He’d be better off bringing nothing with him to remind him of this little place in the middle of nowhere. It’d be a memory encased in glass, like a soap bubble blown in the cold with curved flakes of frost decorating it.
By the time Morgan came into the kitchen, gripping his cell phone in one hand and leaning heavily on his cane, he looked pale and tired. Jack started to ask the last time he had taken his meds, but then he stopped.
Soon that wouldn’t be his problem. So instead he asked, “You want dinner?”
Morgan sank into the nearest chair. “Sure, thanks.” Then he sighed like the weight of the world was on his shoulders and Jack was just there to cook and clean. “I can’t make heads or tails of those numbers.”
“That’s too bad,” Jack said. He didn’t care about the numbers, and he shouldn't care about Morgan. But now, looking at Morgan struggling and exhausted, Jack wanted to stay and help him, even though he knew that would be a mistake.
CHAPTER 30
morgan
After dinner, Morgan went back down to the office. Jack had given him the cold shoulder as they ate, and with good reason. Morgan had taken advantage of Jack last night, when he shouldn’t have, and the results of the encounter, in spite of the tiny gold speck of joy hidden deep inside him, had left a bad taste in Morgan’s mouth.
In the chilly room, he returned to the task at hand, that being entering the last of the stray receipts and then balancing the books. He was as good at math as he was at anything that didn’t involve people’s feelings, but he couldn’t for the life of him get the numbers to work.
He used the functions in the spreadsheet to try and get the amounts to balance. He used the ancient calculator he’d found in a drawer. He used the calculator on his phone. Then he tried the old-fashioned way, writing down the numbers by hand, and did the addition and subtraction with a stub of a pencil. Even after checking his work, doing the addition from the bottom up, didn’t help: The totals kept coming out incorrect.
None of the amounts, payable or otherwise, matched the bank statements. The other odd thing was that the bank statements for each month for the past two years were way lessthan the amount of goods sold. Maybe he was missing a zero or hadn’t carried the ones like he should have. Or maybe he’d entered the numbers wrong. Or maybe he was missing some numbers, and was being too stubborn to realize it.
He needed a distraction. A mental reset.
With a flick of his finger at the papers on his desk, he pulled up a search engine and then a travel site, and looked up flights out of Billings. There were no seats available tomorrow, presumably on account of flights that had been canceled during the storm, but two days out, he could get Jack on a plane.
None of the airlines offered nonstop service from Billings to Southern California, so travel time was around five hours. Which meant he’d better pick an early flight so Jack wasn’t arriving in a strange city late at night.
Not that Jack couldn’t fend for himself, of course, but Morgan wasn’t going to strand him at the airport with no way to make it to the beach. Should he book a few nights at a hotel so Jack could get himself squared away?
Squared away with what, a job? Morgan scoffed at himself and considered putting Jack in a first-class seat. There was a flight with a quick stop in Salt Lake City to the tune of $1,500.
Adding on an ocean-view room at the very nicely reviewed Georgian Santa Monica would be another $750 a night. Say, three nights?
Sure. Bring the total to around $4,000 so Jack wouldn’t have to sleep on the beach or beneath a bridge or on a bench in a park somewhere. Or he could get Jack a week’s stay at a hostel in downtown Santa Monica for around $250.
With the $1,000 Morgan planned to send him off with, Jack would have money for food and whatever else he needed. Which was what? To stick his toes in the sand and eat a hot dog purchased from a beach vendor and watch the sunshine play on the salty water?
Sure, it painted a pretty picture, but it was nothing a person could build a future around. After the hostel kicked him out, after all the hot dogs were eaten and the sand had grown cold around his toes, what was Jack’s plan? Keep on taking illegal rides on freight trains wherever they were headed? Put himself at risk jumping on and off giant metal vehicles with a traveling weight of 10,000 tons?
Morgan checked the search engine. Yes. A long-haul freight train could weigh anywhere from 3,000 to 18,000 tons.
But maybe Jack wanted to search for his erstwhile pals, Blue and Star, and rove around with them some more, until they once again betrayed him and Jack found himself stranded, looking for shelter. Looking for something to steal just to stay alive.
Or he might find another stranger to take him in. A stranger who might not be as nice as Morgan, who might have more nefarious intentions of the sort portrayed in true crime dramas.
No. No matter how frustrating the current situation—for which Morgan could only blame himself—Jack didn’t deserve that.
But other than letting Jack stay at the feed and grain and pretending that what had happened between them hadn’t happened, what else was he to do? Send Jack home to his family, who hated him? Arrange for Jack to get some kind of training so he could get a regular job? Take over Jack’s decisions for his own life, as if Jack hadn’t a mind of his own?
Following through on any of those options might make Morgan a dyed-in-the-wool asshole rather than simply an asshole of opportunity, but at least Jack would have some kind of future.
In the end, it wouldn’t matter. He’d be willing to risk offering, but Jack would likely refuse all help, and Morgan couldn’t blame him.
Maybe he should simply ask Jack whathewanted. Or maybe he should pack it in, leave the math that wasn’t mathing for another day, and get some rest.
He thumped his way upstairs and took a step into the parlor, where Jack was flipping through a large, glossy coffee-table book.
“Good night,” Morgan said.
