Chapter 26: Earrings
The next morning.
He stopped at the ATM on his way to the gym.
Two thousand dollars, sitting there in his account like it had always belonged. He stood at the machine longer than he needed to, looking at the number.
He'd been scraping and calculating and stretching every dollar for weeks. He'd done the math on groceries. He'd thought twice about the gym membership. And now here was two thousand dollars, deposited cleanly, because his father had made a phone call to a friend in Los Angeles four years ago and then gone back to living his life.
Andrew took out two hundred in cash, put his card away, and went to the gym.
Carol and Susan were already there. Carol spotted him first.
"Andrew — good morning." A beat. "Susan mentioned she saw you at the courthouse yesterday. Is everything okay?"
Andrew glanced at Susan. She met his eyes without apology.
"I work there," Susan said, in a tone that was somewhere between explanation and preemptive defense. "If you ran into any kind of legal issue, I might be able to help."
So that was it. Not ratting him out — offering a hand. Andrew recalibrated slightly.
"My father passed away last month," he said. "I went in to handle the inheritance paperwork. Nothing dramatic."
Carol's expression softened. She reached over and touched his arm briefly. "I'm sorry, Andrew."
Susan opened her mouth, then closed it. The professional composure she carried around like a second skin slipped for just a moment.
"It's fine," Andrew said, and meant it. "It's been a few weeks. I'm okay."
He was. Whatever complicated thing the courthouse had stirred up yesterday had mostly settled overnight. Evan was gone. The money was real. The rest of it was history, and history didn't require anything from him.
They talked for a few more minutes — easy, surface-level stuff — and then Andrew excused himself to warm up and run. He had a system now and he wanted to stick to it. The physical conditioning work was unglamorous and slow, but it was the foundation everything else was built on. He'd been running the Tai Chi forms most mornings, and he could feel the difference — the way his balance had sharpened, the way his body moved with less waste.
He ran until he was properly tired, stretched, and was toweling off near the lockers when the woman at the front desk flagged him down.
"Hey — we're running a promotion on yoga classes this month. Interested in trying it out?"
Andrew paused. "What's the setup?"
"Twelve classes a month, two hours each, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday evenings starting at six-thirty. New instructor, so we're offering the first month at a discount — normally a hundred fifty, right now it's a hundred twenty."
He thought about it. The schedule fit perfectly around his bar nights, which ran Wednesday, Friday, Sunday. No overlap. And if the Tai Chi forms had developed into a genuine skill through consistent practice, there was no reason yoga couldn't do the same. Different movement vocabulary, different axis of development, but the underlying logic was the same — controlled, repetitive, correct-form practice building something cumulative.
"I'll do it," he said. He handed over a hundred and got change, plus a punch card with twelve empty boxes on it. The punch card made him feel like he was collecting stamps, which was fine. He didn't need it to feel significant.
From the gym he walked over to the commercial strip a few blocks east. He'd scoped out the children's clothing stores on a previous walk and had a rough idea of what he wanted. He knew Christie's preferred colors — she had quiet but consistent taste, always gravitating toward the same end of the rack — and he'd been mentally pricing things out since the courthouse money landed.
He didn't browse. He went in, found what he wanted, paid, and left. He'd always shopped that way. Wandering around a store deciding what you wanted was a different activity from actually shopping, and he didn't have the patience for it.
He was heading back toward the apartment when something in a jewelry store window stopped him.
Earrings. On a small display card near the front of the case, marked down for a promotion.
He stood there for a moment.
Two days ago he'd caught Bonnie watching a jewelry commercial on TV — one of those cable spots that ran in the afternoon, nothing special. She'd watched it through twice without saying anything. He'd noticed the way her eyes stayed on it a beat longer than the rest of the programming.
Bonnie and Christie were leaving Thursday. Two days from now. He'd known the timeline; that had always been the arrangement. They'd come to him in a bad situation and he'd helped them stabilize and now they'd move on, which was how it was supposed to go. He'd probably never see either of them again.
The earrings in the window were $198.
He went to the ATM on the corner and came back.
"Christie," he said, coming through the door and toeing off his shoes. "Come try these on — I need to know if they fit before I can't return them."
Christie was at the table with a book. She looked up. Bonnie was on the couch, asleep, the way she was more often than not lately — withdrawal did that, pulled the energy out of you and replaced it with a heavy, bone-deep tiredness. It would pass. The other side of it was worth getting to.
Bonnie surfaced at the sound of his voice, blinking, pushing herself upright.
Christie took the bag with both hands, glanced at him with an expression he couldn't quite read — somewhere between shy and something warmer — and disappeared into the bedroom.
"You bought her clothes?" Bonnie was awake enough now to be surprised. "Where'd the money come from? You were counting quarters last week."
"Part of the inheritance came through," Andrew said. He reached into his jacket pocket and held out the small jewelry box toward her. "This is for you. gift. Figure out the clasp yourself — I'm going to start lunch."
He went into the kitchen.
Behind him he heard the soft creak of the couch as Bonnie shifted. Then a long quiet.
Then the faint sound of a jewelry box being opened.
A pause.
Closed.
Opened again.
He didn't turn around. He got out the cutting board and started on lunch, and let her have whatever she was feeling in private.
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