Until the Day I Die(11)

We’re family too, she said, with a look that was anything but familial.

Back in the parking lot of the dorm, the driver’s side door opens and I’m jolted back to the present. Ben slides in, angles his body toward me, and smiles sympathetically.

“Does she hate me?” I say.

“She does not hate you. And she would rather throw herself off a cliff than admit this, but I think she’s excited.”

Throw herself off a cliff. Interesting choice of words.

“It’s called the ‘dizziness of freedom,’ you know.” I stretch my neck, but my head’s still pounding relentlessly. “That impulse you get when you’re standing on a cliff, to throw yourself off.”

Our eyes meet, but I look away.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Not exactly the way I envisioned the day I dropped my daughter off at college going down.” I force a laugh, and we both check our phones at the same time. Layton’s texted me.

How’s the move in going? Is Shorie okay? Are YOU okay?

“Sabine’s grabbing dinner with Layton.” Ben taps his phone. “She says no reason to rush back.”

I text Layton. I don’t know. I hope so. I add a grimacing emoji.

“You want to get a drink? Debrief?” Ben asks.

“Oh, hell, yes.”

“And if Shorie’s having a rough time or needs you, you’ll be close by. That’s what the bag you left in the back seat is for, right? Because you were thinking you might spend the night?”

“I’m being ridiculous, aren’t I? Every mom cliché rolled into one giant human helicopter.”

“Erin. This is a big deal, to leave your only kid at college.” He doesn’t say without her father, but I know he knows. That’s the hardest part of all this.

“It is a big deal, isn’t it?” I ask.

“It is.”

“Okay, then . . . what would you think about us getting a couple of rooms at the Conference Center? Just to make sure everything’s okay with her?”

“I think it’s a good idea.” He maneuvers the truck around the line of minivans and pickups and U-Haul trailers. “I’ll let Sabine know.”





9

SHORIE

For a moment, I let my finger hover over the unread Jax message that Dad sent me. He sent it in mid-March, right after the STEM scholarship was finalized and he’d set up my budget for college. The day before he died. It starts Shorie, my sweet, just like all his messages to me. But I’m not ready to open it and read the whole thing. I may never be.

I close my eyes.

It’s hard to explain why I don’t want to open it. I guess it’s like a wrapped present under the Christmas tree, shiny and beautiful and full of promise, and once I unwrap it, the anticipation will all be over. It will be the last communication—letter, phone call, text—I ever get from my father.

In my rational mind, I know reading it won’t make me feel any less miserable. In fact, the opposite seems true. I have the distinct sense that I’ll feel even worse if I do read it. It’s the law of energy conservation. When energy flows from one place to another, it may change forms, but it’s never destroyed. It’s the same with sadness, I’ve discovered. You can’t get rid of it.

I swipe back to my home page, and my allocations pop up, neat little bubbles all over the screen. Food, household, medical, personal, transportation, gifts, fun, savings. In addition to covering tuition, a meal plan, and books, the scholarship I’ve been awarded also gives me a little bit of living expense money. The school deposits that cash directly into my local bank account, which Dad connected to my Jax. Along with the extra money Mom’s put in, I should have no problem hitting my budget goal every month.

So here’s Jax in a snapshot: It’s a comprehensive personal budgeting app that captures all your purchases, and it sorts and automatically files them into categories for you using your bank’s bill-pay platform, the app’s proprietary digital wallet feature, and your phone’s GPS. It compiles authorized data from our retail and bank partnerships, scrapes a bunch of random public data plus our merchant partners’ information, and then, using a bunch of algorithms, tells you how much money you can spend on a given day at a given location.

If you choose, your transactions can be shared with some or all of your connections, making them, in effect, public. Most people opt out of that feature; it’s really there for parents keeping tabs on their kids or companies monitoring their employees’ work-related expenditures.

The best part is, when tax time rolls around, Jax connects to your particular filing platform. Then all you have to do is electronically sign in a couple of spots and voilà, your taxes are done. After that it automatically adjusts your budget for the next year, helps you keep up with your spending, and gives you updated suggestions on how to manage future expenses.

I know. Genius.

Just then, a banner drops down on my phone with a text from Gigi.

shorie darlin have you spent your cash yet love gigi it is a thousand

I laugh. Funny how, in spite of the fact that her son created the world’s first automatic budgeting app, my grandmother insists on using cash. Mom has always bitched about it, the fact that Gigi doesn’t use Jax, but she and Mom rarely see eye to eye on anything. When it comes to me, though, Gigi’s always been a big squishy cupcake. A cupcake that gives me lots of cash gifts and sends me all these hilariously unpunctuated, improperly capitalized run-on texts, all sent from a 2003 BlackBerry.