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?”
Holly, unamused as usual, answered, “None of them are that good.”
“Well, then I’ll have my usual Blazin’ Texan burger, but I’d like to upgrade my side to onion rings. And yes, I know it’s extra.”
Holly nodded, then turned her eyes to me. “Veggie burger,” I said. “No cheese or mayonnaise or—”
“I know your order,” Holly said. “Coupon?”
“Not today, Holly,” Daisy answered. “Not today.”
—
We spent most of dinner imagining how, precisely, Daisy would retire from Chuck E. Cheese’s. “I want to go in tomorrow, totally normal day, and when I draw the short straw and have to get in the Chuckie costume, I just walk off with it. Walk right through the doors, into my brand-new car, take Chuckie home, get him taxidermied, and mount him on the wall like a hunting trophy.”
“It’s so weird, putting the heads of stuff you’ve killed on the wall,” I said. “Davis’s guesthouse was full of that stuff.”
“Tell me about it,” Daisy said. “Mychal and I were hooking up in the actual shadow of a stuffed moose head. BTW, thanks for walking in on us last night, perv.”
“Sorry, I wanted to tell you that you’re rich.” She laughed and shook her head again in disbelief. “I ran into Noah, by the way, the little brother? He asked if I knew anything about his dad and showed me this list of his notes. Here,” I said, and showed her the list on my phone. “His last note was ‘the jogger’s mouth.’ That mean anything to you?” Daisy shook her head slowly. “I just feel bad for him,” I said. “He was crying and everything.”
“That kid is not your problem,” Daisy said. “We’re not in the helping-billionaire-orphans business; we’re in the getting-rich business, and business is booming.”
“Well, fifty thousand dollars isn’t rich,” I said. “I mean, it’s less than half of what IU would cost,” which was the state school a couple hours south of us in Bloomington.
Daisy went quiet for a long time, her eyes blanked by concentration.
“All right,” she said at last. “Just did some mental math. Fifty thousand dollars is, like, five thousand nine hundred hours at my job. Which is, like, seven hundred eight-hour shifts, if you can even get a full shift, which usually you can’t, so that’s two years of working seven days a week, eight hours a day. Maybe that’s not rich to you, Holmesy, but that’s rich to me.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“And it was all sitting in a box of Cheerios.”
“Well, like half of it was in a box of shredded wheat.”
“You know what makes you a solid BFF, Holmesy? That you even told me about the money. Like, I hope I am the sort of person who would go halvsies with you on a six-figure-lottery situation, but to be perfectly honest, I don’t trust myself.” She took a bite of her burger and mostly swallowed before saying, “This lawyer guy isn’t going to try to take back the money, is he?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“We should go to a bank,” she said. “Get it deposited now.”
“Davis said we should wait to talk to the lawyer.”
“You trust him?”
“Yeah. I really do.”
“Aww, Holmesy, we’ve both fallen in love. Me with an artist, you with a billionaire. We’re finally leading the debutante lives we’ve always deserved.”