“Touché.” He held up his hands in surrender.
“What are you going to do while I’m gone?” I asked, realizing for the first time that I was kind of ditching him. “Unless you want to come along?”
“No, I think you can spend our money quite well enough on your own.” Three years ago, he wouldn’t have made that joke. Now, we were comfortable enough with each other that he could. “I suppose I’ll just stay here. Maybe visit the fitness center.”
My lips quirked to the side. “You’re going to order dessert from room service and take a nap, aren’t you?”
“That’s likely,” he admitted, flopping onto the bed like a twelve-year-old and kicking up his feet as he grabbed the remote. “I’m putting a dollar amount on this shopping trip today.”
“Excuse me?” That wasn’t like Neil at all.
“I think you need a limit, to prevent you going overboard,” he said evenly. “You’ve told me, time and again, that working- and middle-class people have issues with just being handed things. You wouldn’t want to bring this girl back and offend her mother and sister by inadvertently implying they couldn’t afford to give her the things she needs.”
“Good point.” I played along, because while Neil was trying to be practical and thoughtful, I had a feeling he didn’t have a clue what an offensive amount of money was. “Okay, Mr. Moderation. How much are we allowed to spend?”
He considered. “Twenty thousand dollars.”
I dissolved into a snorting laughter fit.
“What?” he demanded, looking a bit hurt. “Is that not enough?”
“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.
“So, why are you married to him? You’re pretty. You could get a younger guy.” Her backhanded compliment actually felt flattering.
“Thank you. But age doesn’t really matter to me. I married Neil because I fell in love with him. And he’s my best friend.” I paused. “I mean, other than my best friends that I’m not romantically involved with.”
She sighed, clearly disappointed in my answer. Though what she’d expected, I couldn’t guess. “Well, I’m glad you’re happy.”
“And I’m glad we’re finally meeting.” A lump rose in my throat. Finally meeting my sister, who I hadn’t known about for sixteen years of her life…. That seemed so unfair.
“I know.” She examined her chipped nail polish, exactly the way I would have held my hand to do the same. “I didn’t even know you were alive until Dad was dying.”
“Did he tell you?” Maybe it was unethical to interrogate a minor for details, but it still bothered me that I didn’t know the extent to which my existence had been kept secret.
She nodded vigorously. “Yeah. When they found his cancer…well, when he found out he couldn’t donate to me, he told us. Susan and Renee and me. I was really angry because why wouldn’t he tell us if we had another sister? Did you know about us?”
“Vaguely,” I admitted. “I’d heard that my father had another family, but I didn’t know the details. I didn’t really want to know them.”
She frowned. �
�Why wouldn’t you want to know if you had another family?”
“Because I didn’t really feel like you were my family.” I hurried to soften the blow as her face fell. “It’s not anything personal. I’m very glad to get to know you, now. But your dad wasn’t a dad to me. I only met him a few times. We never talked. He probably wouldn’t have recognized me if he’d run into me on the street.”
“I think he would have,” she said sadly. “You look just like him.”
It struck me suddenly that I hated hearing that. I hated knowing that I shared something with the man who’d abandoned me. All my life, people had told me I had my mother’s eyes or her expressions. All along, it was just because they had no other basis for comparison. Now, these strangers were insisting that I somehow had something in common with my absent father, and it stung. Like they were ripping me away from the family who’d actually taken the time to love me and raise me.
It was wholly irrational and not Molly’s fault. She was a teenager, a sick teenager who needed an organ transplant. She had enough stress and drama in her life. She didn’t need mine.
I was about to change the subject when she blurted, “Mom thinks he didn’t see you when you were little because of his dad.”
“Oh?” Poised on the brink of uncovering yet another clue in the mystery of Joey Tangen, I couldn’t back away, even though I knew I shouldn’t let her tell me.
“Yeah. We never saw him. I guess he wasn’t a great dad, either.” It wasn’t enough. I needed to know more, but I couldn’t pry. But I would definitely ask Sasha or Susan about it, later.
