IVAN’S MOVE UP the ladder was not a positive occasion for everyone. Plenty of friends, family, and associates would have loved to have shared more of the wealth with him. However, Ivan could never expect to climb to new heights with excess baggage attached to him. Something had to give. And it did.

First his brother, Derrick, popped up on him from Los Angeles without warning again. He was posted on the sidewalk outside of Ivan’s downtown apartment building, smoking a cigarette. Obviously, someone had informed his brother of his new pad’s location.

Ivan strolled up from a dinner meeting in the Gaslamp Quarter and paused. He spotted his brother in the distance and grumbled, “Shit!”

He recognized Derrick’s cocky stance with a cigarette in his hand a mile away.

Ivan stopped and wondered if he should dodge him by finding something else to do for another hour. He didn’t feel like having a one-on-one with his brother that night. Then his cell phone went off.

While Derrick looked out into the street in the opposite direction, Ivan slipped around the corner of the apartment building to escape his brother’s view. He then looked down at his cell phone and read Christina’s number. He took a moment before he answered it.

“Hello.”

“You’ve been really busy lately. Is it all business or part personal?” Christina asked him. Ivan hadn’t been around her in a while.

“A sure way of finding out would have been for you to keep working with us. Then you could see me in action instead of having to ask about it,” Ivan answered.

She said, “You know how I feel about that.”

They were going nowhere positive, so Ivan changed the subject.

“Well, how have you been doing?”

“Just trying to stay afloat with two jobs.”

That didn’t make much sense to him. Why give up an easy grand a week working parties to slave at two jobs for more hours and less pay?

Ivan asked her, “You still planning on going to school this summer?”

“You still gonna help me to do it?”

He hesitated. He thought, Why should I do that when she obviously gave up on her hustle? She could have paid for her own school while working for us and saving.

Ivan reminded her of their first argument about it.

“I mean, Chris, you’re making how much a week by working these two jobs now—three, four hundred dollars? And that’s, what, barely two thousand a month? You were making that working on weekends.” He told her, “That logic just don’t add up for me. And then I’m supposed to pay to help you to go to school. For what? So you can graduate and make bad decisions all over again? That would be a waste of my money.”