Lisa
Our talk in the elevator lends our house-hunting trip a new gravity. This is probably the last place she will ever live. It focuses me. I want to choose the perfect home for us. The one where we might have stayed forever.
We follow our agent over the cobblestone streets. She's talking on the phone, so I tug Roseanne closer and press my mouth to her hair. She's recovered from the incident in the elevator but I'm not sure I have. It's actually going to end—for some reason, it didn't seem real until now. She's already preparing herself for the day when I'm here without her. The emptiness I feel at the idea of it terrifies me.
"Like anything yet?" I ask.
We've seen two townhouses and a few apartments. They were fine, but none of them were enough. I'm beginning to wonder if I'm just asking too much.
"They're all great," she says. "I just can't get past the idea of spending that much on a place."
"It's really not that much," I counter. "Everything we've looked at isn't a ton more than I'm paying for a one-bedroom right now."
"I guess you take the girl off the bankrupt farm, but you can't take the bankrupt farm off the girl," she says with a small laugh.
I raise a brow. She's implied before that she grew up without money, but she's got this inheritance and her mother's new home couldn't have been cheap. It doesn't add up.
"Your definition of bankrupt and mine must be different. Your mom looked like she was living pretty well to me."
She shrugs. "My dad had this massive life insurance policy. About two million. And 200 grand of that was earmarked for me. That's what I'll be using to pay for school."
I shove my hands in my pockets, thinking. People who are broke don't take out insurance policies that size. He'd have had to pay premiums on it he could have barely afforded.
"Doesn't it seem a little strange that your dad would have taken a policy that large?" I ask.
She nods. "Yeah, especially because my father was the cheapest man alive. He once went an entire day in Philly in the summer without anything to drink because he couldn't find a water fountain and refused to pay for a bottle." She smiles a little at the memory. "But thank God he did. We found out about it at the last possible moment, right before the bank was going to foreclose."
"It wasn't in his will?"
She shakes her head. "Nope. If I hadn't dreamed about that policy I think we still wouldn't know."
The agent is on the phone again so I stop, tugging her hand to face me. "You dreamed about it and then it happened?"
She laughs. "I see where you're going with this, but no. I just had a dream in which I remembered talking to him about needing a policy and when I woke up I knew where to look."
"Lily said you may be time traveling in your sleep without even realizing it."
She shakes her head quickly. Too quickly. For some reason her default position is to deny that there might be anything supernatural going on, no matter how bizarre the circumstances. "My friend Jennie dreamed her missing passport was under her toaster once and found it there. Does she time travel too? Sometimes we just forget stuff, tuck it away some place we can't reach it when we're awake."
I'll table this for now but we're coming back to it later. I have a feeling her mom did a number on her where this stuff is concerned, and I need to rectify that immediately.
