by Emily Belden
palms instead.
“I bought a plot,” he says with a smile that’s expanding at
the speed of light.
“Come again? You…what?” I shake my head. Clearly I’m
having trouble following all of this.
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“Okay, well I didn’t buy it yet, per se. But it’s on hold for
me if I want it. I mean, you definitely don’t have to put him
here, Char. But I know you were interested in it, and I wanted
to act fast.”
“Interested? It was just a Google search result that I hadn’t
even clicked on yet,” I say.
He steamrolls on. I don’t think he’s even heard me.
“And if at all this is going to be the spot, I didn’t want you to get ripped off. People are going to end up reselling the crypts on the black market for much more than asking. I just need to
let the guy know by Monday. Think you can decide by then?”
I look over my shoulder once again to confirm what I’m
seeing: piles of dirt, a wide open field, and no one working.
“When…when is this thing even going to be done?”
“Uhh, I think the website said a year? I bet it’ll be closer
to ten months if they’ve got their shit together.”
I don’t need a program to run the math on this comple-
tion date. I’m caught between showing my appreciation for
someone who has, in theory, solved my greatest problem, and
running for the hills—perhaps the dirt ones behind me—be-
cause I didn’t ask for this and I’m afraid showing any hint of
ungratefulness is going to create even more of a mess.
What I think is the sound of a bulldozer backing up is ac-
tually the beeping of a pager Brian has clipped onto his pants.
I didn’t realize doctors carried pagers anymore, the noise is
so foreign.
“Shit, sorry,” he says, unhooking it from his mint-green
scrubs. “Oh, damn.”
“What?” I ask.
“They moved our staff lunch up by an hour. It was supposed
to be at one, now it’s at noon. We’re doing some summer pot-
luck thing in the courtyard at Cedars with the folks from In-
ternal Medicine. I just brought a loaf of bread though. Who
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has the time to make deviled eggs? Anyway, do you mind if
we cut this short? I promise we will talk more about it later,
but I’ve got to get you back to Studio City and me to Cedars
all in the next half hour.”
Those travel times are impossible and he knows it.
“Don’t worry about me, Brian. I can Uber back to my place.
I want to spend some time here checking out the grounds.”
That’s a lie. In fact, there’s no place I want to be less than
here, except contained in a car with a man who basically
bought a plot of land for my dead husband. And here I was
thinking his surprise was a picnic for two.
“You sure I can’t drive you? I feel really bad. Didn’t mean
to stick you with an Uber bill. Actually, I think I might have
a promo code for Lyft in my email. That’s usually cheaper.
Here, I’ll send it to you?”
He fumbles for his phone.
“No, Brian, it’s totally fine. Casey’s work is somewhere
over here, too. I’d love to pop in and say hi to her. I feel like I haven’t seen her in a couple days.”
Again, I’m lying. I have no idea where Casey’s work is and
connecting with her right now is not a priority at all, but I’m in need of a clean break, not lingering conversation on the
semantics of rideshare providers.
“Okay, well, thanks for being spontaneous today. Text you
later, okay?”
He steps toward me for a hug and plants a kiss on my cheek
before hopping back into his car and pulling away from the
construction site with two quick honks of his horn and a
wave. I wave back.
Does he really think this place is a solution? Is it a solution?
After all, it is—or will be, rather—a fireproof place that’s cen-trally located to all who loved Decker. Short of having to hang 9781525805981_TS_BG_txt.indd 177
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on to the urn until construction is over, doesn’t that check a
lot of the boxes? Could rehoming the urn really be this easy?
I pull out my phone to open my Uber app. But when I press
the home screen button, it’s on the last thing I had open, which was Facebook. I admit that earlier this morning, before Brian
picked me up, I was sitting in bed, petting Leno, looking—no,
staring—at the photo he posted of us. There’s just something
that draws me to him. There’s something that draws everyone to him, though. Just ask Alexis from the farmer’s market. Or Bella from Internal Medicine. Which reminds me, he’s off to the hospital right now, where he’s going to mix and mingle
with some cute nurse he has, or had—who knows—feelings
for and sees every day at work. Then after the potluck, a drove of hot soccer moms will bring their bruised-up kids through
his doors, fake like they actually think it’s a hairline fracture, just to see Brian’s megawatt smile.
The girls he’s into, he buys them baseball tickets, not crypts.
I’m a charity case, not a crush. It meant nothing.
My Facebook feed auto-refreshes and at the top is a post
from TIF’s newest client, WeHot. It’s a picture quote that
says: You’re never more than 30 minutes away from a good mood.
