My father was an honest craftsman who believed in things you could measure with a steel tape and level with an eight-inch bubble. If a pipe leaked, you cut it out and soldered a fresh sleeve; if a roof buckled, you replaced the rafters. He took no pleasure in luxury, drove the same Ford F-150 until the frame rusted through, and regarded ostentatious displays of wealth as a moral failing.
My mother regarded Dad’s pragmatism as a life sentence.
To Samantha, our modest, paid-off brick bungalow in Portage Park was an embarrassment she spent four decades attempting to disguise. When her bridge club met, she referred to our neighborhood as “Old Irving Park Adjacent.” When she volunteered for the civic beautification committee, she had her stationery printed on heavy, cream-colored linen cardstock, styling herself as an “independent cultural consultant.” She had an extraordinary, predatory genius for transforming minor acquaintances into high-level connections, and domestic banality into high society.
And in her grand theater, my sister Natalie was the leading lady.
Natalie had inherited Samantha’s fine, straight nose, her hazel eyes, and her relentless appetite for validation. From the moment Natalie entered the corporate communications sector, Samantha turned her into an idol. Natalie’s corporate headshots were framed on the mantelpiece; her employer’s quarterly newsletters were fanned across the coffee table like sacred texts.
I was the stagehand.
I was three years younger, built like my father—broad-shouldered, quiet, pragmatic, and unbothered by small talk. While Natalie studied rhetorical theory and public relations at Northwestern, I studied supply chain logistics and industrial operations at the University of Illinois Chicago. I understood inventory turnover, freight lane optimization, and load-bearing capacities. When I graduated and took an entry-level position at a regional third-party logistics firm in the industrial corridors of Cicero, Samantha told our relatives that I was “taking some time to find myself before pursuing an actual profession.”
It didn’t matter that by twenty-seven, I had been promoted to logistics coordinator. It didn’t matter that by twenty-nine, I was managing thirty-two team members and overseeing twenty-eight million dollars in freight operations annually. Whenever relatives asked about my life, my mother waved a dismissive, manicured hand.
“Sydney is very stable, thank heaven,” she would sigh, making stability sound like a terminal illness. “She takes after her father. No real vision, but she can keep time.”
