My sister said it was just a ceremony. My father said it was a formality. My mother said they would take me somewhere nice for dinner when they got back.
I picked up my bag and left the country club and flew back to California that night. I did not speak to them before the ceremony. I told myself I was fine with it, which is what you tell yourself when you have been telling yourself you are fine with things for twenty-eight years and the alternative is collapsing in the security line at SeaTac.
The phone in my pocket buzzed while the university president was giving his opening remarks. I pulled it out. My mother had sent a message from the ship’s premium internet package, which she had mentioned at the dinner was an upgrade they had splurged on specifically for Tiffany’s content creation. The message read: Have fun today, Clara. We are drinking margaritas by the pool. Do not be too dramatic about us missing the ceremony. It is not like you are really a doctor yet anyway, since you still have residency. Tiffany says hi.
I read it twice. Then I locked the phone and put it back in my pocket and looked at the four empty seats and thought about who I had been when the whole thing began.
I grew up in a suburb of Seattle that had the kind of manicured quietness that people associate with success and that mostly just means no one hangs their laundry outside. My father was a corporate consultant who related to his family the way he related to his clients: in terms of return on investment. My mother ran a boutique consulting firm and sat on several nonprofit boards and organized her social life around the country club with the same focused energy that other people bring to careers they love. They were not unkind people, exactly. They were people who had decided, at some point before I could remember, that Tiffany was the asset worth developing and I was the variable that did not fit the portfolio.
Tiffany was blond and bubbly and effortlessly social in the way that makes adults feel chosen. She was not particularly hard-working, but she had the gift of making ordinary things look significant when she performed them, which is its own kind of talent. My parents treated everything she did as evidence of her exceptional nature. When she placed third in a middle school talent show, my father booked the back room of an Italian restaurant downtown, invited twenty-four family friends, ordered a custom cake with her face on it, and gave a five-minute toast about her destiny. I sat at the end of the table and ate my pasta and clapped when everyone else clapped.
