Fifty thousand dollars.
She left it on the table. She actually left fifty thousand dollars sitting on a diner table next to a ketchup bottle.
The ketchup bottle had that crusty orange stuff dried around the cap that happens when people don't wipe it and she remembers noticing that while she was busy making the dumbest decision of her life.
Who does that? Seriously, who walks away from fifty thousand dollars?
People who have options, that's who. People with savings accounts and health insurance that actually covers things and apartments where the radiator works.
Those people can afford to say no thank you to an envelope full of money from a stranger.
Those people have the luxury.
Rosaline did not have the luxury.
She had leftover rice.
Two days old. In a plastic container that she'd washed and reused so many times the lid didn't snap shut properly anymore so she had to put a rubber band around it.
She ate it standing up at the counter because the only chair in her kitchen had a wobbly leg and she just couldn't deal with wobbling tonight.
Not tonight.
Add hot sauce.
The cheap kind from the dollar store, the one with the rooster on it that every broke person in America has in their cabinet.
It helped.
A little. Mostly it just made bad rice into spicy bad rice but at least it tasted like something.
The apartment was doing its thing. Radiator clanking like someone was inside it hitting it with a wrench. Draft coming in under the front door because the towel she stuffed there kept sliding out of place.
An upstairs neighbor walking around in what she swore were bowling shoes at ten o'clock at night. Just boom boom boom back and forth across the ceiling while she stood in her kitchen eating old rice out of a container like some kind of standing up sad person commercial.
Three years ago she ate sushi at a place in Lincoln Park where they knew her name. Sat at a real table with real chairs. had wine that didn't come from a gas station. Talked about buildings with people who thought she was brilliant.
Don't do that.
Don't go there.
She went to bed.
Didn't shower because the hot water was unpredictable and she wasn't in the mood to stand there waiting for it to decide if it felt like working tonight. Didn't brush her teeth either which, yes, disgusting, she knew. But sometimes you just don't.
Sometimes the day takes everything out of you and brushing your teeth feels like climbing a mountain and you think I'll do it in the morning, and you know what? That's fine. That's allowed. She pulled the blanket up. Thin blanket. The kind you buy at Walgreens for twelve dollars because you can't afford a real comforter and this is your life now.
There's a water stain on her ceiling. Brown. Vaguely shaped like something but she'd never been able to decide what. Some nights it looked like a hand. Other nights it looked like the state of Florida.
Tonight, it didn't look like anything.
Tonight, it was just a stain on the ceiling of a one-bedroom apartment in a building that should have been condemned, and she was lying under it in her work clothes feeling sorry for herself.
Go to sleep Rosaline.
3:47 AM.
Phone buzzing. She'd fallen asleep with it on her chest which she did every single night and yes she knew it was sad and no she didn't care. It was her connection to David. Her alarm system. Her leash.
Whatever you wanted to call it. It sat on her chest and when it buzzed at 3:47 in the morning it felt like getting punched in the sternum.
Screen too bright. Eyes not ready. She saw CHICAGO MEMORIAL and honest to God her first thought wasn't oh no. Her first thought was how much. Because that's where her brain went now.
Every call from that hospital was a dollar amount attached to a catastrophe and her body had been trained to calculate before it panicked.
But it wasn't billing.
ICU.
"Ms. Williams, this is Dr. Okafor from the cardiac unit. Your brother had an arrhythmic episode this evening."