“Where to?” she asks.
“The Ayres Hotel on El Toro,” Hadley mumbles.
Grace glances back at the loaded trunk.
“We’re leaving,” Hadley says. “Or at least we were.”
Grace says nothing. Without a word, she starts the car and pulls onto the road.
After a few minutes, Hadley says, “That’s why I was taking the money. To get away.”
“I’m not giving you my money,” Grace says flatly.
“I wasn’t asking you to.” Hadley huffs and folds her arms across her chest. “I was just trying to explain what I was doing tonight, why I was trying to get my money.”
The car turns suddenly, cutting right so sharply Hadley slides sideways and needs to catch herself with her hand.
“You want anything?” Grace says as she pulls into the drive-through for In-N-Out.
“I have no money,” Hadley snipes.
“My treat,” Grace offers without an ounce of pity.
“No, thank you.”
Grace orders two cheeseburgers, an order of fries, and a chocolate milkshake, and Hadley hates her a little more. If Hadley ate like that, she’d be the size of a walrus in a week. Meanwhile Grace can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds.
Grace sets the food on the console between them, and the smell of grease and salt wafts seductively past Hadley’s nose.
“You sure you don’t want something?”
Hadley shakes her head as her stomach groans in protest.
Grace pulls back onto the road but a block later veers to the curb and stops. Her hands grip the steering wheel, and her eyes are fixed on the black sky through the windshield, looking at it so intently Hadley wonders what she’s looking for.
Finally, with a great exhale through her nose, she turns. “We need to split it,” she says.
Hadley blinks.
“The money,” Grace says. “The deal was fifty-fifty. So, you need to take half.”
Hadley squints in distrust. “Why?” she says.
“Karma,” Grace says plainly. “I believe in it. It might make me a fool, but I feel like if I don’t give you your half, I’m going to regret it, that it will come back to haunt me, so you need to take your share.”
14
GRACE
Grace is huffing and puffing by the time she gets back to Mrs. Torelli’s room, carrying Miles in his car seat, the diaper bag full of money, her bag of food from In-N-Out, and the grocery bag with Miles’s diapers, bottles, and formula.
Mrs. Torelli sits in the chair beside the bed, her foot propped on the mattress, the ankle already swollen and blue.
Grace sets Miles on the bed, climbs up beside him, and dumps the diaper bag onto the quilt, creating a mound of cash—bundles of twenties, fifties, and hundreds. And the gun.
Her eyes slide from the gun to Mrs. Torelli.
“Sorry,” Mrs. Torelli mumbles. “I wouldn’t have actually shot you.”
She appears really upset, and Grace feels a little bad for her. Mrs. Torelli looks like the kind of woman who would have a hard time squashing a bug, and before tonight, she’s probably never even touched a gun.
Grace slides the gun back in the bag, where it’s out of sight, and turns back to the money. She stares at it, a queasy feeling in her gut. In her whole life, Grace has never had more than a month’s rent in her account, and now, inches away, is enough money to buy a whole new life. Money that isn’t hers.
She looks at Miles, asleep in his car seat, his mouth hanging open and his little fists balled on top of the straps; then she reaches into the In-N-Out bag, grabs a burger, unwraps it, and sinks her teeth into it. Her eyes close as the salty deliciousness touches her tongue, and she feels a little like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind when she declares, “I’ll never be hungry again.”
Sensing Mrs. Torelli watching her, she opens her eyes and says, “Want some?” She holds out the bag with the fries.
Mrs. Torelli shakes her head, but her eyes track the bag like a dog following a bone, and Grace nearly laughs. Mrs. Torelli is probably one of those women who starves herself to stay thin, constantly counting calories and how many steps it takes to burn them off. Though Mrs. Torelli will never be skinny. She’s far too curvy for that. A woman with boobs and hips, something Grace has neither of.
When half the burger is gone, Grace looks back at the money, takes a deep breath, and starts to sort the bundles into piles—hundreds, fifties, and twenties. There are only a few bundles of fifties and twice as many bundles of twenties, and the remaining bundles are hundreds.
She counts the bills in one of the bundles of twenties, then does the same with a bundle of hundreds. There are one hundred bills per bundle.
She points to each pile in order. “Two grand. Five grand. Ten grand.”
“Each?” Mrs. Torelli says, clearly stunned.
Grace nods; then she looks at the bundle of hundreds still in her hand. She tests its weight, which can’t be more than a few ounces. Ten grand, she thinks. Childcare for a year, a new car, half a year’s rent. It seems impossible that so little could be worth so much.
Sitting back on her heels, she starts on the french fries and sips her shake.
“You sure you don’t want some?” she says to Mrs. Torelli, part of her enjoying the torture she’s causing. Grace has never understood the diet mentality. Her grandmother used to say the first three letters in diet are a warning, and Grace agrees. Her grandmother wasn’t five feet tall, and she died a content 180 pounds, and if she were still alive, she’d tell you she’d enjoyed packing on every ounce with the kind of southern cooking that made Paula Deen famous.
When the fries are done, Grace counts the number of bundles in each pile, then counts them again before letting out a long, slow whistle.
“Well?” Mrs. Torelli says.
15
HADLEY
Hadley hears the number, but it doesn’t register. She repeats it to herself: One million, eight hundred seventy-two thousand. She attempts to see it in her mind: a one, a comma, three digits, another comma, three more digits. She rounds it. One point nine million.
She shakes her head. “That can’t be right.”
It can’t be. She and Frank do well, but they don’t have that kind of money. She thinks about Frank—the stress he’s been under, the late-night phone calls, his extravagant splurges over the past couple of years—then she pushes the thoughts away, a bad feeling in her gut.
She glances at the door that connects her room with the kids’ room. She checked on them when she got here. At some point Skipper had climbed in beside Mattie, and they were curled together like a pair of kittens. Mattie probably wasn’t even aware of it, believing the warmth beside her to be Prince Charles.
A million dollars. Tears spring to her eyes as she thinks of what it means. She looks at Grace slurping her shake, and she wants to kiss her, plant a great big smacker on her forehead or cheek. She wants to whoop and holler and throw the money in the air and dance a jig around the room.
Instead, her voice cracking with emotion, she says, “Thank you.”
Grace looks up, then quickly looks away, her face pink.
She sets the shake down and starts to divide the pile of twenties—one for Hadley, one for herself, one for Hadley, one for herself . . .