A sense of being close to answers I’d never thought I would obtain almost urged me to demand the driver turn the car around. I wanted to run back to Sasha and ask her to clarify Molly’s unintentionally cryptic remarks. But the point of our outing was to give Molly a good time. My issues would have to get worked out later.
The Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi was basically the mall in the Detroit Metro area. I’d never been there, but one of my friends had during a U of M campus visit. She’d come home with a map, an honest-to-god printed map of the place. That’s how big it was; someone could get lost in it.
“Holy crap,” Molly said as we pulled up in front of the doors. “There’s valet parking.”
“Yes, there is,” I observed coolly, like I wasn’t also shocked to see a mall with valet parking.
And I was a freaking billionaire.
“Hey, there’s a Cheesecake Factory,” I said, pointing toward the unmistakable gold edifice. “We should get some dessert before we head back. If you’re allowed to have sugary stuff. I don’t actually know that much about your disease.”
“It’s not diabetes,” she said. “I try to eat healthy, but it’s hard to stick to the diet. Stuff is too expensive. But yeah, cheesecake is not going to kill me today.”
She tucked her hair behind her ear, again, and for the first time, I noticed the glint of plastic in her ear.
“Is that a hearing aid?” I asked, before I could remember my manners.
Molly rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Alport Syndrome wrecks your hearing. And your eyes. Hence the stupid glasses.”
“I don’t think they’re stupid,” I told her firmly. “I think they’re very hip.”
“They were. Like two years ago.”
It wasn’t just the fashion that was outdated, then. If she wasn’t having her eyes checked every year…
The healthcare debate in America definitely bummed me out. People should be able to afford medical care. But since I didn’t really have a problem affording anything, it had been easy to be outraged in the abstract. Now, hearing that my sister couldn’t afford new glasses every year, even though she had a disease that affected her eyes, made me indescribably furious. I wasn’t going to just write to my representatives. I was going to start buying off politicians.
We got out of the car and headed for the doors. I stopped her just outside of them. “Okay, so here’s the deal. You can have anything you want.”
Her eyes lit up. “You don’t mean ‘anything’, right?”
“No, I mean it. Anything,” I promised. “Clothes, jewelry, makeup, anything you want. This is a shopping spree.” As if to prove it to her, I unsnapped my purse and fished out my black Centurion card. “Do you know what this is?”
She took it from me with trembling hands. “No. Shit.”
“No shit,” I confirmed, taking it back to tuck it safely away. “I want this thing to melt from overuse.”
She fixed me with a very serious stare. “I can do that.”
And wow. She totally could. We bopped away from the M.A.C. counter at Macy’s with every outrageous shade of lipstick and eyeshadow that they made—it briefly occurred to me that I should have asked Sasha if Molly was allowed to wear makeup, but it was too late at that point. Hot Topic turned into a free-for-all of fandom branded T-shirts and painfully short skirts—another area where I would have to beg Sasha for forgiveness. Molly shopped the way I would have if someone had told me to go no-limits berserk in a mall at her age. By the time we hit the Apple store for a rose gold MacBook Air and matching iPhone, I actually started to worry about Neil’s dollar limit.
“My arms hurt,” Molly complained as we trudged out with the laptop. For a computer that weighed practically nothing, the box sure was heavy.
“Hang on. You stay right there.” I pointed to some benches. “I’m going to enlist some help.”
A mall security guard passed by, and I flagged him down with my biggest, most flirty smile. “Hey there. Can I talk to you for a minute?”
He frowned suspiciously and nodded. I would have taken a five-hundred-dollar bet that he was in training to become a cop.
“Hi. We’re spending a vulgar amount of money here today,” I said, gesturing to Molly, surrounded by bags. “And it’s getting really hard to carry our purchases. Maybe there’s someone in the mall offices who’d be willing to help us out?”
