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  Copyright © 2018 by Nicole Dieker

  Cover art by Adi O'Keefe

  Interior art by Erin Pollocoff

  Kindle ASIN: B07K5X8S5N

  Paperback ISBN: 9781730841484

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Opinions stated by the characters should not be assumed to be those of the author’s.

  To the Billfolders. Thanks for everything, team.

  The Most Indispensable Thing

  There once was a man with three daughters. He was the type of father who insisted on family dinner, every night — it was a tradition started by his late wife, and he kept it up as the girls grew from high chairs to high school — and he often used those dinners to ask his daughters thought-provoking questions.

  That night, he asked: “What do you think is the most indispensable thing in the world?”

  “Oxygen,” his oldest daughter said.

  “Water,” his middle daughter said.

  “Water contains oxygen,” her older sister retorted.

  “The sun,” his youngest daughter said.

  The father raised a finger. “The sun is technically outside the world.”

  “But its light enters our atmosphere,” his daughter countered. “And its heat.”

  “You need the sun’s warmth to live, but you still need oxygen to breathe,” the oldest daughter argued. “And plants need oxygen for photosynthesis.”

  “No wait, it’s carbon!” the middle daughter interrupted. “We learned this in science.”

  The father decided to reframe his question. “Let’s think about this a different way. What is the most indispensable concept created by humans?”

  His daughters were quiet for a moment.

  “I think it’s love,” his oldest daughter said. “You can argue that love is a biochemical reaction, and you can argue that love is an emotion that humans didn’t create, per se, certainly animals can love, but the concept of what you should do when you love someone, the way you should treat them and the responsibilities you have towards them, were created by humans. Our entire culture is built on this idea of finding people to love and finding people to love you, which is really about combining resources and taking care of each other. Our culture also promotes loving — and thus having responsibility towards — larger-scale concepts like nation or God.”

  Her father studied his daughter carefully. “Interesting. So you’re saying love is not indispensable in and of itself —”

  “As an emotion, no —”

  “But the way we are taught to treat the people we love —”

  “Is a foundational building block of society.”

  “Well done,” the father said. “Does anyone want to counter that argument?”

  His middle daughter spoke. “It’s not love. It’s family. The family structure, which in this definition encompasses what you might call the clan or tribe structure, was around for hundreds if not thousands of years before we invented our current concept of love, and it achieves the same goal: providing a network of care and responsibility while allowing people to combine skills and resources.”

  She smiled. “Plus, plenty of people believe that you have to do right by your family even if you don’t love them — that is, you have to do the actions even if you don’t have the emotions. Family’s the one place that can’t turn you away.”

  “There’s estrangement,” her older sister said. “And disowning.”

  “Sure,” the middle sister said. “But that only removes individuals from the family. It does not break down the family structure.”

  “Ah,” their father said. “I see we have two strong contenders!” He looked at his youngest daughter. “Would you like to weigh in?”

  “Money,” his youngest daughter said. She didn’t say anything else.

  “Can you elaborate?”

  “I could,” she said, “but I don’t need to. I’m right.”

  Her father told her that if she wasn’t going to participate, she could eat her dinner in her room. As soon as she left the table, his oldest daughter asked if she could finish her dinner in her room too.

  ✽✽✽

  Decades later, the father stared at the ceiling of his middle daughter’s living room, her youngest child crying because she had run into the hard metal leg of the hospital bed.

  “I told you,” he heard his daughter say. “We talked about running in the house.” Her voice was tired. Her face, when it appeared above his, was taut around the eyes and slack around the lips. She did not give that fake smile that his oldest daughter had, when he used to live in his own home and she used to visit every month, taking the red-eye to spend as much time with him as possible. Then she lost her job, and he lost control of his body.

  His son-in-law rarely looked at him. He talked about him, though, at night when they all assumed he was asleep. About how much longer this was going to last. About how it wasn’t fair that their family was doing the bulk of the work, even though his wife kept explaining that it couldn’t work out any other way. Her older sister had “taken her turn,” as she put it; her younger sister lived in a studio apartment on the other side of the country.

  “He’s family,” she hissed, and her voice sounded like she wished she didn’t have any family at all.

  Then, one day, the man’s youngest daughter called. She’d sold her startup. She was flying out that weekend. She wanted to know whether it would be better to hire full-time, in-home care, or to start looking at reputable facilities.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I can pay for everything.”

