Chapter 51
CHAOS IS THE BEST TEACHER
Oliver
After our shower, Daphne tells me she needs to get something from the front desk for her mission of helping me give away piles of cash.
As soon as she slips out of the door, I call Archie.
“Talk to me, Stevenson,” he says, throwing me for half a second before I realize he’s using a fake name so that no one knows it’s me.
He’s breathing like he’s on a treadmill, and I hear the steady thump thump thump of his footsteps.
“You on an earbud?” I ask.
“Stupid question.”
Good. I can talk freely. “I either had a mental breakdown or I’ve left the stress behind.”
“Pick one. Can’t be both.”
“Don’t have a clue where I am, don’t care, might lose track of time and not find where I want to settle before my two weeks are up, again don’t care, having fun.”
“Shit. It is both.”
It’s also the sex.
I don’t know how sex with the most chaotic person I know is both grounding me and giving me wings, but there you have it.
“Snapped yesterday. Hit a thunderstorm, Daphne freaked out, thought for a minute we wouldn’t get out alive, she called me boring, and the next thing I knew, I was shutting off the GPS and driving wherever I felt like going.”
“Things are okay with your new assistant then?” he says.
That coded question is loaded with the subtext of at least a dozen other very direct questions. “Yeah.”
He’s quiet for a minute.
I’m quiet for a minute.
Then— “Fuck, Oli— Stevenson. You slept with her.”
“Is there really a Stevenson? Is your assistant listening in? Are you going to bring about another man’s divorce right now?”
“What the hell were you thinking?”
“That she’s single, I’m single, she’s never going back to Manhattan, I’m never going back to New York, and she’s…fun.”
“I’m all in favor of fun, but dude, there are lines.”
“I’m not getting back together with Margot. Actually—can you do some snooping for me? Find out if her father’s plotting some kind of takeover of M2G? Don’t care for my sake. I think it’d make Daphne feel better to know Margot only wants me now for my company.”
“Lines and bad ideas.”
“Daph doesn’t want my money.”
He snorts.
I growl.
“Bad. Ideas,” he repeats.
I’m aware he’s trying to look out for me. Dude’s been the best friend I desperately needed.
But this subject is off-limits.
“You see my parents?” I ask him.
The grunt that comes through the phone isn’t exactly what I want to hear either. “Hold on.” The treadmill stops. A door shuts.
Then another door.
“Not in person, but I know they were at Kenniston’s last night. Rumor has it your dad’s expecting you to back his bid to get back into the CEO spot.”
“You still ready?”
“Cannot wait. Though I think you need to give Carmen a heads-up.”
He’s standing in for me at the board of directors meeting in a week and a half. Acting as my proxy to hand over my resignation and pass along my recommendation for the next CEO, and then he’ll be my proxy again at the subsequent shareholder meeting to confirm the board’s choice for the next CEO.
And then he’s helping me divest my M2G shares once I no longer need them to vote.
“She’ll be in. She’s said as much without saying as much.”
“You’re all the way off your itinerary now?” he asks me.
“Completely.”
“The end goal…”
“Still the same.”
“Solo?”
“Yes.” It’s what he wants to hear, even if I’m hesitating in my mind.
Stupid, I know.
Daphne’s not wrong about this thing between us—whatever it is—being a side effect of our close quarters the past few days.
But I like her.
This woman that she’s become—she’s still Daphne, but she’s more.
She gets me. She understands not fitting. She has people in her life—normal people, people she loves, people who are her new family—who have taught her to live the way I want to live.
She’s making me feel like I’m family.
Like I have a place to belong, just as I am, while I’m discovering who I’m meant to be.
“Gotta go,” I murmur as I hear the door opening.
I hang up and tuck the phone into my pocket as she strolls into the room with a stack of envelopes.
Her hair’s damp, though the light’s all wrong to catch the blue and green streaks right, and she’s in a pair of cotton shorts and a T-shirt with a unicorn on it suggesting that I have a nice day. No makeup today.
