answered. You promised! I shot back. He sighed and put down his book. Standing up, he cleared his throat. Everybody stopped what they were doing and looked up.

"If the personal lives of those two... marine biologists, I'm assuming? can wait another moment, I have some news of my own to share." My heart started pounding so hard I could hear it in my ears. Why did I want him to do this again? I thought. Oh, that's right, I am an idiot. "However," he continued, fiddling with his glasses, "I fear it may be somewhat... unwelcome."

Mom made a sound somewhere between a snort and a cough. "Well, as long as it isn't about the banquet, I don't see how it could be that unwelcome. I can't imagine anything more unwelcome than having to hear more about the opportunity that you just threw away, as if it were only your decision to make, as ifI didn't have a say in the matter, as if you didn't even care about how I felt at all, I swear I'll be sick if I hear another word about it!"

"That's a shame, my dear," Dad answered. "If I knew you felt that way about it, I never would have accepted the invitation."

Mom looked about as gobsmacked as I felt in that moment. "You. You what?"

He what?

"Yes, I'm afraid I'm committed at this point, as it would be a bit rude to back out now. But there's no reason you have to come along, if that's how you feel about it."

"Oh. Oh! OH! Abe, you ANGEL!" Mom shrilled, and leaped forward and threw her arms around Dad's neck. "Ohhhh, you had me going there, you silly goose! See what a wonderful father you have here, girls? He's going to take us all on vacation to England!"

Dad jumped a little. "All?" he squeaked, then caught himself. "Uh, yes. All. We'll... all go."

Kitty and Lydia jumped up and started chattering about all the "hot Uni boys" they were going to flirt with at Oxbridge. Mary rolled her eyes and stormed out of the room, muttering something about her art. Jane looked from our sisters, to our parents, to me with an expression of surprised helplessness. I felt frozen in my chair. I attempted to glare at my father, but he studiously avoided my gaze. When it became clear he wasn't going to follow that up with, But the bad news is, I'm unemployed now and we'll probably lose the house and also we don't have the money to pay for eight round-trip tickets to halfway around the world, hope you understand. When it became apparent that no such confession was coming, I asked, "Do you have any other exciting news to share, Dad?"

"As a matter of fact, I do," he said. "I still have about thirty-six ungraded exams to send home with you tonight. I know how much you were looking forward to them."