Page 131 of The Neighbor Wager

He can’t help but show flashes. That’s how much he belongs there.

“Have you cooked for your grandma, since you’ve been home?” I ask.

“A little,” he says. “She’s stubborn. She wants to prove she can take care of herself.”

“Maybe she wants to take care of you.”

“I’m twenty-six.”

“You’re still her grandson.”

“You let your dad take care of you?”

“Now, yeah,” I say. “In college, I tried to make it on my own.”

He raises a brow.

“Okay. I wasn’t totally on my own. He paid my tuition, but I tried to pay for the rest. I got a job at a lab. When that wasn’t enough, I worked nights at a bar.”

“That’s where you learned about cocktails?”

I nod. “They’re a formula. They make sense.”

“And you like things that make sense.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” I already know the answer. No. He doesn’t. He likes magic. And magic can’t make sense, or it wouldn’t be magic.

He doesn’t answer.

I don’t ask him to. “I worked hard. I bought store-brand bread and Lipton tea.”

“How long did you last?” he asks.

“A semester,” I admit. “It’s too hard to work while going to school. I don’t know how anyone does it.”

“People do what they have to do to survive.”

“Why do you have a chip on your shoulder?” I don’t mean it as harshly as it sounds, but he doesn’t shrink from them. “About money?”

“Ida isn’t as rich as Mr. Huntington.”

“Sure, she bought the house a long time ago, when it was worth less. But she’s a successful writer. She makes a lot of money. Especially after that one TV adaptation.” One of the streaming networks made a series from her books. “I’ve seen her royalty checks.”

After my first business class, I asked Ida how money worked for her. We’d covered various arts but not from the perspective of an artist. I was curious to know averages. Though her numbers are far from the mean.

“It’s nowhere near the Huntington ballpark.”

“And she invested her husband’s life insurance money, I know. She tells that story a lot. She always jokes about how he was useful for two things.”

“Sex and money?”

I nod. “Do you think she means that?”

“I don’t know. He died before I was born. I never saw them together. It could be her way of coping with grief. It could be her way of making light of poor treatment.”

“It’s hard to know with her.”

He nods.

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