They Mean Well
Sep. 19th, 2011 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolThe agents from the future always come on Tuesdays. I've asked them about it. Why Tuesdays? I've asked. Tuesdays don’t really work great for me; I sometimes have stuff going on that runs late. I can't always guarantee that I'll be at home on Tuesdays at 6PM, sharp. How about Thursdays?
And the agents always smile indulgently, and they do NOT tell me that Thursdays would be okay, and they do NOT explain to me why Tuesdays are so wonderfully important. They DO tell me that they will be by again in precisely one week, that would be TUESDAY, at 6PM, sharp, and they will expect me at home at that time. I nod. I don't know what else I can do.
It's not like I can just blow off the agents from the future. Times have been tough since the steel mill closed. Jobs don't just grow on trees any more. I've, ah, had a protracted period of weighing my employment options. Rent's due and the car isn't paid off yet. But the agents from the future help me make ends meet. Oh, they don't just hand me money. They tell me, oh, you might want to make an online trade for some Exxon-Mobil stock, good things might happen this week. Or they might tell me that there's a pawn shop that has a genuine vintage Tiffany lamp, selling it for $40 but you can probably argue 'em down to $25, and Soledad's Antiques will give you five large for it.
So, yeah, I'm on the hook with the agents from the future. I need that money, dammit, and they know it. So I put up with a lot of shit. I listen to what they tell me, commit their instructions to memory, and answer all their stupid questions. Questions about my daughter, Maria.
Maria's eleven years old. The agents from the future are very interested in her, and only her. God knows they don't give a rat's ass about me, and they've never once asked boo about my son. They have an insatiable curiosity about Maria, which is weird because she's, you know, just a girl. No, I don't mean it like that; Maria's terrific and smart and makes me laugh all the time, even when I don't feel like laughing. But she's just MY girl. She's an eleven year old kid, who likes to ride her bike and watch TV and stuff like that. She's never done anything big or got into the papers, except for that one time when she came in second in the regional spelling bee and got her big blue eyes on the front page, right below the story of the closing of Gorthammer's Pharmacy. But that's just ordinary kid stuff, so I don't get what the fuss is about.
But they're definitely from the future, I can tell you that much. They proved it for me the first time they came by, two years ago. There were two of them, like always, in black suits that were just a little too shiny to look quite right. They were such slick, clean looking guys, I thought at first they were Jehovah's Witnesses. But right out of the box they told me, hello sir, tomorrow there'll be a meteor strike up in the hills; a rock the size of a dime will hit some old ranchland and blow up like a daisy-cutter bomb, and then scientists will be crawling all over this burg. And sure enough, they were right.
They came back the next week, and the next, and the next. For a solid month of Tuesdays they told me nothing but crap about the future – crazy crap that nobody could make up and nobody could fake, but it all came true. The last time they told me I could be the one millionth customer at the Sears in Brayley, if I wanted to be. I asked when, and they just smiled. Whenever you decide, they said. I never go to Brayley and shopping at Sears is a straight-up rip-off, but I drove the thirty miles and walked through the doors. Noisemakers went off and balloons fell, and Miss Ozarkana County handed me a bouquet of flowers. That store had been open for fifty years if it was open a day. I won a shopping spree and a ride-on tractor, which I wound up selling back to them for almost eleven hundred dollars. Which is a total screw job, by the way, but that's Sears for you.
Then the agents from the future turned the screws. Maria's important in the future, they said. Yeah, whatever, I said; stay away from my daughter, future perverts. No, we're serious, they told me. We're going to make you a deal. We're going to help you. We're going to help you take care of her. But you have to tell us stuff about her, and sometimes you have to do things for her that will be good for her in the long run. And you'll get money out of the deal. But (isn't there always a 'but'?), she can never know that it's going on. We'll be her secret guardian angels from the future.
The next day my water heater melted down and I needed eight hundred bucks immediately. What can I say, I took the deal. And to be honest, they've held up their end of the bargain. They've helped me take care of Maria, because with that money I've put food on the table and kept her in school clothes. So that's something. Of course, the rest of their 'help' I could do without, if I had a choice in the matter.
Take last month, for instance. "It is vitally important," one of the agents from the future said at the time, "that Maria feel uncomfortable around black people."
"Say that again?" I asked. "What, are you saying I have to make sure my daughter is a racist or something?"
"No no no," replied the agent from the future, frowning in disappointment.
