CHAPTER THREE
Cami
Another afternoon of doing nothing. Or at least that was the way my parents thought of it. While I had been locked away in my room working hard on getting the last little details right on my latest painting, my parents thought I was just indulging in a hobby. And wasting time with it, as they had told me more than once before.
Art was my life. It was my soul. It was the reason I got up in the morning and the same one that had me dragging my feet to go to bed each night. This, however, was not something my parents understood—or ever would, I was convinced.
“Cami.” My sister’s voice floated through the room with a mix of frustration and concern, breaking my concentration. “Dinner is in thirty minutes. You might want to get cleaned up.” She sat down on the side of my bed, her butt just barely perched on the edge, and stared at me.
I looked down at my paint covered arms and sighed. Yes, she was right, I couldn’t go to dinner looking like this. Not only would I get displeased looks from my mother throughout the whole meal, once everyone was gone, I wouldn’t hear the end of it either. Good thing I had been working with acrylic paint, a few good scrubs in the shower and it would come off.
It wasn’t a personal goal to make my parents’ lives hard, I just seemed to do it naturally.
“Not to sound like Mom, but what are your plans?” she asked as I began to pack everything up.
“I have a plan…” I said even though I didn’t really. I had dreams…maybe? Little ones. I had an idea of what I wanted to do with my life, but I also knew that it would never match up to what my parents would even be half-thrilled with.
“Just take the job at the museum. It’s perfect for you. You get to be around all that art all day and with as much of their donations that come from us, I’m sure they would even let you have an input on what they bring in. And it will get Mom off your back.”
I was born a Benson. And unfortunately, you couldn’t throw a stone in this city and not hit something either owned, named after, or was somehow connected to the Benson name. My family had been here for generations. There were so many of us that names were starting to be recycled. Yep, I had two cousins with the name Kelly. It was only slightly less confusing because one of them was a boy. We donated to a lot of different projects and organizations. All you had to do was take a look around. There was a wing of the hospital named after my great-aunt Nancy. The museum that my sister mentioned was The Benson Art Museum, named after us because of the sizable contribution my family gave to help break ground. We owned a good deal of land and properties as well, and that was all managed by the Benson Property Group.
I think you get the idea.
And since we were the top donors to the museum, my mother took it upon herself to suggest they hire me. Suggest, as in pressure them with her checkbook. I didn’t have proof of this exactly, but I knew my family and that was how they tended to take care of things.
The job wouldn’t have been half bad but I knew it would eventually suffocate me and stifle my inner artist. It wasn’t that I couldn’t appreciate all types of art and mediums, it was more that standing there all day, looking at the same classic, stuffy paintings and sculptures the museum offered would only fill my brain with classic technique and style. Maybe I was being a bit of a brat, but I honestly just didn’t want to take the job.
Or perhaps, I wanted to make my own way.
To say that I was the black sheep of the family would have been a strong understatement. I was the youngest of five. But being the baby didn’t give me any leeway when it came to this family. My sister, Laurel, the one currently trying to talk some reason into me, was in a serious relationship with a guy whose family was second known to ours. My oldest brother, Timothy, owned and managed a bunch of upscale apartment complexes as well as a few marinas on the beach. Dalton was three years younger than him and had a custom yacht dealership. No, he didn’t actually build boats, he just held all the best connections and knew how to use the right one for each job.
And so on.
So you can see where I was going with all of this.
I maybe sort of had a plan for the future. Okay, it was really more of a wistful dream. Only I wasn’t sure how to go about it. And even less sure how to tell my family it was what I wanted to do. It would not go over well at all and I wasn’t saying might not, I was saying definitely won’t. Which was why I’d kept the idea to myself, even from Laurel.
We were the closest. She was only two years older than me and also the one I talked to the most. She had become the sort of buffer between my parents and me, though if she had to pick a side, I had a feeling it wouldn’t be mine. But I couldn’t really blame her. It was just the way it went with this family.
I would have said that possibly, somewhere in the hidden devious parts of my mind, that it was a way to lash out at what I’d been forced into. And not to forget the fact that my art simply wasn’t something my family, my mother especially, saw as something you could make a life with. It would have been better if I’d been able to force my artistic bone into something they could brag about. Like, say, becoming a ballerina. Pushing myself with hours and hours of structured practices and rehearsals. A grace that could be shown on stage and eventually possibly taken me places around the world. Unfortunately, I wasn’t that graceful girl. And the thought of ruining my body, mainly my feet, wasn’t all that appealing to me. Even from a young age.
