She Raised Us on Our Dead Parents' Settlement, So We Crashed Her Gala novel · Chapter 2 of 40

Chapter 2: The Parking Lot

Dell and Cass reunite behind the yacht club, and Cass takes down a storage key her sister left her in case.

Security walked me to the employee lot, watched me the whole way, and left me at the dumpster with my apron still on.

I stood there in the dark for a long time.

The lake was black behind the yacht club, and the wind carried the sound of the string quartet that had started up again.

My hands would not stop shaking.

I had a trespass notice in my back pocket and no job on Monday, because the catering company would hear about the scene by breakfast.

I had said the number out loud, though.

Forty-eight thousand dollars a year.

I'd said it in front of four hundred people.

"Hey," somebody said behind me. "That was the best thing I've ever seen, and I need you to know I almost threw up."

I turned around.

A small woman with cropped bleached hair and a nose ring stood there in a black bartender's apron.

She held a phone in one hand and a cigarette she wasn't smoking in the other.

She was maybe five foot three.

She had Cassidy Pasternak's jaw, the same one she'd had at three years old.

"Cass," I said.

"Hi, Dell."

I opened my mouth to say a lot of things.

What came out was, "You cut your hair."

"Eleven years ago, genius. You missed it." Her voice cracked on the last word. "You just missed all of it."

She dropped the cigarette and threw both arms around my neck and shoved her face into my shoulder.

I held on to her and stood in the lot breathing the smell of fryer oil and cheap shampoo.

She was twenty-six.

The last time I'd held her she'd been fourteen and furious and in a St. Brendan's nightgown.

"You didn't write," she said into my collar. "Not once. Not one stupid postcard. I wrote to you for two years, Dell. To the address on the bus ticket."

"I never got a letter," I said.

"I know," Cass said. "I found out last year. She had Sabina return them."

I went still.

"Sabina didn't," I said.

"She did." Cass pulled back and wiped her face with her wrist. "Sabina told me herself. Don't ask me to forgive her either."

"Sabina is the one who handed me the notice," I said.

"I saw." Her mouth went flat. "I filmed it from the bar. I filmed all of it, two minutes forty."

"Are you going to put it online?"

"I am," Cass said. "They'll watch it after I add the number."

She said it so plainly that I laughed, one short breath.

The laugh turned into something else halfway out, and I had to put the back of my hand against my mouth.

Cass took the phone and pushed it in her apron pocket.

"Come on," she said. "I live over a bait shop. There's wine. It's terrible, but it's wine."

Her car was a hatchback with a cracked windshield and a rosary hanging from the mirror that had belonged to her mother.

We drove six minutes down Lake Road with the heater going.

The apartment was above Hollander's Bait & Tackle, two rooms, a sagging couch, a kitchenette with a hot plate, a window over the harbor.

There was a framed photograph on the wall of three small girls on the steps of the Gorski Wing in matching yellow raincoats.

I did not look at it long.

Cass opened a bottle of red and poured it into two jelly jars.

"Sit," she said. "Say the thing you've been wanting to say for eleven years."

I sat on the couch.

I looked at the harbor lights through the window.

"I didn't steal that money," I said.

"I know," Cass said. "I was fourteen, and I knew."

"Everyone else believed it."

"Everyone else didn't know you." She sat across from me on the floor, cross-legged. "You made me give a Snickers back to the Kwik Trip when I was nine."

She turned the jelly jar in her hands.

"I didn't know why Sabina said it. I still don't."

"She wanted me out," I said.

"Why you?"

"Because I'd asked for my file. A week before, I asked to see how much was left in my account, because I was about to turn eighteen."

Cass stared at me.

"She said there was nothing," I said. "She said the care had used it up, and when I asked to see the statement she said that was disrespectful."

"Then the money went missing from her office, and I was gone."

For a while neither of us spoke.

The boat horns moaned out on the lake.

"I have something," Cass said at last. "I've been waiting to give it to someone for a long time."

She got up and went to a hook by the door, where a row of keys hung on a bent coat hanger.

She took down a small brass key with a number stamped on it: 14.

"Sabina gave me this six years ago," she said. "She said, in case."

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