Page 47 of Sublimate
“There are at least ten thousand new ones,” Nolan told me quietly. He stood. “I made a sourdough starter this morning. Want to see?”
He showed me the jar he’d put in the pantry and it was interesting. It looked like some kind of creature that might suckyou into a bog rather than a food product, but he promised that it was going to work.
“I have less faith in Beau’s business plan,” he said. “He needs to sit down again with Ryan to go over more details. I also set him up with my accountant because…” He glanced toward the dining room. “I’ve been thinking about what you said before, about him having to take care of his son. I’m always a fallback but he does need to be serious about this.”
“Very serious,” I reiterated. “What if, by mistake, they drop the baby into a storm drain and he gets swept away to another county? What if a cat bites him and he needs surgery? What if they have to pay a witch for a protection amulet for him? What if he wants to learn to tap dance? Or go to college?”
“Those are all concerns, except for the witch thing. I’m actually not very worried about storm drains or cats, either,” he answered. “But I’m glad that Beau is focusing on this more than he must have done with his driving test.”
“I did it on the first try,” I announced proudly. We slapped hands. Of course, I had years of experience as a non-licensed driver that had prepared me. I looked toward the dining room again, where I had just heard Cadence laughing. “She must love those pictures.”
“I got out of looking because my mom called when he started to show them off.”
“Are you two still fighting about her bill?”
“No, I refuse to discuss it any further,” he answered. He had also been refusing to tell me how much they had settled on, buthe had disclosed that his mom was threatening to take action against him. It was an empty threat, he explained. She just liked to argue. “She was calling because she wanted to talk about you.”
That sounded like a real threat, not an empty one. “What about me?” I asked. “Just so you know, I had nothing to do with my sister’s boyfriend’s cousin’s armed robbery. I was in the parking lot but I had no idea what they were planning.”
“Armed robbery?”
“I mean, the gun was fake but it counts if you act like it’s real. Was that what your mom told you about?”
“No,” he said. “She was—”
“Nolan?” Beau’s head popped around the door frame, followed by the rest of him and also Cadence. “We were just talking about going to dinner. Are you two interested?”
Nolan glanced at me and I nodded. “Sure. We have a chauffeur,” he said, and put his hand on my shoulder.
“I’ll drive,” I agreed eagerly. But I looked at Cadence. “Don’t you have to go to the spa to get your mother?”
“There are plenty of rideshare companies and there’s even a taxi service,” she said. She was flushed. “She could use those.”
“You know, we should discuss this outside of the pantry,” Nolan suggested. “It’s a little tight for four people in here.”
Cadence’s phone had stopped making loud noises, so she must have turned it down, and she didn’t have anything more to say about her mom besides, “I don’t care.” I had heard those samewords before, when I’d asked about staying in this house. I had also thought them at various points in my own life and then I’d done dangerous things. I’d decided, “I don’t care!” and I had texted Nolan and gone to meet him, even though I had known that I was inviting big problems with my boyfriend Kolter. My ex. It was a bad idea to act when you had an “I don’t care” attitude.
“I think her mom is going to be really mad,” I whispered to Nolan as we left his house. “Really mad. She gets upset about Cadence going to the library and that’s her job! She won’t like the idea of dinner plans, especially with me.”
I hadn’t asked anything else about what his own mother had said because I didn’t want to talk in front of Cadence, who might have twirled herself bald. There was a lot that someone might have dug up—I had never known anything about my father “Ron” and there could have been a trove of awful information. Maybe he was even worse than my mom’s first husband (Patchouli’s dad), the guy who was now doing a life sentence in the Ely State Prison. He was a very, very bad person and the authorities hadn’t known half of what he’d done. He deserved to rot.
Maybe there was bad news about my mom herself. Her line of work was dangerous and she had gotten hurt before by various clients or by random people out on the street. I did want to know, and I got my chance to ask when Cadence went with Beau so we took separate cars. She felt more comfortable with someone who’d had his license for more than a few hours, despite what he’d just said about failing the test.
“What did you hear from Madeline? Is my mom ok?” I asked Nolan as soon as we’d closed the doors of his SUV. “Did my sister do something else?”
“It’s not about your family,” he said. “It relates to what happened when you were attacked in the parking lot.”
“Oh.” I took a deep breath and remained calm, but this wasn’t a topic I wanted to discuss. “I think that investigation is closed.”
“Not officially,” he told me. “There hasn’t been any progress on finding your attacker, but the police are still looking.”
“They should just stop. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter a lot. You were in the hospital.”
“Why does your mom care about it?” I wondered. “It doesn’t have anything to do with her.” Unless she was worried about her son being with me? He had let her believe that I was his girlfriend.
“She was excited when she found out about it,” he said, and then winced. “That was a terrible way to express it, but I think it’s true. I remember that when I was a little boy, we passed an awful accident between a semi and a few cars. She circled back twice to see what had happened. It’s the same thing as people who rush off to tour the aftermath of a tornado.”