  The man watched his middle daughter end the call, reach for her husband, and start crying. “Thank god,” she said, “for the money, I don’t know how much longer we could have gone on without the money…”

  When his youngest daughter arrived, all energy and practicality and plans, the man wanted to tell her that he was sorry for sending her to her room, all those years ago. He wanted to tell her that she was right; that it was money, even more than love or family, that solved problems and kept people alive. The man could not speak much, anymore, but when his daughter sat next to the bed and interlaced her fingers with his he squeezed her hand as hard as he could and hoped, somehow, she would understand.

  Frugal and the Beast

  There once was another man, with another trio of daughters. The first two won’t get names because they aren’t really relevant to our story; the youngest daughter had a name, but it’s also kinda irrelevant because everyone just called her Frugal. (They would have called her “Cheap,” but that has sexual connotations.)

  Frugal hated spending money. She was the type of person who would return a book to the bookstore after reading it — and when her sisters tried to suggest that maybe she shouldn’t do that, she’d say “The bookstore has a return policy, and I’m returning the book in like-new condition. Now someone else will get the chance to read it, and that’s one fewer tree that has to be cut down.”

  Her sisters knew that Frugal didn’t really care about trees. She cared about saving $19.95. She also cared about finding loopholes that made her different from everyone else. Other people thought she was strange; she thought she was special.

  One day their father announced that he was going on a business trip, and he asked his daughters what they’d like him to bring back from his travels. Their father had been asking them this question since they were children, and although it had been fun to reach into his coat pockets and pull out maple sugar candy from Vermont or flag-waving teddy bears from Washington, D.C., they were adults now and could buy anything they wanted online. The two older sisters understood that their father wanted to remain connected to them in ways that were kind of unnecessary but still sweet, and one of them hinted that she could use a new pair of gloves while the other said “whatever state-themed treats they sell in the airport, chocolate shaped like moose poop, that’d be great.”

  Frugal asked for a white rose from someone else’s garden.

  “I’m not sure I can do that,” her father said.

  “People put gardens in their front yards to benefit the neighborhood,” Frugal said. “You’re taking the resources they offer, and you don’t have to participate in some capitalistic ritual.”

  “But if everybody took a rose — ”

  “Yeah,” Frugal said. “But most people don’t take a rose.”

  ✽✽✽

  Four days later the father found himself standing outside of a heavy iron fence, trying to work himself up to the idea of cutting off one of the roses that poked through the bars. Did Frugal even realize that you couldn’t pick a rose with your bare hands? It was a good thing he always packed a Leatherman when he traveled.

  He texted Frugal.

  Are you sure you want a white rose? I’d be happy to buy you something else instead. Love, Dad.

  i don’t want you to buy me anything

  i told you already

  just the robot

  *rose

  A few minutes later, Frugal’s phone rang. “Honey, I think you’d bette
r come down here,” her father said. “I was trying to explain to the homeowner why I was cutting a rose from his garden, and I know you’re better at articulating your philosophies, so maybe you can… help?”

  Frugal got on her bike and rode to the big old house on the edge of town that nearly everyone forgot was there, but was apparently on her father’s path from the airport back to — you know what, just don’t think about it too much. When she arrived, she saw her father trying to apologize to a man who could only be described as a beast.

  “What’s all the trouble?” Frugal asked.

  The beast explained that he had caught her father trying to steal a rose, and Frugal argued that the word “steal” was a little harsh, and he wasn’t harming the rosebush, and if everybody shared with their neighbors the world would be a better place. “I don’t believe in using money,” Frugal said. “I’ve found that if you ask, people will be happy to give you what you need.”

  “But he didn’t ask,” the beast said.

  “I’ll ask,” Frugal said. “Will you let my father keep this rose?” Seeing an opportunity to teach the beast a lesson, she continued. “And… will you share a meal with us tonight?”

  “I really have to get back,” her father said. “I have a ton of emails.”

  The beast didn’t want to invite Frugal into his home, but when he was a child he had been shamed for refusing to offer hospitality to someone he didn’t know, and because of the guilt associated with that old memory he felt compelled to say yes — and then he immediately began asking himself why he didn’t stand up for his own boundaries, and his mind kept circling around the uncomfortable fact that he had said yes when he wanted to say no, and he really should find a therapist so he could talk about this with someone. Next week. He’d do it.

  ✽✽✽

  “So she’s still living with you,” the therapist said. “How do you feel about that?”

  “I’m not used to it,” the beast said. “But maybe living alone isn’t good for me. I’d talk to inanimate objects sometimes. Not like I’d think they’d talk back, just, you know, asking my teacup how it got chipped, that kind of thing.”

  The therapist smiled. “I’d say that’s pretty normal. But… how do you feel about this woman taking residence in your home?”