The caption goes on to explain that science shows a half hour
of moderate exercise releases enough endorphins to change
your mood dramatically, and invites their social media fans
to drop in for a micro-spin class. I’m immediately attracted to the fact that they’ve backed their claim up with proven data,
but more than that, I consider it a dare. Exercise-averse as I
am, I wouldn’t mind the mood change. Seeing that I’m still
rocking my signature fun-employment looks—leggings, T-
shirt, and sports bra—I call an Uber and enter the address for
the boutique gym in West Hollywood.
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16
Who knew that when exercise classes aren’t an hour long and
themed to 2000s pop music, I’d actually be somewhat down
for the sweat session? Read: That. Was. Fun. And the bonus?
My client wasn’t working today so she wasn’t looming over
me, pressing for details on Gaga Glow— and I actually knew how to get my spin cleats off this time.
Like most things this week, WeHot kicked my ass, which
was to be expected considering my aerobic capability caps at
power walking to my Ubers before I get charged the late fee.
But I stuck with it the whole time, and for that, I’m proud
of myself—even if the motivation was just to test the theory
that my mood would change after pedaling as fast as I could
for thirty minutes. Did it work? Am I shitting out butterflies
now? It’s too soon to tell. But either way, I’m hopping off
that bike with two things: a much calmer mind and an e
mail
from Zareen.
All the rest of the girls from the class have sprung out the
door to catch the mobile rolled ice cream truck that posts up
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across the street before they drive and park at an intersection closer to The Grove. Jennifer Lopez shops there a lot and it
would be a great Instagram moment if they could get her to
take a pic with a bowl of shaved watermelon ice.
I’m the last one in the locker room, sitting on a bamboo
bench and dabbing my brow with one of WeHot’s signature
iced-lavender rags. I open the email from Zareen, the first
communication from her since being put on leave.
Good morning,
I hope you’re finding your time off restful and insight-
ful! I’m writing to let you know that a gentleman named
Warren Holmgren called the agency twice trying to
reach you. I informed him you were on personal leave,
hoping he’d relent until your return. Clearly, he isn’t one
to take social cues and pressed on for a personal email
address. I countered by offering to give you his details
instead. I’m unsure what could be so urgent. Perhaps it
is concerning your husband? Either way, Mr. Holmgren’s
information is in the attached contact card.
See you soon. Take care.
-Z
It only takes a simple Google search to realize that a) Za-
reen would be completely lost without me and b) Mr. Hol-
mgren most likely does not want to talk about the urn. I click into his LinkedIn profile and see that he’s a venture capital-ist from Silicon Valley. A “tech enthusiast” with a “knack for
start-ups.” His rap sheet includes being an initial investor in Groupon, Slack, and Instagram. Holy shit, this guy’s got an
eye for ROI.
I extract his email from the contact card Zareen sent and
shoot him a message. Moments later, he zips me back a reply
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that says he’s in LA for the weekend and wants to meet up.
He goes on to say that he read about The Influencer Firm
in Forbes and wanted to connect “one on one” with the developer behind the company’s success to see what else I may
have in my programming repertoire. I sit back and think this
is my chance to give a bona fide tech guru a tour of my app. I
double check the projects he’s been a part of and confirm he
missed the boat on investing in Tinder. With all his tech bases covered except for modern dating, my guess is that if he saw what my app could do, I’d be able to sell him on it in a flash.
Sure. When and where? By keeping it short and sweet, I remove the hint of desperate excitement I secretly feel. Though
impromptu in nature, this is a meeting I’ve been coveting since Suitor Zero—the first guy through my app.
Tomorrow is my only free day. The wife and I are going to see
Hamilton tonight.
The cool thing about not technically having a job right
now, or a boyfriend, or family that lives within three thou-
sand miles, is that my schedule is as free as I want it to be.
Except then I realize that tomorrow is Sunday. And Sunday
is the singles cruise I promised to go to with Casey. I know
it’s in the evening, but there’s no way I’m missing a one-on-
one with Warren Holmgren.
It’s not necessarily his deep pockets I want, so much as his
deep roots in the tech hub of America. If I can get someone
like Warren to back me, well, then I see no reason I can’t add
the clout-worthy salutation Founder of… to my LinkedIn profile in the next three to five years, ample time to give this thing a proper name. After all, I can’t just call it “my app” forever. I always said TIF was just a stepping stone and now I’m finally
getting closer to taking that leap. As soon as I figure out how to schedule all of this.