Not even her lipstick.
But she smiles at me as if all is perfect in the world, easing that little blip that’s been sitting in my heart since she told me she had soap in her eye in the shower.
“You wanna bet control of the TV remote tonight on if I can get rid of this whole bag of cash today?” she says.
Bold and confident. Eyes sparkling like she’s excited for the challenge.
She’s so damn pretty.
“That’s it? All you want to bet is control of the TV remote?”
“I’m not betting you dinner when I don’t have cash myself, and sexual favors are completely off the table once we leave this room.”
“Completely?”
“Completely, Oliver.”
“Boring, Daphne.”
“Don’t make me go through two bags of your money.”
I grin at her. “Is it hard? Being the adult for once?”
“It’s annoying as hell. You ready to go?
You’re driving. I need to watch my phone to keep an eye out for opportunities.
Also, I have to text Bea, which I know I don’t have to tell you, but I am in the spirit of complete honesty.
She rebranded her burger bus, and I need this full story. I’ve missed a lot at home.”
Home.
I want a home.
But I don’t say it, and instead, we load up and hit the road, leaving behind ten thousand dollars in a tip for the housecleaning crew and a note asking them to someday pay it forward.
An hour later, we’re on a road following a river somewhere in Arkansas. Daphne’s sitting in the back seat with the cash, doing something with the envelopes and her phone.
“We’re coming up to a town in about three miles,” she tells me. “Take a right at the stoplight.”
I follow her directions, and soon, we’re pulling up to a shopping center anchored around a Purple Donkey grocery store.
“We need small bills,” Daphne informs me. “So we’re each going into the grocery store, then into the dollar store next door, then into the gas station at the other end of the parking lot. Get something like gum, and do not give the change away. Not yet. We need smaller bills.”
“Is this change for laundry?”
“No. Laundromats all take some form of credit cards now.” She shoves three hundred-dollar bills at me. “Meet me back here when you’re done.”
She pretends like she doesn’t know me, walking three or four steps ahead of me into the grocery store.
While I’m debating if I want breath mints, a pack of gum, or a random tabloid magazine like the one she grabbed the other day, I listen in as she chats with the clerk in her lane.
“My grandma is so ridiculous. I love her. She keeps sending me hundred-dollar bills, and I’m like, Grandma.
No one uses cash anymore. Can’t support my online shopping addiction with cash, you know?
I’m forever like, ‘Grandma, get me a digital gift card,’ but she thinks the internet’s for recipes and gossip, not for, you know, buying quirky custom T-shirts. ”
“Oh, I hear ya, honey,” the clerk says. “Grannies are something, aren’t they? Mine’s memory is slipping, and I keep getting twenty-dollar bills in birthday cards. My birthday’s in March. The last one came yesterday.”
“I seriously love grandmas, but I’m sorry about her memory issues. Happy…five months after your birthday?”
“Thanks. Best five months after my birthday ever.” The clerk laughs.
Daphne laughs.
The guy behind me asks if I’m going to pick something or hold up the line, so I grab a candy bar, pay for it with a hundred-dollar bill that the clerk checks to make sure it’s not fake, and I pocket my change.
Daphne’s already in the dollar store next door, at the checkout counter.
I grab a random Halloween bucket and get in line behind her.
“No, seriously, I’ve been looking all over everywhere for these sticky notes,” she’s telling the cashier. “Why doesn’t every store carry cute sticky notes anymore?”
The employee doesn’t check Daphne’s hundred for authenticity, but when I put my Halloween bucket on the conveyor and hand her my hundred, I get the look and the counterfeit test.
And then it strikes me that two people cashing in hundred-dollar bills in a row probably looks weird.
So I stop at the car and have a short conversation with Angelina Juliana Priestly, then realize I can drive myself across the parking lot, so I do.
Daphne spots me as she’s leaving the market attached to the gas station.
I nod to her as I’m passing her on my way in.
This time, I grab an apple.
Just feel like it.
