“I’m so sorry your father treated you that way,” I said, thinking I knew where this was going. “It’s not right.”
Cassie took the mug I offered her and sipped slowly. “Turns out his parents had money and when he inherited, after he left us, he made a few smart investments or whatnot. She, his ‘wife,’ said he had every intention of leaving me something in his will. That he’d planned to amend it someday. I am his child, too, and he didn’t mean for me to have nothing at all, but he never thought he’d die so suddenly. I mean, duh, obviously.”
“Oh, Cassie!” I put on my most compassionate air, ready to hug her into oblivion, whatever she needed.
But then she continued. “Turns out the house,myhouse, wasn’t my mom’s after all. It belonged to his family. He just let her live there after he left. She never said anything.”
“You could ask her about it,” I said, treading carefully. I wanted to show that I was on her side,byher side, when no one else was.
Cassie stopped midsip. “She’s dead.” She said it like I should know this,like it had come up before. Had it? “Anyway, it’s mine now.”
She nodded fiercely, nostrils flared and jaw clenched, nowhere near done with getting all this off her chest. “She thought giving me the house would be enough.”
Every time she referred to her stepmother, Cassie said “she” or “his wife” with such loathing it was almost comical. Or maybe it was pain. My landlady had never seemed like such a bad person to me, but she must have known her new husband had conveniently left his daughter behind to go live this lovely life with his new family. I liked the guy a lot less now than when he was alive.
“Well,” I said, “owning your house is pretty nice.”
Cassie shook her head, like I wasn’t following. “I wasn’t going to only take what I was given. At first I was going to throw out a number, but that felt kind of crass. So I waited. And oh my god, I thought I heard her wrong. Like what, a couple of million is nothing to her?” She seemed to think about that, her face beaming with a new insight. “Maybe itisnothing to her. Shit. I bet the boys, her ‘sons,’ are getting much more. Plus she gets this house. Ugh, I hate them all. How she almost made me beg…”
Had Cassie just said “a couple million”? I held my breath, wondering if I was hallucinating.
It was too much all at once.
“That’s incredible,” I said. I think my eyes may have been watering, the stress from thinking I’d lost her, my ticket to freedom, to the shock of her whirling back in here with all that new information.
“You’re sweet,” she said.
“I mean it, Cassie. You’re reallysomething. Going after what you want. Getting your due. You’re fearless.” Sometimes I wondered where that stuff came from.You’re a smooth talker,my dad would say. Lots of pretty words, that’s how you tricked us.
Cassie studied me, excited now.“Come home with me. I’m done here. Really glad I stuck around until they read the will. She’s having thepaperwork drawn up, and I’ll get the money in a few weeks.”
“The two million dollars?” I said, still trying to make sense of it all.
She nodded, still partly sour from not wringing even more cash out of the widow. Finally, it hit me. Cassie hadn’t stayed in New York for fun. Or for me. She was strategizing, staying away from her stepmother until she felt ready to finagle something out of her father’s death. She wasn’t leaving without her slice of the cake. And it had worked: now she was inheriting two million dollars and her house upstate. See,thisis the American dream. And it had fallen into her lap.
“So, are you coming with me?”
I felt my mouth open, words forming in my brain, possibilities shaping in my mind. But now that she had money, I had even less to offer her. “I’d love to be with you. But I can’t stay in this country unless we get married. I know it sounds crazy. You barely know me. But is there any way you might consider it?”
She laughed. “So you’re, like, proposing to me?”
“Yes!” I said, eager. Hungry.
“You want to marryme?”
“It would make me so happy.” I mean, it was the truth.
She smiled strangely as she looked me up and down. It took me a moment to understand what she was waiting for. I felt my mind and my body dissociating as I clumsily knelt in front of her and grabbed her hand. “Cassie, will you marry me? I’ll get you a ring,” I added quickly, just as I remembered cubic zirconium was all I could afford.
“How does that even work, the green card thing?”
I paused, not wanting to sound too keen. Then I tried to steady my voice before launching into it. “I know someone who did it; it’s easy. He used an immigration lawyer who handled everything.” That was a lie—the first part, anyway. I hadreadarticles about people who’d done this. It was pretty common, apparently. America was so good at putting a shiny bow on itself that many looked at it and thought,I want a piece of that. “InNew York, you can easily apply for a license and get married twenty-four hours later. I don’t really have friends in the city, and you have no family left, right?”
She grimaced, like she was disappointed I hadn’t been paying attention. But Ihadpaid attention, and I could tell how much she craved it.
I forced a smile. “Just you and me then. Feels even more special, don’t you think?”
Marriage fraud, they called it. For me it meant immediate deportation, banned from reentering the country for life. For her there was imprisonment, up to five years, and a $250,000 fine. The U.S. government knew all too well how valuable American citizenship was, and it didn’t like when its people attempted to sell it. But that was only if we got caught.
