The Unquiet - J. D. Robb [78]
“Did it get there in one piece?”
“It’s fine.”
“Well, I miss it, but you’ll get a lot more use out of it than I will, now that I’m retired.”
“ Anyway—after I told him about it, he really wanted a face-to-face reading.” For which he’d have paid her a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars.
“This Oliver guy sounds like a prize stiff,” Aunt Kit decided.
“Charlie calls him a stuffed shirt. But fondly,” Molly added in fairness. “He always speaks of him with affection. I think he works for the energy lobby.”
“Perfect. But this is terrible—you love Charlie.”
“He was one of my first callers. I’m really going to miss him.”
“ And I liked hearing about him. But there will be plenty of others, dear. It’s slow in the beginning,” Aunt Kit advised, as if she’d been in the phone psychic business for years. “But it’ll pick up when word gets around.”
“What word is that?” Molly asked, making a left on Connecticut.
“Word of mouth, about the amazing Madame Romanescu. People will tell their friends, and they’ll tell their friends, and the phone will start ringing off the hook. You’ll have to hire employees.”
“I’d be happy just to recoup my losses.” Oh, she wished she hadn’t said that—going into the phone psychic business had been Aunt Kit’s brainstorm. But she’d had no idea how big an investment it took to get started.
“What losses? You mean the calling service?”
“Right, they charge for the setup.” Eight hundred dollars, plus a fifty-dollar-a-month “maintenance fee.” On top of that, Molly only got $1.69 of the $2.99 people paid for a minute. So far, her new part-time job was a serious net loss.
“Guess what,” she said to change the subject. “I got an A minus on my Advanced Adolescent Psych exam.”
“Yay!” Sounds of applause from Aunt Kit. “Go you! You’ll have that master’s soon, and then nothing but good times. You’ll be back doing what you’re supposed to do. I feel it.”
“Two and a half more semesters. I wish I could go faster.” But she could only afford nine credits a term, even after adding phone psychic to her other two jobs: dog walker and house sitter.
“You work too hard,” Aunt Kit said—reading her mind. “After exams are over, you come up here and see me. I miss you.”
“I miss you, too, but I don’t think I’ll be able to visit anytime soon.”
“Think about it. Hoboken in springtime.”
“So tempting. Heck, I’ve got another call—”
“Go. And if it’s Charlie, talk to him. Don’t let that stuffed shirt boss you around.”
But it wasn’t Charlie. It was a man from the loss mitigation department at the bank, calling to say his boss wouldn’t go for her pro bono lawyer’s proposal for paying down her mortgage. So the sale of her house was still on.
FOUR
And she loved her house. Her haven, her sanctuary, her pride and joy—but most of all, the brick-and-mortar proof she’d needed, after the divorce, that she wasn’t anybody’s helpless dependent. A 1940s bungalow with only two bedrooms, it had beautiful floors, small but perfect proportions, and a dream of a front porch. She’d bought it during the boom, and paid too much—easy to see that now. But she’d fallen in love, and they’d given her such a great deal.
Until the interest rate went up and, practically the next day, she’d lost her assistant counselor job due to budget cuts at Stone Creek Private Academy for Girls.
“This is an opportunity,” Aunt Kit had tried to convince her from Hoboken, but for Molly (a positive person—“obnoxiously optimistic,” her ex used to call her), it was hard to see the progression of her life lately as anything but a slow slide backward. Underwater.
“It’s only a house,” she told Merlin, her cat, settling beside him on the porch swing with her Evolution of Human Behavior textbook. “Just bricks and wood and glass.” And she was only thirty, she could start over—she’d done it before. And for now, at least,