Page 49 of Sublimate
Cadence shook her head and murmured something about splitting it, but Beau just seemed confused. “What?” he asked.
“I’ll pay for this dinner,” I explained. I had some money in my own bank account and for the first time ever, I had a debit card. It felt really official but Cadence had insisted on having a serious discussion about credit use and overuse. She didn’t need to worry, because I’d seen that go wrong with Kolter’s mom and also when my sister had stolen all those numbers and spenta pretty outrageous amount. Plastic was dangerous, whether it belonged to you or not.
“You don’t need to do that,” Beau said, and smiled at his friend. “Nolan, tell her.”
“Are you suggesting that he should pay?” I asked. “That’s not very fair. Why should he when you were the one who suggested going out? Why should he have to take care of us like that?”
“It’s ok, Viv,” Nolan told me. He changed the subject by asking Cadence about the library. She turned bright red and twirled her hair quite a bit, but she did manage to talk to him.
The dinner was good. I got full and that usually made me feel better, like a sense of relief that I didn’t have to worry for a while about getting my next meal, but I was upset and I couldn’t figure out exactly why. I didn’t care what Madeline Whitaker said to her son about me. Why would I have? Words meant nothing, so when people insulted you, saying that you were a street walker like your mom or that you were worthless because you couldn’t even do the laundry, you could just ignore them. But I found that I did care what Nolan thought. I didn’t want to owe him and then run away. I didn’t want to drive his new car and snarf down all his bread and give him nothing in return! It wasn’t right.
As I finished the chicken sandwich that I was definitely going to pay for, I was also thinking more about his mom trying to dig up dirt on me. She didn’t actually know why I’d been in that parking lot, and she wouldn’t have been able to understand that sometimes you needed to do what you needed to do! You had to eat and you didn’t always have money for chicken sandwichesor even for the cheapest thing in a vending machine. You had to have a safe place to sleep, and sometimes it was in the house of a guy who scared you and whose moods you had to try to manage. And if you weren’t going to steal credit card numbers? Then you had to make it happen another way.
“That was good,” Cadence said at the end of the meal. She had relaxed a lot, to the point that she wasn’t turning red when Nolan looked at her or when she heard him speak. She also hadn’t checked her phone for the whole time we’d been here, but Beau had. Every few seconds, he would look down and sometimes he was also texting stuff.
“I just want to make sure that Victoria remembers that Finley likes to hear ‘Back in Black’ while his diaper gets changed,” he noted at one point. “It soothes him.”
“You sing that?” Nolan asked. “How the hell do you hit those high notes? Pardon me, I meant to say ‘heck.’” As he spoke, the waitress put the check on our table and he reached in his back pocket for his wallet.
“No, I have it,” I said, and took the little tray from him. “I said that I was going to pay for this.”
“You and I will settle up later,” Cadence told me in her library voice.
“You don’t have to do that,” Beau announced. He looked over at Nolan. “Don’t let her.”
“I can pick up one, single dinner after everything that he has done for me,” I said. “He got all my paperwork. He gave me a place to live. I use his nice ovens even though I can’t makeanything good in them. He lets me fly in his plane, drive his car, eat his food—”
“Vivi, you don’t owe me,” Nolan broke in.
Beau nodded. “He’s in a position to do it for you.”
“And I’m very grateful,” I answered. “I’m so grateful for all that and more. But it doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t give back.”
Beau frowned like I was wrong and I took that personally. “I don’t understand you,” I told him. “You shouldn’t be a scammer, either!”
“A scammer? I think you may be projecting.” He laced together his fingers and put them under his chin. “I believe this may be a personal issue.” He tapped his lower lip.
He was probably right about that. I didn’t want to be a scammer like other people in my family, especially not to Nolan—and it made me furious to think that I was. “You went on for about an hour about installing the baby car seat and going to three different police agencies and a fire department to make sure that you’d done it right. But you don’t have a job to protect your son’s future. Maybe you’re not scamming but you’re not responsible,” I told him.
I could tell that he got mad right back but there was no way he could do anything to me in a public restaurant and anyway, I still had my knife. “I’m working on establishing my own company,” he answered frostily.
“Good for you,” Cadence murmured.
“No, it’s not good,” I said. “What if Finley fell down a storm drain tomorrow, before you have your company even started? Or if there was a bear attack when you were still struggling with getting it off the ground? Those things could happen.”
“A bear?” Beau repeated.
“I would step in,” Nolan said. “Unless there was an actual bear involved, and then I would encourage everyone to fight.”
“We have black bears here in Michigan,” Cadence explained quietly to me. “Definitely don’t play dead.”
“Nolan shouldn’t be your safety net,” I told Beau. “You have to be your own safety net.”
“You’re the one living with him,” he pointed out. “You would be on the street if he hadn’t helped you. He helps everyone, like that guy he took in whose name we never knew. But I’m going to get my business off the ground, bears or no bears, and make it a success. I’m doing this explicitly for my son. Finley also has a mom, by the way. Victoria is wonderful.”
I had kind of forgotten about the thing where people had two parents and both of them loved the kid.
“I don’t know why you’re are arguing,” Nolan said to us. “It’s unpleasant and I would like you to stop.”