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I came here for the clear mind, right? So let’s think this through, I say to myself. Warren said tomorrow. And while he may
have discussing this over a forty-five-dollar martini in mind,
I’m going to counter with breakfast instead so we can meet
sometime in the morning. I’ll sit down with him for an hour,
two at the most, come back to my place, start getting ready
by two, and I’ll leave with Casey for the cruise by four. That
all seems doable, right?
Let’s meet at the bakery at Bouchon in Beverly Hil s tomorrow
at 10 , I fire off.
Here’s to hoping he’s in the mood for a chocolate croissant.
I’m prepping for my meeting with Warren by creating a test
version of the app for him to try out. It doesn’t require much
from the custom-coding standpoint, but it does require a sec-
ond iPad. Without access to our extra stock at TIF like I had
for the Voyager dinner, I need to go fishing through Decker’s
stuff for his iPad, assuming it’ll still work once connected to a charging cord for a bit. So, for the second time this week, I climb up and reach for the box of Decker’s belongings. I pop
off the no-longer-dusty lid and can’t help but notice the bright red folder from the bank where Decker’s life insurance benefit
policy is. I probably should have done a better job of putting
things back in order after I pulled out his Dodgers jersey, i.e., I should have shoved this folder to the way bottom of the box
and piled everything else that’s left of his on top of it. It’s a lot easier to have a run-in with a Dodgers jersey he loved to
wear than with the gateway to his life insurance policy—one
of the coldest reminders he’s gone.
When I pick it up, I realize—not for the first time—that
no one my age should come into a sum of money like this.
A surge of cash you didn’t have the day before. It’s like the
lotto—except surrounded by a lot less lucky circumstances.
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I have never taken from the life insurance fund before. I’ve
never really needed to. I paid off Decker’s medical bills from
the profit on our house sale, and everything else—his school-
ing, his car, etc.—were gifts from his parents. With no debts
to worry about, there certainly was a degree of temptation to
spend frivolously when I suddenly came into the money after
he died. When you’re dealing with an impossible kind of pain,
you just never know if a new car, another dog, or a full-back
tattoo will be the things needed to take the edge off. But to
be honest, my only plan was always to save the money for a
down payment on a house with a yard for Leno whenever I
was ready to do that whole thing again. I haven’t been ready.
I take a quick inventory of where I am at nearly the five-
year anniversary of Decker’s passing. I know his urn com-
ing back threw a lot of stuff off track, but Brian Jackson may
have solved the mystery of where to place him. I return to
work in a week, and once I start writing code and running
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reports again, things will go back to normal. It’d feel good to do something philanthropic in the meantime, which reminds
me that Debbie urged me to make a donation to Decker’s old
fraternity. I know she can be pushy about what people should
and shouldn’t do, but I don’t mind the idea of pledging some-
thing in his honor for their fundraiser. In fact, it puts a nice bow on the crazy week I’m about to wrap up. My only question is: Is a thousand dollars appropriate?
I open the folder, expecting there to be a withdrawal ini-
tiation form. I’ve never done one before, but I remember that
being Step One of the process as explained by my assigned be-
reavement banker. There are no helpful papers in the folder, so I log on to the bank’s website to initiate a digital check instead.
I’ve never done this before either, but I’m in the business of
user experience and can figure out how their website works.
When I look at the sum of the account, it seems to be off
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by about ten thousand dollars. I think back to when I got all
the policy stuff from the bank and try to member if I ever
made a withdrawal one drunken night when I was grieving
like crazy, but I understand myself well enough to know that’s
impossible. It’s time to call the 24/7 800 number.
After taking several minutes to verify who I am and what
I want through a series of Social Security numbers, pin num-
bers, maiden names, and so on and so forth, I’m finally on the
line with a real-life representative.
“Okay, ma’am. I see it here. The withdrawal form was made
out to Cash in the sum of ten thousand dollars.”
I almost laugh at the absurdity. “That just can’t be right.”
“It’s been the only account activity thus far.”
“When was it?”
“Let’s see here…in the September after your husband passed.
I can certainly transfer you to loss prevention if you think it’s an error, but I’m almost certain the claim would fall outside of the statute of limitations by this point since it’s been almost five years and you haven’t reported any suspicious activity on the
account. Have you been checking your statements regularly?”
Whenever I get mail from the life insurance bank, I toss it
in the garbage. I know that sounds irresponsible of me, but I
also know I haven’t made any changes to the account since it