Chapter 11 #2
They’re showing a picture that includes her as one of the many partygoers on my parents’ packed patio at their Hamptons house. It’s taken from the balcony, but you can see Daphne holding her head high, blonde wig on, martini glass in hand, mid-stride like she’s on a mission.
Like she fits in there.
Wonder who she paid off to get in. She wasn’t on the guest list. Probably why she wore a disguise too. Security would’ve let someone’s girlfriend in.
They likely would not have let Daphne in, and I get the impression she didn’t want to be there anyway.
The guy on the other side of the pump starts his engine.
“Also, you have to pay for the gas inside first if you’re not paying by credit card or phone tap,” Daphne murmurs.
Fucking fuck on a fuck-bucket. I knew that too.
Daphne has made half my brain cells scatter and refuse to work together, and now I look like an even bigger dumbass.
“So do you have phone tapping set up on your phone?” she asks.
Not a chance.
I don’t even like being here when I know there are likely security cameras on the premises.
Eventually, my family will hire investigators to track me.
It won’t matter that they’ll get a letter informing them that I’m willingly opting to remove myself from life in Manhattan and I don’t want them to contact me.
It won’t matter that I’m divesting myself of all of my shares in M2G after I use them to vote for my choice of my own successor.
It won’t matter that I’m not leaving a digital trail. They’ll find ways to track me.
That’s half of why I’m taking a circuitous route to get to wherever I decide my final destination is and the only phone in my possession—other than Daphne’s—is a phone with exactly one phone number in it, to exactly one person that I trust with my life.
I pocket the keys, then shrug out of my flannel to hand it to Daphne. “Put this on and get in the car.”
“It’s too freaking hot for—what are you wearing?” Her gaze dips to my chest and my arms, and she makes a face that I don’t want to interpret. It comes with bulging eyeballs and parted lips and then a head shake. “Oh my god. Do you still have feeling in your fingertips?”
I look down at the white T-shirt I shimmied myself into this morning.
It’s brand-new.
And it’s the smallest freaking size large T-shirt I’ve ever worn.
Order clothes online, I told myself. Have them delivered to the Pennsylvania house. Enough to get you deep enough into the countryside that no one will look twice as you get a new wardrobe.
Except most of the packages didn’t arrive. All that was waiting for me at the cabin last night is what I’m wearing today.
So here I am, in a T-shirt so tight that my nipples are caving in and the smallest slice of my stomach is showing over my waistband.
“Get in the car,” I repeat to Daphne.
“I know you come from a long line of people who’d take candy from a baby, but I didn’t think you’d take their shirts too. Who did your shopping? There’s no way that’s an adult-size shirt.”
“Get in the car,” I repeat.
She rolls her eyes and circles the car to open the back door. “Tell them you need to put thirty dollars’ worth in the car at pump seven.”
As if I can’t calculate for myself how much gas I need. Even if I’ve never had to pump it myself, I work in the industry.
But the brain cells that aren’t already on vacation are fizzing and popping and burning from the stress of my unexpected companion.
I’d handle this fine if she weren’t here.
Probably.
A sigh leaks out of me.
Or possibly not. I’m not sure I’ve handled anything fine in the past four years.
When I walk in the building, the woman behind the counter’s wearing a nametag that reads Carol on her red vest with Cupholder and MILES2GO printed across the front. She eyes me. “Pump seven?”
“Thirty dollars’ worth,” I say, shoving a hundred-dollar bill across the plexiglass countertop that’s showing off small postcards with dollar, two-dollar, and five-dollar price tags on the top of each.
She looks at me.
Then down at my pants.
Then at the currency on the counter between us.
Lottery tickets.
Those are lottery tickets.
Not postcards.
“Keep the change,” I add.
Maybe she’ll buy lottery tickets.
Maybe she won’t.
She snorts softly. “Right. The change.” She pulls a marker out of a drawer and swipes it across the hundred-dollar bill, then eyes me.
“It’s real,” I say as the doorbell jingles behind me.
She eyes me again, then slides a look outside.
She’s seen Daphne.
She’s seen Daphne, and I’m standing here wearing a shirt three sizes too small and linen boat pants and yellow work boots.
Dammit.
I don’t look like an average Joe.
I look like the cops want to talk to me.
It takes everything inside me to keep watching Carol like I’m in complete control and not internally bracing myself in case that was a cop who walked in the door.
Why do I have my back to the door?
Why don’t I have a good angle to look at my own car?
These stores need to be revamped. They need to be renovated so that I can pay for gas with cash without being blind as to who’s approaching me from behind.
Dark hair with blue and green streaks appears in my peripheral vision, then a subtle heat as red flannel brushes against me too.