And the clerk checks my hundred-dollar bill before making change for me.
“They all think I’m passing fake money,” I tell Daphne when I get into the car.
She cracks up. “You look so suspicious, Oliver. So suspicious.”
We go three more blocks before she directs me along a set of turns that lead to a small pet shelter.
“Are we giving money away, or are we getting another road trip mascot?” I ask her.
She blinks at me.
It’s one long, slow blink that asks if I’d let her get a pet.
“How many years has it been since Lady Catherine Ophelia passed?” I ask her.
“Four. She died right after I moved in with Bea.”
“You haven’t wanted another dog?”
Another blink.
This one goes with a visible swallow. “I don’t want my heart to ever break like that again.”
I don’t know if my heart has ever broken.
There were high school and college girlfriends, but they were who I was supposed to date whether my heart was in it or not.
Even Margot was who I was supposed to date.
Safe.
Easy.
I loved her the only way I knew how to love her—the safe, easy, nonconfrontational, agree-about-everything way.
The boring way, as Daphne would say.
I’ve never thrown my entire heart into something I loved so much that I couldn’t walk away from it, that I’d fight for it, that I’d bend all rules of time and space and reality to hold on to it.
Talk about feeling inadequate.
I don’t know if I even know how to love someone.
Not the way Daphne loved her dog.
She pats Angelina Juliana Priestly on the head, then holds up a stack of cash.
“Here’s the deal. Whenever you want to donate a small fortune in cash, put the small bills on the outside of the wad so that they think it’s a bunch of ones and fives.
Garage sales are good cover stories. Had a garage sale, wanted some of it to go to a good cause.
People are tipping servers less and less in cash these days, but that’s still a reasonable cover, especially in more rural areas, like where I live.
Bea gets a handful of cash at her burger bus every week. It’s believable.”
“So we’re long gone by the time they realize it’s more than fifty bucks.”
“Exactly.”
“How much is that?”
“No idea. I didn’t count. I’m hoping there’s a donation jar inside. If there’s not, we’ll pet the animals for a few minutes, then shove an envelope of cash in their mailbox on our way out. Just—let me do the talking.”
I let her think I agree to let her do the talking.
But I’m making plans to insist she gets a chance to pet the animals when she reaches the door, tugs on it, and then sighs.
“Closed,” she mutters.
“Mailbox?”
“Yep.”
We leave somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand dollars in the mailbox, straight up hundred-dollar bills, with a note asking them to give the animals an extra hug from two animal lovers.
It’s almost the truth.
Daphne has clearly loved a dog or two in her lifetime.
My family had pets, but the staff took care of them. And in the case of my mother’s cats, whoever could handle their hissing dealt with them.
“I should get a pet when I’m settled,” I murmur, almost to myself, as I put the car in gear again.
“A big, fluffy, happy golden retriever,” she agrees. “You’d love that.”
We stop at a second grocery store in town, where she easily buys a thousand dollars’ worth of Visa gift cards with ten hundred-dollar bills, and management is asked to check my two hundred-dollar bills when I attempt to use them in a different checkout lane to pay for restaurant gift cards.
Back in the car, she takes one look at me, and she cracks up laughing so hard that she nearly can’t breathe.
“I give up.” I toss my hands in the air. “I can’t even spend cash, much less give it away.”
I know that’s why she’s converting it into credit card gift cards—so that I can give away money online or with cards—but she’s giggling too hard to tell me so herself.
We make one final stop in town to grab a late breakfast—the peaches and cheese from yesterday’s farmer’s stand were delicious, but not enough food—and I practice her method of putting a few small bills on top of the tip I leave on the table after we’re done eating.
She tosses a few coins on too.
And when we’re finally back on the highway, I’m twenty-five thousand dollars lighter.
Still nowhere close to giving away even a million, but we’re making progress.
Together.
And it’s fun. Freeing.
Right.
For the first time in my life, I’m doing what I know I’m supposed to do.
Unexpectedly with exactly the right person too.