“Well, I’m going downstairs,” she said as she stood up with the grace of a queen, then headed out of the room with quiet steps. “Hurry it up,” she called out right before she rounded the corner into the hall.
As I rushed through a shower, making sure that I didn’t have a speck of paint left on me, I thought how I needed to find my own place. At twenty-four, it was simply time. It wasn’t that I was hesitant on moving out of my parents’ huge house, it was more that with no job I didn’t have money to pay for a place of my own or even all the bills that came along with life. I know what you might be thinking. I’m a rich girl and my parents would probably pay my rent and anything else I needed. Yes, that was very much true, as long as I got a respectable job doing something they thought would in some way look good to the community.
The thing was, I didn’t want them to pay for everything. I wanted to live my life on my own terms and know that I could do it all myself. Because I wasn’t about living my life on their terms. Maybe my brothers and sisters were fine doing that and I could understand the appeal. But something in my heart sank whenever I would start to question if what I wanted was really all worth it. It was. I truly believed that.
Dinner was a typical Benson affair. Four courses, none of them cooked by any of us. None of them simple. And not a single one eaten without some sort of conversation about how well each one of my siblings were doing business-wise. I was happy for them in their handed down success, really I was. If they were happy then I was happy for them. But that didn’t mean I wanted to hear basically the same thing week after week. All the while, no one asked me a single thing about my life or my so called ‘hobby.’ And the only time I got my mother’s attention was when she turned to me and pointedly made a statement about how the staff went out of their way to make sure my meal was prepared to my ‘dietary needs.’ Like it was something that was beyond ridiculous to her.
Marta, the house chef, never had a problem making me special meals. And you would think that she had to say that because it was her job and all, but I knew it wasn’t. I didn’t treat her like the rest of my family. We had a few conversations of things that she wanted to try to make for me and I was happy about them all. It wasn’t like I was all that picky or had special restrictions due to health reasons. My mother just simply liked to make it seem that, yet again, I was a burden on someone in some way, all the while coming off like she was a caring parent.
“May I have everyone’s attention, please?” Brice, my sister’s boyfriend, said as he scooted his chair back a bit. We’d just finished dessert and I was really hoping they would wrap this thing up so I could go back upstairs. “Laurel, we’ve been together a while now, and I wanted to do this with your family present, I know that’s important to you.”
Oh, wow.
He was really doing this right now.
He slid out of his chair and got down on one knee as he pulled a ring box out of his pocket.
“I see no one more perfect to spend my life with. Laurel, will you marry me?”
“Yes. Oh, gosh, yes,” she replied as she all but dove for the monstrous rock he’d bought her.
Even I was a little impressed by it. It wasn’t my style, but I could see how it was perfect for her. And he knew better than to try and pull this off with something less than spectacular.
“This calls for a toast,” my mother said and it was clear she was pleased about this union. I could just see it now, my mother would take over the whole wedding planning and it would be one to remember. The wedding of the season that everyone would be talking about. That would be exactly how she would want it. The wedding would turn into some sort of grand publicity stunt.
I smiled and gave them both congratulatory hugs, going as far as to welcome Brice to the family. As my family surrounded them, I stood back and wondered if I was somehow missing something. I didn’t want to infect everyone with my weird mood so I tried my best to shove my uncertainty down and smile for my sister. This was her big moment and I wasn’t going to bring her down. I was overjoyed for her. Really, I was. This is what she had wanted for a while now. It looked like she was going to get her happily ever after. I mean, I could only hope so. There truly was no way to tell what the future held.
I mean, I had to be real for a minute. She could start popping out kids and get that misshapen, pudgy mom body and he could totally be repulsed by her and start cheating. Or he could go prematurely bald and decide the gym is a waste of time. Or he could develop an addiction to porn. Who knew, maybe he already had one and was really good at hiding it.
Okay, so maybe I went a little off there on that thought process. I had never really been in love so, it could have been that I just didn’t understand anything when it came to matters of the heart. Or perhaps, I was just doomed to be an old lady with a million cats that I talked to as if they were my friends or children or something like that. I could see it now, I’d order fancy tea biscuits from England and eat them dry—without tea—like it was a normal thing to do. And I’d make rugs and coats out of all the loose cat hair I would sweep up every day.
Yeah, I needed to stop. This thought was wildly running away from me. I was sure if I kept it up, I wouldn’t be able to keep this smile plastered on my face for much longer.
So, figuring it was best if I bowed out while I could do it gracefully, I gave my family my final hugs and wished everyone a good night. With odd thoughts and heavy feeling in my gut, I slipped off to my room for some quiet time.