“These too,” Daphne says beside me, dumping six bags of Lava Cheese Puffs on the counter. “We definitely need these. Oh, and two MegaHit energy drinks. Hold on a sec. I’ll go grab them.” She winks at the woman behind the counter. “Gotta keep him going all night, you know what I mean.”
She turns, slaps my ass, making me jump, and strides barefoot to the cooler along the back wall.
Carol stares at me more.
“Thirty dollars’ worth at pump seven, and whatever she wants,” I say.
You still own this building, I remind myself.
Or at least the licensing to the company name.
I own a quarter of it outright with the stock shares I inherited from my grandfather.
Carol looks at the hundred-dollar bill again.
It’s good. I saw her check it with the pen. Mark turned yellow.
It’s good.
She knows it.
I know it.
So why am I sweating like I’ve done something wrong?
“Honey,” Daphne squeals. “Matching T-shirts! Your family will die. What size is Uncle Herman again? Oh, never mind. You never know things like that. Men, am I right? We’ll get a few sizes in case.” She drops a pile of black Cupholder the hermit crab T-shirts on the counter.
Carol stares at both of us while she scans all of the barcodes with a little laser gun.
“My mom is gonna be so mad,” Daphne says to me. “She hates matching T-shirts. But your family’s Thanksgiving cards with the matching shirts are always so cute.” She turns to Carol. “Thanksgiving cards. Isn’t that the cutest?”
“One sixty-eight fourteen,” Carol says.
“Give her another hundred, honey.” Daphne wrinkles her nose, then reaches into her cleavage. “Or, you know what? Never mind. I’ve got this one. Ooh, but add three of those five-dollar Tarzan lottery tickets in too, would you?”
She drops a folded hundred-dollar bill on the counter.
I look at her cleavage.
How much of my money did she shove in her cleavage while she was searching my car last night?
She laughs and pushes me. “Save it for the car, horndog.”
Carol checks Daphne’s hundred, and moments later, Daphne’s carrying an armful of shirts and chips and MegaHit energy drinks out to the car, with three lottery tickets sticking out where her hundred-dollar bill was a few minutes ago.
I’m horrified.
So horrified, in fact, that I get in the car, crank the engine, and I’m pulling away before I realize I forgot to put gas in the tank.
I look in the rearview mirror as another car slides into the slot I’ve just vacated. “Fuck.”
Daphne grins at me from the back seat. She’s discarded my flannel and is throwing a black Miles2Go T-shirt over her head. “So…Speedy Sloth across the street instead?”
Dammit.
Dammit.
She noticed I forgot to get gas too.
“I’m not going to Speedy Sloth.”
“Why not? You could get a Speedy Sloth Slushie. I’ll bet you’ve never had one.”
I will never.
Ever.
Ever.
Enter a Speedy Sloth gas station or convenience store.
Ever.
Fuckers added that Speedy Sloth Slushie to their offerings to compete with the Miles2Go Landslide Slushy—yes, they spelled slushy the other way—right after my father went to prison.
The number of meetings I sat through calling that a crisis—and the number of people who felt so strongly about it that it was like I was personally insulting their babies when I declared it wasn’t a crisis—just no.
Never.
“Do you want to stay in this car and continue with our deal, or do you want to see yourself out right now?” I ask Daphne.
She rolls her eyes. “Testy much? Fine. There’s a Quickie-Lickie on the other side of the highway.”
“Why is every gas station named something awful?” I mutter.
“Don’t diss on the Lickie. They have the best squeegees for cleaning all of the bugs off your windshield—don’t worry, I’ll walk you through that too—and they give away a free sucker with every fill-up, and they’re not flavors you can find anywhere else. Have you ever had a mango root beer sucker?”
I gape at her in the rearview mirror. Mango root beer?
That sounds as awful as continuing this road trip with her in tow.
“Stop sign!” she shrieks.
I slam on the brakes as another car honks and veers around me while I’m halfway through the intersection.
Shit.
Daphne has one arm braced on the ceiling of the car and her opposite leg pressing into my seat. “Can I please have a turn driving?”
I look every way I can look, breathing through the way my heart is trying to pound out of my ribs, then continue through the intersection, swinging left at the last minute to head toward the country highway and the Quickie-Lickie so that we can get gas.
I don’t hear Daphne draw a full breath again until we pull into the second gas station.
She huffs out a breath, and then she laughs.
Laughs.
“Holy shit, look at this. One of the scratch-offs I got to throw her off won us ten grand.”
Ten grand.
Ten grand.
I haven’t even begun giving away the millions I have in the trunk, and now I have another ten grand to deal with.
I lurch the car to a stop at a pump, realize I’ve once again parked backward for the gas tank, and I drop my head to the steering wheel.
The car honks.
Fuck.
Just fuck.