I batted my eyelashes for effect.
Considering the proximity of the mall to some of the wealthiest suburbs in Michigan, it didn’t surprise me when he responded as though the request was routine and reasonable. “Let me radio down there and see what I can do.”
About fifteen minutes later, two very solicitous gentlemen in suits joined us to carry our purchases.
“This is the way you live all the time?” Molly asked in wonder.
“Not all the time. I actually don’t go shopping all that often.” I’d picked up a few things for myself from Nordstrom’s today, but nothing on the scale of Molly’s capitalist demolition.
“I would,” she said without hesitation. “I would go shopping like this every day.”
“I just don’t have the time. I’ve got my work, I’ve got Olivia—”
“That’s Neil’s granddaughter, right?” Molly asked, as though she were taking mental notes.
I nodded. “Yeah, that’s her. We didn’t bring her because—”
“Because you have a nanny?” she finished for me.
“Because she’s with her grandmother.” I didn’t want to give Molly the impression that we habitually abandoned Olivia just because we could. “We do have a nanny, but I like to be able to be home to spend time with Olivia. I don’t think it’s good for a kid to grow up without spending time with the people who love them.”
She went quiet and thoughtful for a moment. “I guess you would know about that. Because of Dad.”
I didn’t want to ruminate on the subject, because it appeared to bother her. Molly deserved to still think of her dad as the loving, kind man who’d raised her, even though he hadn’t done the same for me. It was difficult enough watching Susan struggle with all of this, and she was almost ten years older.
“Why don’t we go get something for your mom and for Susan?” I noticed a jeweler up ahead. “Do they like jewelry?”
“Mom doesn’t have much jewelry. Just her wedding ring. She sold pretty much everything else when we needed to buy this.” Molly tap
ped her hearing aid.
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “Then, I think you should pick her out something really nice.”
Granted, a precious gem would probably boost me over Neil’s ridiculous dollar limit. But Sasha Tangen had sold everything but her wedding ring so her daughter could hear. It was ridiculous and just plain wrong that she’d had to make the choice.
With a little guidance, Molly picked out a pair of round-cut diamond earrings for Sasha, and some teardrop pearls for Susan, since we decided we shouldn’t forget her. Then, Molly’s eyes fell upon a set of necklaces. When pushed together, the pendants made a platinum heart, with a small sapphire in each half.
“Hey, that’s my birthstone!” Molly exclaimed.
My throat stuck shut, but I managed to rasp out, “Mine, too.”
“My birthday is September eighteenth. What’s yours?” she asked excitedly.
“September twenty-first.” Just a few days—and years—apart. I wondered how Joey Tangen had felt about that. Had he even noticed the coincidence?
“We should get this,” Molly stated firmly. “This is here for a reason. You can have half, and I can have half. Like a friendship bracelet, but for sisters.”
I hesitated. What would Susan think? What would Sasha think? I was already in way too deep with the computer and the clothes. Symbolically-binding jewelry might be way over the line. “Won’t our kidneys be like a friendship bracelet?”
She snorted. “Yeah, probably. But this is something we can wear on the outside, to remember each other. Since I don’t know when I’ll see you, again.”
Oh, man. She really knew how to tug at my heartstrings. And my purse strings. I nodded to the woman behind the brightly illuminated glass counter, who was no doubt ready to swoon at the commission she was about to make off us.
“Thank you, Sophie,” Molly said, suddenly far more serious and mature than I’d seen her. “You didn’t have to do all this.”
“I know I didn’t. But I wanted to. I remember what it was like to be your age. If someone had done this for me—”
“No. Not the shopping.” She paused, her face scrunched up in concentration as she searched for her words. “If my dad hadn’t raised me…if he had done to me what he did to you, maybe I wouldn’t be so cool about meeting my sister. I probably wouldn’t even care enough to give away my kidney.”
The Sister (The Boss Book 6) Page 26