"That's an unfortunate twisting of our words, and it's inaccurate and hurtful," scolded the other.
"We want Maria to grow up to be open, and accepting, and equally loving of all people," clarified the first agent from the future.
"However, it is important that she not feel comfortable around black people," added the second.
"Really," I said.
"Yes, really," they both said at the same time.
"You'll have to have a talk with her about this," one of the agents from the future said. "You need to suggest to her, as strongly as possible, that while people of all races and cultures are fundamentally equal, she may have some reason to feel uncomfortable, possibly even threatened, in the presence of African-Americans."
"But I don’t believe that," I protested. "Black people are okay."
"What you believe is unimportant," said the first agent from the future sternly. "You have to believe us when we tell you that this is all in Maria's best interests."
"We know," insisted the second agent. "We're from the future."
"Yeah," I said heavily. "I know."
Later on I sat down to dinner with the kids. I let Maria try to make meatloaf again. She almost had it right; a little less ketchup and it would be dynamite. I struggled over how to broach the subject.
"So," I said, after a few minutes, "how's the social scene at school?"
"Well, it's good I guess," said my daughter, chewing as she spoke, which is disgusting but whatever. "I had a fight with two girls in PE but we made up so it's all cool."
"Yeah?" I said. I chewed on some string beans before firing the next salvo. "So I got a question: do you have any black kids in your classes?"
"Sure," said my daughter. "Why?"
"Oh, I dunno," I stuttered. I stammered some lie about hearing our town was overwhelmingly white.
"Well, there's two girls who are black in my class. And one boy." The corners of her mouth turned up as she said the word 'boy'. My eyes narrowed. Was my daughter starting to get interested in boys? Was she, God help me, going to start getting her period? I wasn't feeling ready for that, NOT AT ALL. Then my son grinned.
"We have two black girls in my math class," he said, "and let me tell you: they are both HOT." And that was pretty much the end of any productive conversation over THAT dinner.
The next week the agents from the future were not happy with me. "You were supposed to project an impression that black people are dangerous and untrustworthy," one complained. "We have reviewed the logs of last week's activities, and there was no such intimation whatsoever!"
"We are very disappointed with your performance in this matter," said the second agent from the future. "We expect you to make amends this week."
"All right, I'll tell her, I dunno, that a black person ripped me off once," I said.
"That's not going to be enough, I'm afraid," said an agent primly.
"More significant action is going to have to be taken, if you wish to prevent disaster," said his companion.
"Disaster?" I didn't like the sound of that. "What kind of disaster are we talking about?"
"The kind where Maria's life is forever ruined by your inaction," an agent replied.
"And you've seen this? In the future?" I asked.
"Of course we have," one agent from the future answered.
"But it can be prevented," the other added. "All you have to do is tell Maria that under no circumstances is she to associate with black people."
"That's crap," I said. "I won't do it." The agents' faces clouded over.
"Then you're a terrible father," one of them accused.
"A broke, terrible father," said the other.
"Look, this is only a temporary prohibition," said the first. "You can have a change of heart in a short while, say a month. You can tell her then that you were wrong and you're sorry, and she should feel free to associate with whoever she likes. But for right now…."
"…especially right now…" inserted the second.
"…you need to get this message across. Firmly."
"OR ELSE." The agents from the future took off.
Later that night I sat my daughter down. "Look," I said, "we have to have a serious talk about something."
She already had her PJ's on. "Okay, what?" she asked brightly. She had pigtailed her hair which was wet from the bath.
"Well," I said, swallowing hard and feeling like a complete turd. A broke turd who loves his daughter. "Well, I want to talk to you about black people."
Maria's eyes shone. "Oh, Isaac!" she said, all grins.
What? "Who's Isaac?" I asked.
"He's the boy. The boy!" Maria pushed me in the chest. "The black boy in my class I was telling you about! Yesterday he gave me a little giraffe. He folded it out of a piece of tinfoil. Look, here it is. Isn't it clever?" The giraffe had been sitting on her bedside table, closer to her pillow than her clock. I turned it over in my hands. It was lopsided and could have been any kind of quadruped, really. It was just a stupid giraffe. But I remembered middle school, and I saw my daughter looking at it fondly, and I knew it wasn't just a stupid giraffe.
"So what about him?" my daughter wanted to know. I shook myself out of my reverie and handed the giraffe back.
