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“No, it’s fine.” I doubted we’d find even ten thousand dollars’ worth of things for Molly to buy; Neil really had no idea how much things cost when they weren’t bespoke and made from ultra-extravagant materials. “I’ll reign myself in.”
Washed and dressed again—this time in a blazer, T-shirt, and jeans so as to prevent mall-walking thigh chaffing—I headed down to the lobby. Molly waited for me, slouched on one of the chairs. She had changed, too, into black jeans with a hole in one knee and a black and gray horizontal-striped V-neck T-shirt. Her hair hung loose down her back, and as she concentrated on the phone in her hand, she reached up to tuck some strands behind her ear.
Holy cow. I could have been looking at myself a decade ago.
She looked up, saw me, and her entire face transformed. For a moment, she’d looked sullen and serious, but her bright smile and shining eyes returned as I approached. “I thought you would be late!”
She rose to hug me, and I couldn’t think of a way—or a reason—to refuse. “Why would you think that?”
“Because you’re rich. Aren’t rich people always late?” she asked, as though it were common knowledge.
“I wasn’t always rich,” I reminded her. “I grew up in Calumet.”
Her eyes grew wide. “No way. Calumet? That’s like…the middle of nowhere.”
I shrugged. “All my clothes came from Pamida.”
Her brow creased.
“Shopko?” I tried, and she nodded in recognition.
How could someone make me feel so impossibly old? I was only twenty-eight.
I noticed the black sedan outside the glass lobby doors. “Our ride is here. Let’s go.”
She followed me out, moving somewhat cautiously toward the vehicle. “You didn’t drive your own car? Like, you didn’t even rent one?”
“This one is kind of rented,” I explained, nodding to the driver as he opened the door for us. I motioned to Molly to get inside then got in myself. “But we live in New York. We don’t generally drive ourselves around. Well, Neil does. But he actually likes driving.”
“I can’t wait to get my license,” she said with a sigh. “I am so sick of having to beg for rides from my mom or my friends.”
“I remember those days.” Living in the U.P. without an independent mode of transportation was like living in an underground bunker, isolated from the rest of the world. At least, it had felt that way when I was a teen. “Do you have a snowmobile?”
“I did, but it broke down last year, and without Dad to fix it…” Her voice trailed off, and she looked away, out the window.
I gave her a moment to compose herself and mentally added “snowmobile” to the list of stuff I needed to buy her. But we had time for that, and time for me to ask Sasha permission before I gave her daughter a potentially dangerous recreational vehicle.
“When do you think you’ll get your license?” I asked, changing the subject back to the holy grail of teen transportation. “You’re already sixteen, right?”
“I missed driver’s training last year because I was too sick,” she explained. “So, Mom’s trying to teach me, now, and I’m studying the handbook online. I’m going to try to do segment one before the surgery, at least.”
“How long will you have to recover?” I asked. I’d done plenty of research on how long my recovery would be, but shamefully little on what would happen to Molly.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably a year? And I’ll have to be on drugs for like, the rest of my life.”
“Neil had a transplant,” I told her. “Bone marrow. But it was his own, so there wasn’t as high a chance of rejection.”
I wouldn’t tell her how sick he got right afterward. Nobody wanted to hear about what could go wrong when they were facing something that was already scary.
“Did he have cancer?” Molly asked. Apparently, Susan hadn’t shared the details of my book with her. Which was good, because I would rather Molly not know my books existed. I wanted her to get to know me firsthand and not form an opinion of me based on research, as Susan had done.
I nodded. “He had leukemia.”
“Can I ask you a question?” She didn’t wait for my answer. “Neil is like…super old.”
“That’s not really a question.” But I knew what she was getting at. “Yeah, he’s twenty-four years older than me.”
“So…are you married to him because he’s rich?” If anyone else had asked, I might have been offended. In fact, people had asked me that before, and I’d absolutely been offended. But Molly was sixteen, caught between adulthood and childhood, and innocent childish curiosity was the clear motive behind her inquiry. She wasn’t passing judgment or insinuating I was a bad person. She was just trying to process me.
“No. I didn’t know he was rich when we first met.” And the details of that meeting weren’t anything she needed to hear about. I would not regale her with tales of my own teenage adventures. At least, not that one.
