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“Ah, but who willcookthe groceries?”
“We will. I can cook a little, you can cook a little.”
“Honestly, bean, I don’t have time to buy groceries and cook,” he said. “Maybe I can order them online and have them delivered? You email me what you want and—”
“I’m not going to fucking email you a grocery list, just give me some money.”
“I’ll do you one better,” he said, whipping out his wallet. “I’ll give you a credit card. Can I trust you to use your judgment with it?”
“What’s the limit? Twenty grand? Can you increase it?”
“Very funny.”
Saber looked at the heavy silver Amex.
“I feel like I’m playing the part of a rich kid on, like, a tv show.”
“Well, it’s real life,” her dad said.
She looked at him, not knowing what to say.
“Why didn’t you have me come and live with you before? After mom died?”
“Jesus, bean, that’s a tough fucking question. Looking back, I would have maybe made different choices. When your mom died, we were so young, it was such a shock. My job in Jacksonville paid shit, and when I got an offer out here, I knew I’d be working a ton. I thought I’d come back, but I just kept getting raises, better offers, and it seemed wrong to take you away from nanny.”
“We could have both moved out.”
“If you think that, then you didn’t know your nanny very well. She loved the beach, loved her house.”
“So did I,” Saber said. “I don’t care about any of… this.”
She indicated the beautiful house, the state-of-the-art kitchen they only used for its microwave.
“I haven’t always lived like this, bean,” he promised her. “Remember that shitty condo? For years, I saved. I sent your nanny money, I set up your college fund, I worked my ass off.I never held anything back. And I was there, wasn’t I? In the summer?”
“It just felt like you were choosingthislife over me.”
“I was terrified of being a parent. Is that what you need to hear? That I was afraid of bringing you here and fucking you up when I knew you were happy there? Didn’t you have a good childhood? It wouldn’t have been like that here. I worked sixty-hour weeks, sometimes more.”
Saber looked at him, then back down at her food. She’d had a wonderful childhood, but that didn’t make her any less angry at her dad.
“A kid died at my school,” she said, completely changing the subject.
“I heard. Very weird.”
“Yeah, I guess nobody knows what happened.”
“A guy on the ferry told me something pretty incredible about it. The paramedics toldhimit looked like he died from blood loss, but there was no blood at the scene. But I guess that’s a second-hand rumor.”
“I thought he was basically in the water, or like, washed up.”
“No, they said he was on the beach, like he died there.”
“That’s crazy,” Saber said, thinking about everything Lozen had told her. “So not drugs? That’s what everyone at school thinks.”
Jim shrugged.
“I’m starting to think rumors can really fly around here.”