  The beast wasn’t sure how he felt. He knew how he really felt, and he also knew how he was supposed to feel. He wasn’t supposed to enjoy living alone. He was supposed to be looking for a partner and starting a family. He was also supposed to be kind to people who were less fortunate than he was, and although he wasn’t sure whether Frugal was actually less fortunate, he knew that she needed a place to stay. She’d explained it all to him: how she’d couchsurfed, the time she spent a month housesitting for a friend, the time she tried to convince a group of potential roommates that she should live in a collapsible tent in the living room — that she’d only put up when it was time to sleep! — in exchange for not having to pay rent.

  “I was also going to cook for them,” Frugal had said. “It was a fair offer.”

  The beast tried to think of the most honest way he could combine all of his feelings. “I worry that if I don’t learn how to live with someone else, I’m going to miss my chance. I really like the life I have, but if I don’t learn how to share it with anyone, or compromise, or do any of those things, will it be like… time’s going to run out? And then if I meet someone later, I won’t know how to love them?”

  “That’s all worth discussing,” the therapist said, “and that’ll be a good place to start in our next session. But I still haven’t heard how you feel about this particular woman who is sharing your space right now.”

  The beast didn’t say anything.

  ✽✽✽

  One day the beast came home from work to find that Frugal had broken a mirror — and it wasn’t just a mirror, it was a family heirloom, and it was in a room that he’d asked her to stay out of, and when he asked her how it had all happened she had simply said “I wanted to see what my hair looked like from the back.”

  “Are you going to replace it?”

  “I could check the local Buy Nothing group,” Frugal said. “But do you really need another mirror?”

  The beast took a breath. “It was something I kept to remind me of my mother.”

  “Well, you’re not going to forget her,” Frugal said. “We don’t need stuff to remember the people we love.”

  The beast knew she was trying to be helpful, but all he wanted to do was scream and roar at her because she didn’t understand, why did she think that she could just move into his home and start changing things and going into rooms that he’d asked her to stay out of — and then he felt ashamed, again, for not being more generous and open and all of those things that he worried he wasn’t, those parts of him that made him question whether he was as fully human as everyone else because they all seemed to be living these free, messy, impossible lives and all he wanted was to come home after work and put his feet up and sip his tea and read one of the books that he’d gotten from the library.

  He left. He let himself slam the door. Then he worried that Frugal would be angry with him for being angry with her.

  ✽✽✽

  When he returned, there was a note on his kitchen table:

  Dad got sick. Going home. Thank you for everything.

  She had also left a rose — a red one this time, and obviously cut from his garden. He picked it up, and a petal fell to the ground, and he felt happy.

  The Fisherman and His Wife

  There once was a fisherman, which is to say that there once was a junior sales associate who enjoyed fishing in his spare time, and who liked to think of himself as a fisherman when he sat, alone, on the used jon boat he had bought with last December’s bonus.

  The part he liked best, about fishing, was the fact that he didn’t have to catch any fish to be a fisherman. He spent most of his time working towards objectives and overcoming objections, and if he failed at both he would quickly be removed from his position as junior sales associate — but he could sit in his orange life jacket with his lure in the water for as long as he wanted, and it still counted as fishing.

  That day he caught something.

  He did not know enough about fish to know what kind of fish it was; he knew it was not a catfish because it did not have whiskers, and he thought it was too large to be a crappie, and he wondered if he might have set a record for largemouth bass, except this fish was more yellow than green. There were bits of silver and blue in its fins. He thought of Flounder, from The Little Mermaid.

  “Should we take a photo, big guy?” he asked, wiping one hand on the back of his jeans before reaching for his phone.

  “Please don’t,” said the fish. “Put me back in the water, and let me swim.”

  That evening the fisherman told his wife about the fish he had caught, and how it almost seemed like the fish had said something to him, but of course that couldn’t be true. He had imagined it. Maybe he’d dozed off for a minute.

  “You shouldn’t fall asleep in that boat,” his wife said. It was one of the things she had started saying, lately, that made him think of her more as his wife than as the woman he married. He had hoped his relationship would not be like his parents’, and now here he was, listening to the same types of admonitions he had so often heard addressed towards his father. (That was perhaps the only way in which his life resembled his parents’. As they frequently reminded him, by the time they had been his age, they already owned a home and his older brother already existed.)

  The fisherman had to wait a full week to be a fisherman again, to drive from his apartment to the storage unit and then to the lake, and before he left his wife said “If that fish starts talking to you again, get it on video this time.” The request stung and stuck to him like the tiny raindrops that fell onto his arms and into his boat — why isn’t this what I wanted I thought it was what I wanted — but when the line went taut and the yellow-silver-blue fish rose out of the water the fisherman thumbed at his phone, pulling down on a wet screen.