"Oh, I dunno," I said. "Nothing I guess."
"I think," my daughter said hesitantly, "that he might ask me to the dance next week."
"Dance?" I asked. "What dance?"
I am, apparently, a terrible father. If I had actually read the dumb PTO newsletter I'd have known all about the Undersea Blues dance that would be held in the gym a week from Friday. My daughter filled me in. Not ready for this, I told myself. But the next day we went shopping for a dress, betting on the come that somebody would ask Maria. Somebody named Isaac, she hoped.
The next day I sold my car to cover the credit card bill. The following Tuesday the agents from the future weren't angry. They were pale, frightened.
"Listen," one said, "we have a confession to make."
"We work for an important family in the future. Your family," said the other.
"They're putting a lot of pressure on us to get the job done here, and they're concerned. Very concerned." The agent from the future was actually mopping his brow with a very white, slightly shiny handkerchief.
"So we are prepared to take extraordinary action to ensure your cooperation in a bold plan to end this nonsense once and for all."
"Why don't you just spit out what it is that you're trying to do?" I asked.
"That's not how we operate," said the first agent loftily. "Now then, the state lottery is up to twelve million dollars and some change. We have the winning numbers. You stand to win half that purse and be set for life."
"The drawing's next week," said the second agent from the future. "All you have to do is follow these instructions precisely." He handed me a slip of paper with a few sentences written in plain typeface. I scanned it, then balled it up and threw it to the ground.
"I am not going to rip her dress," I said angrily, "and I'm not using racial slurs on some poor kid."
"You're blowing this way out of proportion!" exclaimed one agent, stooping to retrieve the paper wad and stuff it into his mouth.
"And if you don't do it," said the other, "I can guarantee you that our support for you and your family will dry up forever." The other nodded, still chewing vigorously.
"Gentlemen," I said, "I believe our business relationship is concluded." I closed the door in their faces and turned around. Maria was standing behind me with a crazed look on her little face.
"How much of that did you catch?" I asked. She ignored me and held up her cell phone, grinning from ear to ear.
"He asked me!" she said, starting to jump up and down. "And I said yes!"
On the day of the dance, I had to walk my daughter to the school. The agents from the future were standing on an opposite street corner as we went by. One of the silently held up a dollar bill and lit it on fire. I ignored them. Maria didn't notice them in the first place.
I got her to the gym. There was a young black kid standing at the door wearing a sport coat that was two sizes too big. He had a corsage in a plastic box. "Stay here, Dad," Maria said seriously to me, then ran over to him. She had never said anything like that before to me; I felt like I had been punched in the gut. They talked animatedly, uncertain what to do with their hands. He shyly handed the box to her and she awkwardly took it. I suddenly felt like a peeping Tom and turned to go. The walk home loomed ahead of me, longer than it used to be.
The agents from the future were gone from the street corner, but a different young man was there. He wore a long duster with a faint and incongruous sheen to it, and smiled at me in a friendly way. His skin was the color of coffee and cream, and his eyes were very blue, just like Maria's. He crossed the street to join me.
"Good job," he said. He didn't have to explain, I knew he was from the future. I was pretty sure he was my grandson, but I felt it might be rude to ask.
"Why has our own family," I asked, "been jacking with me and Maria all this time?"
The young man looked at his feet. "They mean well," he said.
"Don't make excuses," I said. "How can you make excuses?"
"There's no way to explain," he said. "But they're family. Sometimes family does things we don’t like, but we put up with it anyway. And see? There was nothing to worry about all along. I knew you'd do the right thing."
"Yeah," I said, squinting into the setting sun. "Well, fat lot of good it'll do me now, broke and all. I just hope Maria doesn't starve to death before there's a family to make excuses for. Losing my job really screwed me up, you know?"
"Sure," he said. "Sorry about that. The, uh, family did that. Pulled a few strings to make the parent company close the mill, just so you'd lose your job and be more compliant right around now."
"Of course they did," I said. "When you get back to the future, would you please make sure to let everybody know that I'm writing them all out of my will?"
"I will," he said seriously. "But, listen: don't worry about money. You're going to be just fine."
I cocked my head. "How's that?" I asked. "You got a hot tip for me too?"
"No," he said. "But the agents from the future couldn't have promised you something major like a lottery win. That would have been a major swing in history, too major to be allowable. There's only one way they could promise you that, and that's if you were going to win it all along."
