Page 62 of The Maverick
I found myself thinking about money in a new way.
Not my money—I'd done that math so many times I could run it in my sleep. His money. What it meant, in practice. Not in the abstract the way people talked about rich people, as a category, a condition, something that happened to other people and produced a kind of person you recognized on sight by their clothes and the way they moved through rooms.
Tommy's money was different from the money I'd been around in Charleston—the old money in linen, the young moneyin denim at The Carolinian and The Piazza, the couples with the non-frizzing hair and the effortless restaurants.
Those people knew they had money. It was part of their presentation. They wore it.
Tommy didn't wear it. He just—had it, the way he had everything else, quietly and without making it the point. He'd paid for the donuts without ceremony. He'd left a tip at The Carolinian I'd noticed on the way out that was more than my best shift, and he'd done it the way you left a tip when you weren't thinking about the tip, when the calculation was automatic because the number didn't require deliberation.
That was the tell. Not the amount. The ease of it.
I thought about what that felt like from the inside—to move through a city without running the math. To see a menu and just order what you wanted. To book a flight the way I booked a bus, which was to say without checking the price four times and calculating how many shifts it would take to cover it. To stay somewhere nice not because it was a treat you'd saved for but because nice was the default, because the alternative had stopped being relevant somewhere along the way.
I couldn't imagine it.
I'd tried before—tried to picture what it felt like to not feel the numbers—and I always hit the same wall. The numbers were so fundamental to how I moved through the world that trying to imagine their absence was like trying to imagine a color I'd never seen. I could understand it, intellectually. I couldn't feel my way into it.
And here was the thing that sat under all of that, the thing I wasn't sure I could say out loud yet:
I didn't want his money.
I knew that with a clarity that surprised me, actually. I had grown up with so little that I might have been expected to want someone else's a lot. Might have been expected to see a man likeTommy and feel the pull of what he could provide, the relief of it, the way drowning people felt the pull of anything solid.
I didn't feel that.
What I felt was more complicated and, I thought, more mine. I wanted to close my own gap. I wanted to make my own rent. I wanted the number to get manageable through my own work—through Luis's schedule, through The Piazza, through the podcast producer's card I hadn't called yet and was going to call, I'd decided, today. I wanted to be the one who fixed the math, and I wanted to fix it with my voice, which was the one thing I had that nobody had given me and nobody could take.
What I wanted from Tommy was something else entirely, and it was harder to name.
I wanted to be known.
Not taken care of. Known.
The way he'd looked at me across the restaurant when I'd played. The way he'd saidyou saw itabout the ocean. The way he'd held the Gibson back out to me with both hands, and again in the shower, hands moving over my shoulders like he was trying to learn me by feel, like he was making a record of a thing that mattered.
I wanted that.
Dolly would say that was either the bravest thing or the most foolish.
Dolly would probably say it was both and go, anyway.
My phone buzzed.
I picked it up. Tommy.
What are you doing tonight?
I looked at the ceiling. The Tennessee stain.
Nothing, I typed back.I get off work around 3. Lunch shift only today. Why?
Three dots. Then:
Come find me at The Palmetto Rose. Ask for me at the front desk. Seven o'clock.
I put the phone down on the bed.
The Palmetto Rose.
