Page 39 of Twelve
An offer?I was suddenly reminded of who I was dealing with here. Lillian Taft wasn’t a powder puff. She was the merciless, dictatorial matriarch who’d kicked my pregnant mother out of her house at the ripe old age of seventeen.
I stalked to the front door and retrieved the Post-it I’d placed next to the doorbell when our house had been hit with door-to-door evangelists two weeks in a row. I turned and offered the handwritten notice to the woman who’d raised my mother. Her perfectly manicured fingertips plucked the Post-it from my grasp.
“‘No soliciting,’” my grandmother read.
“Except for Girl Scout cookies,” I added helpfully. I’d gotten kicked out of the local Scout troop during my morbid true crime and facts-about-autopsies phase, but I still had a weakness for Thin Mints.
Lillian pursed her lips and amended her previous statement. “‘No soliciting except for Girl Scout cookies.’”
I saw the precise moment that she registered what I was saying: I wasn’t interested in heroffer. Whatever she was selling, I wasn’t buying.
An instant later, it was like I’d said nothing at all. “I’ll be frank, Sawyer,” she said, showing a kind of candy-coated steel I’d never seen in my mom. “Your mother chose this path. You didn’t.” She pressed her lips together, just for a moment. “I happen to think you deserve more.”
“More than off-brand knives and drinking straight from the carton?” I shot back. Two could play the rhetorical question game.
Unfortunately, the great Lillian Taft had apparently never met a rhetorical question she was not fully capable of answering. “More than a G.E.D., a career path with no hope of advancement, and a mother who’s less responsible now than she was at sixteen.”
Were she not an aging Southern belle with a reputation to uphold, my grandmother might have followed that statement by throwing her hands into touchdown position and declaring, “Burn!”
Instead, she laid a hand over her heart. “You deserve opportunities you’ll never have here.”
The people in this town were good people. This was a good place. But it wasn’tmyplace. Even in the best of times, part of me had always felt like I was just passing through.
A muscle in my throat tightened. “You don’t know me.”
That got a pause out of her—and not a calculated one. “I could,” she replied finally. “I could know you. Andyoucould find yourself in the position to attend any college of your choosing and graduate debt free.”
There was a contract. An honest-to-God, written-in-legalese, sign-on-the-dotted-linecontract.
“Seriously?”
Lillian waved away the question. “Let’s not get bogged down in the details.”
“Of course not,” I said, thumbing through the nine-page appendix. “Why would I go to the trouble of reading the terms before I sell you my soul?”
“The contract is for your protection,” my grandmother insisted. “Otherwise, what’s to keep me from reneging on my end of the deal once yours is complete?”
“A sense of honor and any desire whatsoever for an ongoing relationship?” I suggested.
Lillian arched an eyebrow. “Are you willing to bet your college education on my honor?”
I knew plenty of people who’d gone to college. I also knew a lot of people who hadn’t.
I read the contract. I wasn’t even sure why. I was not going to move in with her for an entire year. I was not going to walk away from my home, my life, my mother for—
“Five hundred thousand dollars?” I may have punctuated that amount with an expletive or two.
“Have you been listening to rap music?” my grandmother demanded.
“You said you’d pay forcollege.” I tore my gaze from the contract. Even just reading it made me feel like I’d let the guy with the Dodge Ram tuck a couple of ones into my bikini. “You didn’t say anything about handing me a check for half a million dollars.”
“It won’t be a check,” my grandmother said, as if that was the real issue here. “It will be a trust. College, graduate school, living expenses, study abroad, transportation, tutors—these things add up.”
These things.
“Say it,” I told her, unable to believe that anyone could shrug off that amount of money. “Say that you’re offering me five hundred thousand dollars to live with you for a year.”
“Money isn’t something we talk about, Sawyer. It’s something we have.”