THAT brought me up short. "Yeah?" I said. "What numbers?"
The young man saluted. "Whatever you decide," he said, turning and walking back the other way.
And the agents always smile indulgently, and they do NOT tell me that Thursdays would be okay, and they do NOT explain to me why Tuesdays are so wonderfully important. They DO tell me that they will be by again in precisely one week, that would be TUESDAY, at 6PM, sharp, and they will expect me at home at that time. I nod. I don't know what else I can do.
It's not like I can just blow off the agents from the future. Times have been tough since the steel mill closed. Jobs don't just grow on trees any more. I've, ah, had a protracted period of weighing my employment options. Rent's due and the car isn't paid off yet. But the agents from the future help me make ends meet. Oh, they don't just hand me money. They tell me, oh, you might want to make an online trade for some Exxon-Mobil stock, good things might happen this week. Or they might tell me that there's a pawn shop that has a genuine vintage Tiffany lamp, selling it for $40 but you can probably argue 'em down to $25, and Soledad's Antiques will give you five large for it.
So, yeah, I'm on the hook with the agents from the future. I need that money, dammit, and they know it. So I put up with a lot of shit. I listen to what they tell me, commit their instructions to memory, and answer all their stupid questions. Questions about my daughter, Maria.
Maria's eleven years old. The agents from the future are very interested in her, and only her. God knows they don't give a rat's ass about me, and they've never once asked boo about my son. They have an insatiable curiosity about Maria, which is weird because she's, you know, just a girl. No, I don't mean it like that; Maria's terrific and smart and makes me laugh all the time, even when I don't feel like laughing. But she's just MY girl. She's an eleven year old kid, who likes to ride her bike and watch TV and stuff like that. She's never done anything big or got into the papers, except for that one time when she came in second in the regional spelling bee and got her big blue eyes on the front page, right below the story of the closing of Gorthammer's Pharmacy. But that's just ordinary kid stuff, so I don't get what the fuss is about.
But they're definitely from the future, I can tell you that much. They proved it for me the first time they came by, two years ago. There were two of them, like always, in black suits that were just a little too shiny to look quite right. They were such slick, clean looking guys, I thought at first they were Jehovah's Witnesses. But right out of the box they told me, hello sir, tomorrow there'll be a meteor strike up in the hills; a rock the size of a dime will hit some old ranchland and blow up like a daisy-cutter bomb, and then scientists will be crawling all over this burg. And sure enough, they were right.
They came back the next week, and the next, and the next. For a solid month of Tuesdays they told me nothing but crap about the future – crazy crap that nobody could make up and nobody could fake, but it all came true. The last time they told me I could be the one millionth customer at the Sears in Brayley, if I wanted to be. I asked when, and they just smiled. Whenever you decide, they said. I never go to Brayley and shopping at Sears is a straight-up rip-off, but I drove the thirty miles and walked through the doors. Noisemakers went off and balloons fell, and Miss Ozarkana County handed me a bouquet of flowers. That store had been open for fifty years if it was open a day. I won a shopping spree and a ride-on tractor, which I wound up selling back to them for almost eleven hundred dollars. Which is a total screw job, by the way, but that's Sears for you.
Then the agents from the future turned the screws. Maria's important in the future, they said. Yeah, whatever, I said; stay away from my daughter, future perverts. No, we're serious, they told me. We're going to make you a deal. We're going to help you. We're going to help you take care of her. But you have to tell us stuff about her, and sometimes you have to do things for her that will be good for her in the long run. And you'll get money out of the deal. But (isn't there always a 'but'?), she can never know that it's going on. We'll be her secret guardian angels from the future.
The next day my water heater melted down and I needed eight hundred bucks immediately. What can I say, I took the deal. And to be honest, they've held up their end of the bargain. They've helped me take care of Maria, because with that money I've put food on the table and kept her in school clothes. So that's something. Of course, the rest of their 'help' I could do without, if I had a choice in the matter.
Take last month, for instance. "It is vitally important," one of the agents from the future said at the time, "that Maria feel uncomfortable around black people."
"Say that again?" I asked. "What, are you saying I have to make sure my daughter is a racist or something?"
"No no no," replied the agent from the future, frowning in disappointment.
"That's an unfortunate twisting of our words, and it's inaccurate and hurtful," scolded the other.
