The-Lucky-List-Rachael-Lippincott

I’ve got something to show you.”
I frown and spin around to jog aer him, jamming my feet back into my flip-flops as I go. All I
want is a shower and a real nap, not in a truck bed, but I haven’t seen him with this much pep in his
step in about a hundred years.
“Where are we going?” I ask as I slide into his truck, buckling my seat belt while he zips out onto
the road, the truck engine revving.
“You’ll see!” he says, turning the radio up, Billy Joel crooning at us while we drive past the
McMansions and the gas station and the highway entrance, straight into south Huckabee. I peer out at
the sea of identical town houses, doors barely hanging on their hinges, torn screens in the windows.
I’m surprised when my dad flicks on his turn signal, pulling into a parking lot and driving past a row
of yellow and blue town houses to park right in front of a row of white ones, wilting flowers and
bushes lining the paths to each door.
He flashes me a big smile and swings open the truck door. “Ready to see our new place?”
“Wait,” I say, my insides turning to ice as I fumble for the handle, hopping out and following him
toward a small house on the very end. “Our what?”
“Our new place!” he repeats, nodding toward the handwritten SOLD sign staked straight into the
dying flower bed. “We move in two weeks.”
Sold. Not pending. Not for sale. Sold.
I feel the ground shift underneath me.
Stunned, I follow him inside. I try to register everything, but it’s like I’m underwater, a wave pulling
me down and holding me there. Faded white carpet. e worn linoleum of the breakfast bar in the
kitchen. A sliding door in the living room that falls off the track when he opens it.
I clutch the banister as he takes me up the narrow steps, trying to fight my way to the surface.
My room is to the le now instead of the right. e handle gold instead of silver. I walk across the
hardwood and push through the door to see the walls are a bubblegum pink, the tiny space closing in
around me as I gravitate to the window.
e view is… the parking lot: rows of cars and the communal Dumpsters in the corner, currently
overflowing with trash.
Not a sunflower in sight besides the one on my arm.
My fingers find the windowsill, grabbing on to it as I hear the sound of my dad’s boots on the floor,
walking toward me.
“We can paint this, of course,” he says. “White. Or beige. Or yellow, even. Whatever you want.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to keep my shit together.
I think about this entire summer, boxes and boxes of my mom’s stu thrown in his truck to donate,
and now this. I thought we’d look at places together. e places I sent him. Places we decide on
together. Places other than the town houses my mom’s family had been oshored to when their farm
had been bought out from under them.
I thought he’d at least talk to me. I thought even when the oer came in that we’d have more time.
It’s like he’s hit the fast-forward button on everything.
“It’ll be good, Em! You’ve got a bier closet now, and you’ll be closer to school. It’s a new start,” he
says, his hand landing on my shoulder.