Page 47 of Blind Luck

“Most of the items got scraped off and flushed earlier this year.”

Yikes. “Those were the girlfriend ones?”

“Yeah. Buy our dream home, get married, have a kid or two, all the important things. Which were incompatible with winning the Meadows Cup.”

“Huh?”

“My girlfriend wasn’t a hockey fan. She thought playing in the league was just a phase.” Rusty sighed. “You really don’t have a bucket list?”

His career was a phase? Wow.

“Nope, but when we flew over the Grand Canyon yesterday, I got to thinking I should start one.”

I picked at my poached eggs and avocado toast. People laughed about avocado toast, but it actually tasted pretty good.

“No time like the present. If Kelsey works nine to five, we’re here for another four hours. You could write a bucket novel by then.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“Just throw out some ideas. Doesn’t matter if they seem impossible—put them on there.”

“Okay, I want to surf a big wave one day.”

“How big is a big wave? Compared to a normal wave, I mean?”

“One ofthebig waves, at least twenty feet high. Jaws, Pipeline, Mavericks, Teahupo’o, Nazaré. The dream would be Ghost Tree—Pescadero Point—but it’s really a tow-in wave, and ever since they banned PWCs in the area where it breaks, you have to paddle in. So I guess that would be, like, item ninety-nine on the list.”

Maybe even lower than that. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be brave enough. Ari said it was because of my inbuilt sense of survival, the idea of being held down by tons of water if it all went wrong…

“I don’t understand most everything you just said. What’s a PWC?”

“A personal watercraft, a jet ski. I had a job riding them once.”

My old boss owned a bunch of rental businesses along the Florida coast, and I got hired to move the PWCs from one place to another depending on bookings. It was a hoot, riding around with my colleagues, one of my favouritest jobs ever. I hadn’t realised we were being used as drug mules, honest. Thankfully, he paid cash in hand so there were no records, and I’d had a day off when the DEA raided the place.

“You can’t drive a car, but you can ride a jet ski?”

“I used to work at an off-airport parking lot, so I’m great at moving vehicles around. Navigating actual roads? Not so much.” And that was lucky because the parking lot had been owned by the PWC guy’s brother, so the cars were also being used as drug-mobiles. “Jet skis are way easier. You don’t need to worry about lanes and stoplights on a jet ski.”

Or raccoons.

“So, surf a big wave. We’ll put that at number one. What else?”

“I guess it would be cool to own a house someday. Not a mansion or anything, just a space I can call my own. Sharing sucks.”

“Sin wasn’t kidding earlier, huh?”

“When you spend pretty much the first sixteen years of your life living with family you hate, and the next six years in nasty house shares, you learn to appreciate having your own bathroom.”

I’d left the Promised Land a month before my sixteenth birthday. The closest I’d come to living alone was the occasional night in a hotel, and that luxury was only a recent thing.

Rusty nodded. “I guess I can understand that. So, your own house and your own bathroom.”

“And I want to go somewhere cold.”

“Somewhere cold?”

“Like Alaska. I’ve lived in California, Texas, and Florida—although I’d rather forget the Texas part—and I’ve never seen snow. Staying in one of those ice hotels would be real cool.”

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