Page 14 of More For Me

“You’re using your daughter to lie to your wife? That’s messed up, dude.” I lean toward him and lower my voice. “What did you have to give her to keep her quiet?”

He sighs. “That Vitamix blender she’s been obsessing over. Cost me like five hundred dollars.” I laugh and he gives me a sheepish grin. “Totally worth it.”

“You’re ridiculous. Why don’t you just tell mom you don’t want to do it?”

He rips open the bag of chips and pours some onto each of our plates. “You know she’s going to lose interest in it the next time she has a craving for bacon. I can go along with it until then.”

My mom has been a sometimes-vegetarian for as long as I can remember. She gets really excited about healthy eating and helping the environment. The only problem is, she really likes bacon. Alot. So every four or five months she abandons her rabbit food, as Uncle Cash calls it, and goes back on the meat train until she starts to feel guilty and the cycle starts over.

“What else is going on around here?” I ask, trying not to feel wistful.

I love living on my own. I really do. Fox and Bodhi are the best roommates anyone could have, and we have so much fun together.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss this house.

My family has always been super close. Me and my cousins generally find it difficult to make friends with people outside of the family. It’s too hard to know when someone actually likes you or when they just want to use you to get close to famous people. We’ve all been burned.

That’s probably why it took me so long to move out. I lived in the same bedroom upstairs until after my twenty-first birthday. When I finally did go out on my own, you would have thought I moved to China by the way my dad acted.

He likes to have his kids at home with him. And he’s not very good at accepting change.

“Santana has decided if she’s going to be a proper country star, she needs to learn to play banjo.” He says this the same way another father might admit his kid was experimenting with drugs.

“Is she any good?”

He scowls. “Does it matter? I have fucking banjo music playing in my house at all hours. I have half a mind to tell her she can only practice in the garage.”

“You’re so full of shit,” I say, laughing. My rock and roll legend father might hate country music with the fire of a thousand suns, but there’s no way he’d ever banish Santana to the garage. He tries to pretend like he’s a strict father, but everyone knows he’s wrapped around his girls’ fingers.

Case in point—giving one daughter five hundred bucks to hide cold cuts in the basement fridge, all so my mom’s feelings don’t get hurt.

“What about Pres?” I ask. “I feel like I haven’t seen her in forever.”

He frowns. “She’s been a little quiet lately. Always up in her room or out with Silas.”

“I’ll take her out to dinner this week,” I offer, and he gives me a grateful smile. I’m sure she’s fine—Presley has always been the most chill, most quiet of the girls. But compared to me and my other sisters, not to mention our Mom, chill and quiet can seem out of place. Mostly, though, Dad is just a huge worrywart.

“And Mom?”

He grins that soft grin he only ever wears for her. I swear, my parents are so freaking adorably in love it’s almost obnoxious sometimes.

“Your mom is good. She just got a really big account—they asked her to head up the design for all the promo materials for that new dragon show on HBO.”

My mouth drops open. “For real? That’s huge! Everyone is watching that show.”

His eyes glow with pride. “I know. My girl is a pretty big deal.”

“Wow.” Of course, I’m not surprised. My mom is a crazy talented graphic designer. She’s where I got my artistic abilities from. She’s always making little doodles and sketching. I started copying her when I was about five, and over time, my own drawings became more and more focused on fashion.

Dad continues to fill me on the happenings around the house. Vega tried to sneak out last weekend when Dad forbade her from going on a date with her latest crush—I already knew about that one. The cousin group text has been blowing up about it all week. Uncle Cash is trying to convince all the families to go away for the Christmas season this year—somewhere like Hawaii or Tahiti, because Cash is flashy that way. Their label signed a new singer-songwriter that Dad has a good feeling about.

It’s all the normal stuff that comes along with having a not-so-normal big family. Everyone is always up in each other’s business and there’s always gossip to catch up on. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I did want to talk to you about something,” my dad says once our plates are cleared, and I bite back a groan. He’s going to give me shit about bringing a date to Rose’s wedding last week. Or maybe he’s going to try to get me to accept a modified shooting schedule that keeps cameras out of the rental house, like he pushed for the last season. Hell, he probably wants to try to convince me to come back home and—

“They’re naming a new department after us at USC.”

I blink. “What kind of department?”