Damn it, I was going to burst into tears again. “Thank you,” I breathed, my body feeling shaky.
He wasn’t interested in heartfelt exchanges, though. “Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone who you are. Don’t use credit cards, or ID. You won’t need an ID to claim the money. They’ll let you use a ten-digit code and a password in lieu of identification documents. I’ll run down the street and get it set up on my end, then text the code to you.”
I was still in shock. “Okay,” I said faintly.
“Afterward, you should head straight to the bus station downtown. Buy a ticket from St. Louis to Chicago with cash, and I’ll meet you at the station when you get here.”
This was so completely out of character for my dad, I couldn’t help but freak out a little. Why was he helping me? Was he only a distant, passive-aggressive asshole when things were normal? But when shit got real, he suddenly turned into Super Dad, flying to the rescue? I was having real trouble wrapping my mind around the concept.
“Dad—” I began, unsure how the sentence would continue.
“I’ll contact you from the Western Union store in a few minutes.” And just like that, he hung up.
I stared at the phone. Did that really just happen? Did my dad just pull a solid to protect me? My dad? The man who’d emotionally checked out of our stunted, two-person family almost two decades ago?
I sat there staring around me at the bustling grocery store in the city I’d lived in all my life. A city I was about to leave, maybe never to return. Still fighting shock over this whole thing, I grabbed my backpack. There was a Western Union desk right at the customer service counter of the store. I’d walked past it a hundred times over the years, though I’d never had cause to use it before. I wondered if the store had a cheap prepaid phone I could buy, as well. It seemed like I should probably ditch mine as soon as possible, just to be safe.
As I walked from the pharmacy to the customer service desk, I wondered anew at my dad’s actions. For twenty years, he’d played the part of a man who’d lost everything he cared about and just... given up. But maybe he still had something left to lose after all.
Me.
TEN
WAITING WAS SLOW TORTURE. I imagined a hundred ways this could go wrong while I stood in line at the Western Union desk. The top of the list was Dad coming to his senses and changing his mind—refusing to answer his phone. Leaving me hanging. With only two people ahead of me, I picked up my cell and called him.
He picked up on the second ring. “Zorah? I’m at the place now. Give me a minute to get the transfer set up.”
“Okay,” I breathed, relief washing through me. He hadn’t abandoned me. I waited, foot jittering as I listened to the indistinct sound of people talking over the tinny connection, too far away from the microphone for the sense of the words to come through. The last person in front of me finished their transaction and I stepped up to the desk.
“Here’s the code and password. I’ll just read it off rather than texting. That way I don’t have to hang up.” Dad rattled off the numbers and letters while I jotted them down on a scrap of paper. “I’m sending you two hundred fifty dollars. Use some of it to buy a burner phone, then ditch yours. Be sure to take out the SIM card and cut it into bits.”
My dad seemed surprisingly good at being sneaky. I briefly wondered if he just watched a lot of television, or if there were things I didn’t know about him.
“I thought of that,” I assured him. “They’ve got prepaid phones here. I’ll get a couple, just to be safe. Thanks, Dad. I really mean that. I don’t know what I would’ve—”
“It’s all right.” His voice was shaky, probably as shaky as mine was. “Be careful, Zorah. No more phone calls on this phone. Dump it and destroy the SIM card like I told you.” The line was silent for a second before he let out a breath. “And Zorah...?”
“Yeah, Dad?”
“I love you.”
The line went silent, and then he was gone.
My dad hadn’t said he loved me in years. In fact, I couldn’t even remember the last time the words left his lips.
Fuck.
I filled out the paperwork with unshed tears clogging my throat, and handed everything back to the lady. After that, I had to wait for her to check that it was in order and process the transfer. Another ten minutes, and I had the wired money in hand. I purchased a couple of cheap flip phones and a prepaid card that had talk and text on it, along with a pair of scissors.
Transferring the important names and numbers over to the new phones only took a couple of minutes. There were depressingly few of them. Then I took the SIM card out of my old phone and stuffed it into my back pocket. Returning to the restrooms, I sat in a stall and sliced the tiny plastic and metal wafer into the thinnest shreds I could manage. Some of the shreds went in the trashcan next to the sink. The others I would throw in random trashcans on the way to the station.
Unsure how much the ticket to Chicago would be, I used a few dollars to buy some food and a drink. When I was done eating, I left the store and paid cash for bus fare to the St. Louis Gateway Transportation Center, where the Greyhound station and Amtrak terminal were located.
The only seats on the bus were near the front. As the driver headed along the meandering route toward the station, he talked to himself. He muttered about possible causes for delay, like construction and a convention at a large hotel that could
