Last Tang Standing

I guess I’m the reason she was able to meet Kamarul in her third year. This has always made me feel a little guilty toward my mother, not because I condone her casual racism (“You can be friends with them, but you can’t date them!”), but because, since I’d borne the full brunt of the financial fallout (cancers are expensive when you don’t have good insurance!) and downplayed my mother’s mental breakdown after my father’s passing in the misguided belief that Melissa shouldn’t suffer remotely any more than could be helped, my sister never knew the full extent of how bad things had gotten. My mother recovered thinking Melissa hadn’t cared enough to return home after her degree was done a few months after my father’s death, embarking instead on a gap year with Kamarul. They’ve been inseparable since.

Anyway, the rough patch my family found itself in, emotionally and financially, is somewhat over and I could quit and work somewhere else as I had intended to before I had to move back—only I can’t. I don’t know how to anymore. The money at my job is more than anything I’ll make elsewhere; I have little savings in my bank account because of my father’s illness and a mortgage I can barely afford (I might have been a little too aspirational with the posh address I’d chosen), which is fine, just as long as I have a job. Plus, I can’t give up now: I’ve half-ruined my eyesight on pages of document review, sucked up to too many people, sacrificed too much of my youth and identity, listened to far too many lectures from my mom about languishing in the purgatory of mediocrity. It’s no longer a choice; too much hangs in the balance. I have to become partner.