“And I’m not. My breakfast date is with Mr. Charles Cheese. Alas. Can it wait till Monday?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Okay, I get off work at six. Applebee’s. Might have to multitask, though, because I’m trying to finish a story—don’t take it personally okay he’s calling I have to go thanks love you bye.”
As I put down my phone, I noticed Mom standing in my doorway. “Everything okay?” she asked.
“Holy Helicopter Parenting, Mom.”
“How was your date with that boy?”
“Which boy? There are so many. I have a spreadsheet just to keep track of them.”
—
To kill time that morning, I went through Noah’s file of entries from his dad’s notes app. It was a long, seemingly random list—everything from book titles to quotes.
Over time, markets will always seek to become more free.
Experiential value.
Floor five Stairway one
Disgrace—Coetzee
It went on like that for pages, just little memos to himself that were inscrutable to anyone else. But the last four notes in the documents interested me:
Maldives Kosovo Cambodia
Never Tell Our Business to Strangers
Unless you leave a leg behind
The jogger’s mouth
It was impossible to know when those notes had been written, and whether they’d all been written at once, but they certainly seemed connected: A quick search told me that Kosovo, Cambodia, and the Maldives were all nations that had no extradition treaty with the United States, meaning that Pickett might be allowed to stay in them without having to face criminal charges at home. Never Tell Our Business to Strangers was a memoir by a woman whose father lived on the run from the law. The top search result for “Unless you leave a leg behind” was a news article called “How White-Collar Fugitives Survive on the Lam;” the quote in question referred to how difficult it is to fake your own death.
“The jogger’s mouth” made no sense to me, and searching turned up nothing except for a bunch of people jogging with their mouths open. But of course we all put ridiculous things in our notes apps that only make sense to us. That’s what notes are for. Maybe he’d just seen a jogger with an interesting mouth. I felt bad for Noah, but eventually I set the list aside.
—
Harold and I made it to Applebee’s half an hour early that afternoon. For some reason, I was scared to actually get out of the car, but if you pulled down the center segment of Harold’s backseat, you could reach directly into the trunk. So I wiggled my way back there and fumbled around until I’d found the tote bag with the money, my dad’s phone, and its car charger.
I stuffed the bag under the passenger seat, plugged in my dad’s phone, and waited for it to charge enough to turn on.
Years ago, Mom had backed up all Dad’s pictures and emails onto a computer and multiple hard drives, but I liked swiping through them on his phone—partly because that’s how I’d always looked at them, but mostly because there was something magical about it being his phone, which still worked eight years after his body stopped working.
The screen lit up and then loaded the home screen, a picture of my mom and me at Juan Solomon Park, seven-year-old me on a playground swing, leaning so far back that my upside-down face was turned to the camera. Mom always said I remembered the pictures, not what was actually happening when they were taken, but still, I felt like I could remember—him pushing me on the swing, his hand as big as my back, the certainty that swinging away from him also meant swinging back to him.
I tapped over to his photos. He’d taken most of the pictures himself, so you rarely see him—instead, you see what he saw, what looked interesting to him, which was mostly me, Mom, and the sky broken up by tree branches.
I swiped right, watching us all get younger. Mom riding a tiny tricycle with tiny me on her shoulders, me eating breakfast with cinnamon sugar plastered all over my face. The only pictures he appeared in were selfies, but phones back then didn’t have front-facing cameras, so he had to guess at the framing. The pictures were inevitably crooked, part of us out of the frame, but you could always see me at least, curling into Mom—I was a mama’s girl.
She looked so young in those pictures—her skin taut, her face thin. He’d often take five or six pictures at once in the hopes of getting one right, and if you swiped through them like a flipbook, Mom’s smile got bigger and smaller, my squirming six-year-old self moved this way or that, but Dad’s face never changed.
When he fell, his headphones were still playing music. I do remember that. He was listening to some old soul song, and it was coming out of his earbuds loud, his body on its side. He was just lying there, the lawn mower stopped, not far from the one tree in our front yard. Mom told me to call 911, and I did. I told the operator my dad had fallen. She asked if he was breathing, and I asked Mom, and she said no, and the whole time this totally incongruous soul song was crooning tinnily through his earbuds.
Mom kept doing CPR on him until the ambulance came. He was dead the whole time, but we didn’t know. We didn’t know for sure until a doctor opened the door to the windowless hospital “family room” where we were waiting, and said, “Did your husband have a heart condition?” Past tense.
My favorite pictures of my dad are the few where he’s out of focus—because that’s how people are, really, and so I settled on one of those, a picture he’d taken of himself with a friend at a Pacers game, the basketball court behind them, their features blurred.
And then I told him. I told him that I lucked into some money and that I’d try to do right by it and that I missed him.
—
I’d put the phone and charger away by the time Daisy showed up. She was walking toward Applebee’s when I called to her through Harold’s open window. She came over and got into the passenger seat.
“Can you give me a ride home after this? My dad is taking Elena to some math thing.”
“Yeah, of course. Listen, there’s a bag under your seat,” I said. “Don’t freak out.”
She reached down, pulled out the bag, and opened it. “Oh, fuck,” she whispered. “Oh my God, Holmesy, what is this? Is this real?” Tears sprouted from her eyes. I’d never seen Daisy cry.
“Davis said it was worth it to him, that he’d rather give us the reward than have us snooping around.”
“It’s real?”
“Seems to be. I guess his lawyer is going to call me tomorrow.”
“Holmesy, this is, this is—is this one hundred thousand dollars?”
“Yeah, fifty each. Do you think we can keep it?”
“Hell yes, we can keep it.”
I told her about Davis calling it a rounding error, but I still worried that it might be dirty money or that I might be exploiting Davis or . . . but she shushed me. “Holmesy. I’m so fucking done with the idea that there’s nobility in turning down money.”
“But it’s—like, we only got this money because we know someone.”
“Yeah, and Davis Pickett only got his money because he knew someone, specifically his father. This is not illegal or unethical. It’s awesome.”
She was staring out the windshield. It had started to drizzle a little—one of those cloudy days in Indiana when the sky feels very close to the ground.
Out on Ditch Road, a stoplight turned yellow, then red. “I’m gonna go to college,” she said. “And not at night.”
“I mean, it’s not enough to pay for all of college.”
She smiled. “Yeah, I know it’s not enough to pay for all of college, Professor Buzzkill. But it is fifty thousand dollars, which will make college a hell of a lot easier.” She turned to me and grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. “HOLMESY. BE HAPPY. WE ARE RICH.” She pulled a single hundred-dollar bill from one of the stacks and pocketed it. “Let’s have the finest meal Applebee’s has to offer.”
—
At our usual table, Daisy and I shocked Holly by ordering two sodas. When she returned with our drinks, she asked Daisy, “You want the Blazin’ Texan burger?”
“Holly, what is your best steak?”