Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
I give myself thirty seconds.
Then I push off the tile, run the cold water, and press my wet hands to my face. I look at myself in the mirror all flushed, bright-eyed, and managing to hold it together.
Tonight I’ll sit at Finn’s and twiddle my thumbs and wait for a phone call telling me how the operation went.
Tomorrow there’s pizza.
I dry my hands and I go back to work.
CHAPTER 23
Finn
I’m in my mother’s kitchen, even though she’s long dead and I haven’t been here in years. It smells like the powdered creamer she kept in a coffee can because real milk was too expensive and only to be used for my cereal.
I’m sitting at the card table where we ate every meal when I was a child. It had a folded matchbook under one leg so it wouldn’t wobble. The linoleum’s peeling up at the seam by the stove and there’s a water stain on the ceiling shaped like the state of Florida.
It’s exactly as I remember it and deep in my subconscious, I know it’s a dream, yet the details are frighteningly vivid.
Mom’s at the counter in her blue housedress, the one with the faded daisies, pouring hot water over a tea bag she’s already used once today.
“Sit up straight,” she says, not turning around. “You always slump when you’re thinking too hard.”
“I’m not slumping.”
“You’re slumping, Finn.”
Begrudgingly, I sit up.
She brings the mug over and sets it on the table and lowers herself into the chair across from me with the small sigh she makes at the end of every day. It’s the sound of a woman whose feet hurt from standing at a register for nine hours. She wraps both hands around her mug, knuckles swollen but eyes kind.
“I’m proud of you,” she says.
It’s not something she ever said to me before and my chest flares with warmth. “Yeah?”
“So proud.” Her eyes shine. “My boy. The best there ever was. People talk, you know. They say there’s never been a smuggler like you. Not in this country. Not in the whole world, maybe.” She reaches across and pats my hand. “And you did it all yourself. From nothing. From this.” She gestures at the kitchen, the peeling floor, the Florida stain. “Look what you made of yourself.”
I should be happy she’s proud. That’s all I ever wanted… to make her proud. To make enough that she’d never reuse a tea bag again.
But something’s wrong with it.
“Mom,” I say slowly, the way you talk in a dream, like through a long tunnel. “I’m giving it up.”
Her smile falters. “Giving what up?”
“The work. All of it. I’ve decided I’m getting out.”
“Don’t be foolish.”
“I mean it.”
“Finn… you can’t give it up. You’re too good at it. Nobody’s ever been as good as you. And the money—” Her voice catches on the word the way it used to catch on rent and electric bill. “The money, baby. You know what that money means. You know what it’s like to not have it. You’re going to walk away from all that money?”
And I’m confused, the deep underwater confusion of dreams, because she’s right. I do know what it’s like to not have it and to only want it. How do I explain to the woman who reuses tea bags that I’m going to walk away from more money than she could have counted in ten lifetimes?
And then I think about Josie.
I think about the two of us in the dark in my bed, her head on my chest, her finger tracing shapes on my skin. The way she told me in a sleepy voice that all she really wants is a home filled with love, a white picket fence around the border, a dog and laughing children. She laughed at herself telling me, embarrassed, like it was too small a dream for a woman who decrypts intelligence for a living.
I found it endearing and realized it was a dream that never once crossed my mind. But I’ve been thinking about that white picket fence and all the things that could be held inside it, and it’s what I want too. I’m sure of it.
I look at my mother across the card table. “I found something better, Mom.”
“Better than being the best in the world?”
“There’s this woman.”
My mother’s eyes go wide, her mouth curving into a smile.
“Her name’s Josie. And she’s got this dream. A house, a fence, a dog, some kids. Nothing special. The most ordinary thing. And I want it more than I want to be the best at anything I’ve ever done.”
My mother looks at me for a long moment.
And then her face breaks open into the smile I’d have done anything for, the one that used to make this whole falling-down house feel warm.
“Oh, Finn,” she says. “That’s so much better than being a smuggler.”