Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 99434 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 497(@200wpm)___ 398(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99434 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 497(@200wpm)___ 398(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
“How’s it going, old man?” I asked him. “Miss me?”
“Sure did. Guy that took your bunk snored like a banshee and is a damn slob.”
My smile felt good. “Not sure you get to complain about anyone’s sleeping habits there, Van Winkle.” I nodded toward the door. “Let’s get the hell out of here before they decide to keep one of us.”
***
Rip had me make three stops in the first hour of our drive back to the city. The first time he wanted McDonald’s for lunch, the second time he needed to use the bathroom, and the third time he wanted to hit Walmart to pick up a cell phone. I took him to a Verizon store instead.
While he perused the flip phones, I grabbed a salesperson and told him to set me up with the latest iPhone and add it to my monthly plan.
“Here you go. Happy freedom day.” I held out the bag.
Rip looked down at my offering. “What’s this?”
“It’s a cell phone—a real one.” I lifted my chin to the flip phones he’d been browsing. “Unlike those things.”
“I can’t afford that.”
“You don’t have to. It’s on me. Added it to my monthly bill. Once you’re on your feet again, you can take it back over.”
“I can’t take that from you. Those things are expensive. That had to be over a hundred bucks.”
I managed to contain my smirk. Try a grand. “It was on sale. Plus, I owe you.”
He took the bag. “What do you owe me for?”
“Three years of listening to my crap.”
“Your crap was more interesting than my crap. In fact, I don’t have any crap,” he laughed.
“Come on. Let’s get back on the road.”
There wasn’t much traffic, so we relaxed as we drove and shot the shit. It didn’t take long to catch up on Rip’s life. All he had left was his one daughter who lived in Seattle.
“How’s your lawyer lady doing?” he asked. “You tie that one up yet?”
My last letter to Rip had been a few days before everything went down with Ella and Max. Obviously, I had a ton to catch him up on. I didn’t really feel like talking about it, but there was no hiding from it when it was just the two of us in the car.
“That’s a long story,” I warned him.
He leaned back in his seat. “Got a few more hours to kill. Start at the beginning.”
So I did. Poor Rip spent the next hour shaking his head. He mostly stayed quiet, with a few “you got to be shittin’ me” responses thrown in—until I got to the part where I’d broken it off with Layla.
“I never told you why my Laura doesn’t talk to me anymore.”
Laura was Rip’s daughter. My eyes flashed to him and back to the road. “No. You never mentioned it.”
I knew the story about why he’d gotten sent to prison—how he’d wanted to help with his granddaughter’s medical bills, so he’d used his old-school printing shop to make fake Social Security cards. For a hundred dollars apiece, he’d cranked out more than a thousand phonies, all the while sending his daughter the cash anonymously. When he’d gotten arrested, his daughter had figured it out and stopped speaking to him. He’d never mentioned why, and I didn’t push.
“Sweet Daniella, God rest her soul, was sixteen when her heart started to fail. Eighteen when she became too critical to get out of bed anymore. She’d had a dozen surgeries since she was born, and they just couldn’t fix it. She needed a transplant. Most people think there’s one big waiting list for organs. There is, but there isn’t. You register with your transplant center. But you can register with more than one transplant center to try to increase your odds of getting an organ—it’s called multiple listing. But the insurance company only pays for one set of tests, and then there’s travel and hotels and everything that comes along with transporting a sick kid to a different facility. You need money.”
“I had no idea.”
“Yeah. Me neither. I knew my daughter wouldn’t take the money if she knew how I’d gotten it. So I sent it to her anonymously. Rich people do that sometimes. Hospitals call them medical angels.”
“Did she use the money?”
Rip looked down and shook his head. “Daniella had started to get real involved with her church group the last year of her life. And she’d made a lot of friends at the children’s hospital, kids who were also on organ lists. She didn’t want her mother to take the money because she thought money shouldn’t give one person an advantage over another. She had friends on the same list as she was who couldn’t afford to be on multiple lists. So my daughter wound up donating the money to the hospital’s uninsured children’s fund.”