Page 39 of Sublimate
Another good word. I stored it in my memory to look up later. “What did you tell him?”
“I said that I’m not the guy to ask,” he answered. “Why would I be of any help? I don’t have business experience. I’ve never successfully built my own company or even held a job for a decent length of time. I gave him the names of some of my family members to contact, Ryan up here, Steve in Detroit. They’ll be able to give him realistic advice but I’m not the right person.”
“But you could be.”
“What?” He turned to look at me. “What do you mean?”
“You could be a person like your cousin Ryan up here and Steve in Detroit. Why not?”
“I’m not like them at all. They’re trustworthy and hardworking.”
“Aren’t you?” I asked. “I mean, I trust you. I’m living with you and I’m not worried about it at all. I don’t think that you’ll steal my money or take my phone and belongings. I know that you won’t lock me out and then call the police to tell them that I’m an intruder so I have to run off when I see blue lights. I don’t put furniture in front of my door at night—I know that you’re not going to come in so you can get at me. I don’t even have to sleep with my knife! That’s a lot of trust.”
“Are you speaking from experience? Have you had to put furniture in front of your door, have you been locked out of your own home? Have you been scared enough to sleep with your knife?”
Well, yeah, so I nodded. “But not anymore,” I said, to emphasize my point. “And you’re clearly hardworking. You’ve been sober for more than half a year, trying hard and succeeding every day.”
“Thank you for saying those things. I would hope that you trust that I won’t attack you somehow, and I absolutely won’t. You’re talking about a basic level of human decency. I am working hard to stay sober, but I have to do that because I put myself in the position of being a drunk. I saw how my parents behaved and what happened to my grandparents, too, but I still didn’t bother to put the brakes on myself.”
“You were young when you started.”
“I was,” he agreed. “And I waited too long to stop. I was even drunk on the day of my grandparents’ funeral, even though I saw the irony.”
“I think I know what you mean by irony but how did it apply to their funeral?”
“They were lost in a boating accident. No one ever says it, but we all believe that it was because they were intoxicated,” Nolan explained.
The stuff I’d read online hadn’t mentioned that. “You should always wear a PFD,” I said, which the article had recommended. “I’m sorry that happened to them.”
“Me too. Despite their issues, they weren’t bad people. My mother is a generally wretched person, by the way, which is why she tried to overbill my fraternity. She’ll probably do the same thing with your case, but you don’t have to worry. I’ll handle her.”
“You mean, you’ll tell her that she should do you a favor because she’s your mother? Or do you mean that you’ll pay her all that money?”
“We’ll probably haggle for a while, since that’s one of her favorite things, and then we’ll settle on a number that’s a fraction of what she had demanded. She actually called this morning to let me know that she has results. She’s insisting that she needs to see you in person, so I thought we could fly down. It won’t be fun but I think it’s necessary. You don’t have any clients on Wednesday and Thursday, correct?”
“No, and not on Friday either. That family was only up here for the summer and they went back home because school starts soon,” I answered. The spreadsheet that Cadence had helped me make was only getting emptier instead of filing with morenames, and that wasn’t going to help me pay back Nolan for everything that he was doing. “Will you give me a copy of your mom’s invoice?”
“No. It was my idea to get her involved, right?”
“It’s still my problem that she’s solving,” I said, but he didn’t answer. “Do you talk to your parents besides when you have legal questions?”
“I do speak to her briefly every month or two.” He thought. “Both of them usually call around my birthday but now they won’t have to.”
“Why?”
“Because if we’re going there on Wednesday, I’ll see them. They won’t have to call,” he explained.
“That’s your birthday? In three days?”
“Unless you can figure out a way to stop it,” he told me.
“As far as I know, we might be able to stop time when we’re dead. I mean that obviously our time will have stopped due to being dead, but we might be able to also stop it for people in the world of the living.” He looked very doubtful and I switched topics. “What do you think that your mom has been able to do about my paperwork?”
“Maybe she found out that you’re actually elfin,” he suggested. “Someone switched you at birth with a human baby, and that’s why you’re so dainty.”
“I’m what? I’m dainty?”
He laughed. “Don’t pull out your knife. That was supposed to be a compliment,” he said. “When you walk, you almost glide, like you’re flying. You have big blue eyes like a fairy.”
