Retail Therapy by Roz Bailey Page B

I’ve asked the accountant to take a look over our family budget and the results, I must say, were quite shocking.”
    â€œNow Ernest,” Mama warned, “you promised not to be dramatic.”
    Dread hit me as I sat back in the velvet chair, feeling like a character in a movie scene. “Oh, God! This isn’t the part where you tell me the family fortune is gone! That you’ve lost it all to gambling or bad investments or identity theft or something.” I pressed a manicured hand to the faux-fur trim of my suit. A financial crisis ... this was the worst kind of news.
    â€œOf course we haven’t lost it all!” my father snapped. “You’ve been watching far too much of Hailey’s soap opera if you think I would be so foolish with our financial stability.”
    â€œWhat your father means to say,” Mama went on, “is that we all need to do our part to cut down unnecessary expenses. And Lanny, your spending has increased quite a bit.”
    Cut down? Cut down! I needed more—an increase! These people were insane. They couldn’t be my parents ... it was all a bad dream.

8
    Alana
    S omewhere during the veal chop and broccoli rabe, I managed to soak up the information that our family was not going bankrupt—except in Daddy’s mind. That knowledge calmed me a little, though I must admit my parents’ surprise strike had unnerved me. For the moment, I decided to hide in my baked potato and let them ramble on while I prepared a counterstrike.
    â€œDon’t you ever miss your friends from Harvard?” Mama asked me. “Do you think of returning there?”
    â€œSorry to disappoint you, but no, Mama. I see my Boston friends all the time. Love Beantown. But Harvard wasn’t my thing.”
    Daddy had been the first to recognize the huge mistake he’d made in sending me off to Harvard, a university set in a lively cosmopolitan area with thousands of merrymaking college students and twice as many shops and boutiques. In the spring of my sophomore year, when my credit card bills surpassed the hefty price of Ivy League tuition, I was yanked back to New York. Despite a tearful breakup with my Harvard man, I’d been relieved to come home, realizing that Manhattan had all the nightlife of Boston, without the term papers.
    â€œI just wondered,” Mama went on. “We’d love to see you finish school, Lanny. I was thinking that if you had more to do, you wouldn’t spend so much time shopping.”
    â€œLord knows, I’m trying to save money here. I don’t want you returning to Harvard,” Daddy started.
    A good thing, because that’s not going to happen, I thought as I added a dollop of sour cream to my baked potato. My friend Rory had told me that potatoes are disaster food on the Zone, which I find astounding. This innocent root vegetable that comes from the earth, its skin loaded with minerals? What kind of rhetoric is that?
    â€œHowever, isn’t it about time that you consider completing your degree?” Daddy continued, prodding.
    â€œMost of your credits would transfer,” my mother added. “You could attend NYU or Columbia.”
    â€œOr City College,” my father said with emphasis. It was his alma mater, the college that had launched him into law school, and if I had to hear one more time how he rose from humble beginnings to preside over a federal courtroom, I was going to fling my baked potato over to the Schnabels’ table. “It’s time, Alana. Enough dillydallying. You need to complete your education.”
    Education? Conventional school was the furthest thing from my mind. I figured Mama had that area all sewn up with her doctorate and her niche teaching students to write at NYU. No reason to tread on her field of expertise when mine was so different. The city was my playground. Retail stores were my classroom. Shoe displays, jewelry cases, and clothes racks were my