The plan for Day 10 had two items: spend money like water, and remember why.
Here's the part of the apocalypse nobody warns you about: it doesn't take away the things you own. It takes away the things you almost own — the nice dinner you were going to have someday, the boots you kept trying on and never buying, the version of your life that was one payday away. My first life ended with me owning nothing but memories of things I'd been too careful to enjoy.
Not this time.
The Galleria opened at ten. I was inside at 10:01, three credit cards at their ceilings and a hard money loan still warm in my account, and a shopping discipline best summed up in four words: scorched earth.
· ·
First: the department store, and the saleswoman.
I was wearing the honest uniform of a woman mid-renovation: flannel, work jeans, dusty boots. The commission lights in the saleswoman's eyes did a quick inventory, and I watched her decide — in real time, with visible effort — that I was furniture.
She materialized a beat later beside a woman in a quilted designer vest, all teeth: "That coat is our last one, and honestly? You have the shoulders for it."
Fine. The mall had plenty of other stores, and a whole week of cold snap was waiting for me — and cold snaps don't care about your shoulder line. I bought good boots, good wool, good gloves, a down parka built for an ice storm, and — the apocalypse is no excuse for indulgence — a frankly unnecessary quantity of fancy soap.
On the way out I walked past her again, arms full. She glanced at the bags, then at me, and her face did a slow, expensive arithmetic she wasn't paid enough to finish.
· ·
Then the electronics store, for the Mango.
I already had the iPhone — two of them, because phones die and backups matter. But on the clearance rack sat the thing my first life had never let me waste money on and my second life now insisted upon: a brand-new Mango Phone, flagship model, reduced to $89 because nobody with taste would carry it.
A phone shaped like an apology for a phone. A logo that was almost a fruit, legally distinct from a certain fruit, manufactured by a company that existed purely to be sued by one. I bought three. One to use, one for parts, and one for posterity — because someday, when I was rich in canned peaches and bored in a limestone fortress, I was going to need something to laugh at.
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[DEPOSIT: SMARTPHONES ×3 — VALUED AT $267]
Query: why.
"Morale," I said. "Ask any army."
· ·
The food court was lunch, and lunch was doctrine.
I had a Cinnabon the size of my head. I had a pretzel the size of my forearm, salted like a grudge. I had a slice of cheesecake and a boba tea with the sugar dial at maximum, tapioca pearls like little black planets — and yes, I did the thing where the pearls shoot up the straw and nearly take an eye out. First life, I'd have ordered a small. This life: large. Extra pearls. The pearls were the soul.
Under the table waited a paper bag: ten portions of grilled chicken and rice, packed for a certain ninety-pound dog — she'd spent the whole morning at the store window with her nose printed against the glass.
Dogs aren't allowed in malls. Civilizations aren't allowed to end, either, and yet here we are. I fed her in the truck bed like a queen.
· ·
Dinner was the steakhouse.
Not a chain — the old place downtown, dim lights, red leather booths, a maître d' old enough to have traded stories with Prohibition. The kind of place my mother always promised she'd take me after she closed a big deal — the dinner that never happened, because a red light got there first.
I ordered the ribeye, medium rare, with a loaded baked potato and creamed spinach, and a dessert I ordered without reading the price. The waiter — professional, unhurried, the last of a dying species — didn't blink at a woman dining alone; he had clearly served widows of far longer standing than me. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
Midway through the steak, I did something I hadn't planned: I ordered a second ribeye to go.
"Taking it home to the family?" he asked.
"She doesn't eat steak," I said. "But it's her birthday this week, and she likes being offered."
Then, because the hotel above the steakhouse was the same hotel, and because the plan said spend money like water, I booked the corner suite for two nights — soaking tub, a full wall of window over the sleeping town, a showerhead taller than I was. In my first life, the closest I'd ever come to this room was pressing my face to the lobby glass on a blizzard night.
I soaked until my fingers pruned, ate the rest of the cheesecake sitting in the tub, and watched the news crawl at the bottom of the muted TV: the red circle had reached the state line. Nine days left.
· ·
At eleven p.m., my phone buzzed. It was Chase.
"The appraiser came through," he said, all business. "House is worth four-eighty, maybe five hundred. Beth thinks we should list at four-fifty to move it. Your three hundred isn't going anywhere either way — so honestly, it's the smart play."
They were going to flip my mother's house like a stock, and they were telling me, the way people tell a river it's flowing. I sat in the soaking tub of a hotel I'd never have entered in my first life, and I felt something I hadn't felt in ten years: gratitude.
"Do it," I said. "Flip it. Every dollar you've got, straight in. Borrow more if you can — I've been in a wonderful mood about lending, lately."
A pause on the line. Suspicion always runs a beat late, arriving at the station after the train. "...What's that supposed to mean?"
"Means good luck, Chase," I said, and hung up. Three for three.
Nine days left. Summer slept under my window. And in one corner of it, my mother's house was filling up with Beth's dreams and Chase's arithmetic — in nine days, both would be worth exactly as much as a Mango phone.
I slept like the dead. Like someone who had already been dead once, and had opinions about it now.