"We want Maria to grow up to be open, and accepting, and equally loving of all people," clarified the first agent from the future.
"However, it is important that she not feel comfortable around black people," added the second.
"Really," I said.
"Yes, really," they both said at the same time.
"You'll have to have a talk with her about this," one of the agents from the future said. "You need to suggest to her, as strongly as possible, that while people of all races and cultures are fundamentally equal, she may have some reason to feel uncomfortable, possibly even threatened, in the presence of African-Americans."
"But I don’t believe that," I protested. "Black people are okay."
"What you believe is unimportant," said the first agent from the future sternly. "You have to believe us when we tell you that this is all in Maria's best interests."
"We know," insisted the second agent. "We're from the future."
"Yeah," I said heavily. "I know."
Later on I sat down to dinner with the kids. I let Maria try to make meatloaf again. She almost had it right; a little less ketchup and it would be dynamite. I struggled over how to broach the subject.
"So," I said, after a few minutes, "how's the social scene at school?"
"Well, it's good I guess," said my daughter, chewing as she spoke, which is disgusting but whatever. "I had a fight with two girls in PE but we made up so it's all cool."
"Yeah?" I said. I chewed on some string beans before firing the next salvo. "So I got a question: do you have any black kids in your classes?"
"Sure," said my daughter. "Why?"
"Oh, I dunno," I stuttered. I stammered some lie about hearing our town was overwhelmingly white.
"Well, there's two girls who are black in my class. And one boy." The corners of her mouth turned up as she said the word 'boy'. My eyes narrowed. Was my daughter starting to get interested in boys? Was she, God help me, going to start getting her period? I wasn't feeling ready for that, NOT AT ALL. Then my son grinned.
"We have two black girls in my math class," he said, "and let me tell you: they are both HOT." And that was pretty much the end of any productive conversation over THAT dinner.
The next week the agents from the future were not happy with me. "You were supposed to project an impression that black people are dangerous and untrustworthy," one complained. "We have reviewed the logs of last week's activities, and there was no such intimation whatsoever!"
"We are very disappointed with your performance in this matter," said the second agent from the future. "We expect you to make amends this week."
"All right, I'll tell her, I dunno, that a black person ripped me off once," I said.
"That's not going to be enough, I'm afraid," said an agent primly.
"More significant action is going to have to be taken, if you wish to prevent disaster," said his companion.
"Disaster?" I didn't like the sound of that. "What kind of disaster are we talking about?"
"The kind where Maria's life is forever ruined by your inaction," an agent replied.
"And you've seen this? In the future?" I asked.
"Of course we have," one agent from the future answered.
"But it can be prevented," the other added. "All you have to do is tell Maria that under no circumstances is she to associate with black people."
"That's crap," I said. "I won't do it." The agents' faces clouded over.
"Then you're a terrible father," one of them accused.
"A broke, terrible father," said the other.
"Look, this is only a temporary prohibition," said the first. "You can have a change of heart in a short while, say a month. You can tell her then that you were wrong and you're sorry, and she should feel free to associate with whoever she likes. But for right now…."
"…especially right now…" inserted the second.
"…you need to get this message across. Firmly."
"OR ELSE." The agents from the future took off.
Later that night I sat my daughter down. "Look," I said, "we have to have a serious talk about something."
She already had her PJ's on. "Okay, what?" she asked brightly. She had pigtailed her hair which was wet from the bath.
"Well," I said, swallowing hard and feeling like a complete turd. A broke turd who loves his daughter. "Well, I want to talk to you about black people."
Maria's eyes shone. "Oh, Isaac!" she said, all grins.
What? "Who's Isaac?" I asked.
"He's the boy. The boy!" Maria pushed me in the chest. "The black boy in my class I was telling you about! Yesterday he gave me a little giraffe. He folded it out of a piece of tinfoil. Look, here it is. Isn't it clever?" The giraffe had been sitting on her bedside table, closer to her pillow than her clock. I turned it over in my hands. It was lopsided and could have been any kind of quadruped, really. It was just a stupid giraffe. But I remembered middle school, and I saw my daughter looking at it fondly, and I knew it wasn't just a stupid giraffe.
"So what about him?" my daughter wanted to know. I shook myself out of my reverie and handed the giraffe back.
"Oh, I dunno," I said. "Nothing I guess."
"I think," my daughter said hesitantly, "that he might ask me to the dance next week."
"Dance?" I asked. "What dance?"
