shook it formally, hung on to it for a half second too long until Benny began to blush.
“I’d love to say that I’ve heard all about you,” she said. “But Nina has not been forthcoming with information about her new friends.”
“That’s because I don’t have many,” I said. “Just this one.” Benny met my eyes and smiled at this.
“You could have at least let me know you had a lovely new friend and that he had a name.” She dimpled at Benny. “I bet you tell your parents all about your friends.”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Well, then. Us parents should all get together and commiserate. Compare notes.” My mother rolled her eyes, but I could see her take careful measure of the way Benny was smiling at me, the faint flush I could feel on my own cheeks. There was a moment of awkward silence, and then my mother looked around.
“Now, where’s the creamer? I can’t drink this stuff without a ton of sugar,” she said. “Let me know when you’re ready to go, Nina.” She stepped toward the coffee bar at the end of the counter, a polite masquerade. There, she made a great show of fussing over the sugar dispenser, as if we weren’t just three feet away. I silently thanked her for her discretion.
But Benny and I just grinned silently at each other until we reached the front of the line, Vanessa trailing just behind us. “Coffee for me and a cappuccino for my sister,” Benny said to the barista.
“Soy,” Vanessa said, still not looking up from her phone.
Benny rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you can ignore that part.” He fished a hundred-dollar bill out of his wallet. Vanessa finally looked up from her phone long enough to notice what he was doing. She lunged forward and grabbed his wrist, examining the money in his hand.
“Jesus, Benny, are you stealing from the safe again? One of these days Dad is going to notice and then you’re going to be in deep shit.”
He shook her hand off. “He has a million dollars in there. He’s never going to notice that a couple hundred bucks are missing.”
At this, Vanessa’s eyes shot over to me, and then away again. “Shut up, Benny,” she hissed.
“What’s up your butt today, Vanessa?”
Vanessa sighed and threw up her hands. “Discretion, baby brother. Learn some.” She was intentionally not looking at me now, as if she believed that disregarding my presence would somehow make Benny’s gaffe vanish from memory. The phone in her hand began to vibrate. “Look, I’ve got to take this, I’ll be back in a sec. Don’t forget we have to stop by the airstrip so I can look for my sunglasses.” She spun and left the café.
“Sorry. She’s usually not so rude. Mom is making her go to Paris with us instead of letting her go to Mexico with her friends, so she’s in a mood.”
But I’d already moved on from Vanessa’s dismissiveness, my mind instead wrapping itself around the vision of a million dollars in a dark vault inside Stonehaven. Who kept that much money just sitting around in cash? What would it look like? How much space would it take up? I thought of heist movies I’d seen, robbers filling duffel bags with bright green stacks of bills; I imagined a bank vault hidden inside of Stonehaven, a giant round steel door with a lock that took two people to open. “Your dad really keeps a million dollars in your house?”
Benny looked uneasy. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“But what for? He doesn’t trust banks?”
“Yeah, but it’s not just that. It’s in case of an emergency. He always says it’s important to have cash at the ready, right? If shit hits the fan and everything falls apart and you need to just go. He keeps some in our house in San Francisco, too.” He offered this casually, as if it was completely normal to need a seven-figure reserve. For what? I wondered. In case you need to flee a zombie apocalypse? An FBI raid? The barista handed Benny his coffees, and when he turned back