I am, apparently, a terrible father. If I had actually read the dumb PTO newsletter I'd have known all about the Undersea Blues dance that would be held in the gym a week from Friday. My daughter filled me in. Not ready for this, I told myself. But the next day we went shopping for a dress, betting on the come that somebody would ask Maria. Somebody named Isaac, she hoped.
The next day I sold my car to cover the credit card bill. The following Tuesday the agents from the future weren't angry. They were pale, frightened.
"Listen," one said, "we have a confession to make."
"We work for an important family in the future. Your family," said the other.
"They're putting a lot of pressure on us to get the job done here, and they're concerned. Very concerned." The agent from the future was actually mopping his brow with a very white, slightly shiny handkerchief.
"So we are prepared to take extraordinary action to ensure your cooperation in a bold plan to end this nonsense once and for all."
"Why don't you just spit out what it is that you're trying to do?" I asked.
"That's not how we operate," said the first agent loftily. "Now then, the state lottery is up to twelve million dollars and some change. We have the winning numbers. You stand to win half that purse and be set for life."
"The drawing's next week," said the second agent from the future. "All you have to do is follow these instructions precisely." He handed me a slip of paper with a few sentences written in plain typeface. I scanned it, then balled it up and threw it to the ground.
"I am not going to rip her dress," I said angrily, "and I'm not using racial slurs on some poor kid."
"You're blowing this way out of proportion!" exclaimed one agent, stooping to retrieve the paper wad and stuff it into his mouth.
"And if you don't do it," said the other, "I can guarantee you that our support for you and your family will dry up forever." The other nodded, still chewing vigorously.
"Gentlemen," I said, "I believe our business relationship is concluded." I closed the door in their faces and turned around. Maria was standing behind me with a crazed look on her little face.
"How much of that did you catch?" I asked. She ignored me and held up her cell phone, grinning from ear to ear.
"He asked me!" she said, starting to jump up and down. "And I said yes!"
On the day of the dance, I had to walk my daughter to the school. The agents from the future were standing on an opposite street corner as we went by. One of the silently held up a dollar bill and lit it on fire. I ignored them. Maria didn't notice them in the first place.
I got her to the gym. There was a young black kid standing at the door wearing a sport coat that was two sizes too big. He had a corsage in a plastic box. "Stay here, Dad," Maria said seriously to me, then ran over to him. She had never said anything like that before to me; I felt like I had been punched in the gut. They talked animatedly, uncertain what to do with their hands. He shyly handed the box to her and she awkwardly took it. I suddenly felt like a peeping Tom and turned to go. The walk home loomed ahead of me, longer than it used to be.
The agents from the future were gone from the street corner, but a different young man was there. He wore a long duster with a faint and incongruous sheen to it, and smiled at me in a friendly way. His skin was the color of coffee and cream, and his eyes were very blue, just like Maria's. He crossed the street to join me.
"Good job," he said. He didn't have to explain, I knew he was from the future. I was pretty sure he was my grandson, but I felt it might be rude to ask.
"Why has our own family," I asked, "been jacking with me and Maria all this time?"
The young man looked at his feet. "They mean well," he said.
"Don't make excuses," I said. "How can you make excuses?"
"There's no way to explain," he said. "But they're family. Sometimes family does things we don’t like, but we put up with it anyway. And see? There was nothing to worry about all along. I knew you'd do the right thing."
"Yeah," I said, squinting into the setting sun. "Well, fat lot of good it'll do me now, broke and all. I just hope Maria doesn't starve to death before there's a family to make excuses for. Losing my job really screwed me up, you know?"
"Sure," he said. "Sorry about that. The, uh, family did that. Pulled a few strings to make the parent company close the mill, just so you'd lose your job and be more compliant right around now."
"Of course they did," I said. "When you get back to the future, would you please make sure to let everybody know that I'm writing them all out of my will?"
"I will," he said seriously. "But, listen: don't worry about money. You're going to be just fine."
I cocked my head. "How's that?" I asked. "You got a hot tip for me too?"
"No," he said. "But the agents from the future couldn't have promised you something major like a lottery win. That would have been a major swing in history, too major to be allowable. There's only one way they could promise you that, and that's if you were going to win it all along."
THAT brought me up short. "Yeah?" I said. "What numbers?"
The young man saluted. "Whatever you decide," he said, turning and walking back the other way.
