Blind Luck (22 page)

“Yeah, just down the street.”

“Good, I want to buy a lotto ticket.”

She turned, and her eyes sparkled as if he had just invited her to a Caribbean island. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Oh my god, you’re serious.” She hopped three times in place.

“Why not? There’s definitely been some good things happening to me. What do we have to lose?”

“You have everything to gain, but don’t involve me in this, or it won’t work.”

The variety store smelled stale, as if nothing had been moved for years. The counter was relatively clean, but even the chocolate bar rack had a layer of dust. Dave looked at all the types of tickets laid out beneath the counter’s glass.

“What should I get?”

“Not the scratch ticket. Ask how much the weekly pot is.”

He looked at her for a second like she should ask herself before turning to the owner, who was in his fifties, with a blotch on his bald head that looked burned or diseased. “Hi, what is the pot for the weekly lotto?”

“Eight million,” he said in an Eastern European accent Dave placed as Ukrainian.

“Get a weekly ticket,” Amy said so fast it came out as one word. “But wait until I leave, I don’t want to be around when you get it.”

She left the store as fast as possible, and the clerk made eyes at Dave to indicate he thought she was crazy.

“She’s just excited. And very superstitious.”

The Ukrainian man laughed deeply and fully at her expense. Dave scribbled down a series of numbers before passing them to him.

“Good luck,” the man said as he passed him the ticket.

Dave held the ticket high. “Thank you.”

“I mean with your lady friend.” The clerk burst into another full laugh that Dave knew was at his expense.

He looked at the ticket and thought about how weird it was that a small square piece of paper could be worth eight million dollars. He waved it from shoulder to shoulder as he stepped out of the store so that Amy could see it was official.

“I can’t believe you did it.”

“Do you want to hold it?”

“Are you crazy?”

Dave smiled at the purity of her reaction. He folded the ticket once before placing it in his wallet. “How close are you with your brother?”

“Grayson?”

“Is there another one?”

“No, it’s just the question came out of nowhere.”

“He keeps showing up in my life, so I’d like to know how close you are.”

“I’d say we’re close. At least as close as he is to anyone. He’s twelve years older, so it’s not like we grew up sharing secrets, and we don’t see each other a whole lot, but he’s a good big brother. Why?”

“Because Grayson and this man he works for are taking this belief in me too far.”

“How so?”

“They won’t let me stop working with them.”

“Why do you want to? You’re making money, aren’t you?”

“You’re not listening. They won’t let me stop. I refused to pick a stock, and they told me I’d owe them what they would have invested if I don’t. That’s two hundred thousand dollars, and they said they’d make sure they’d get their money.”

“Grayson wouldn’t do that.”

“Well, he did.”

“Are you sure you’re not reading into what they said?”

Dave stopped in front of the laundromat. “Look, I don’t want to be in this situation, especially not with your brother. Not when we’re starting what we’re starting here. They took me to see some form of extreme betting the other day. These guys were racing, and they let loose a dog to see which guy it would attack; I don’t want to be involved in this stuff. I need your help. I need you to go to Grayson, tell him that we’ve started a relationship, tell him he should let me out.”

“Dogs?”

Dave nodded. Amy didn’t respond as fast as he’d anticipated. He was hoping for an “Anything for you”, but her eyes warned that the request wasn’t that simple.

“There’s got to be more to this. I know Grayson is a cutthroat businessman, but he wouldn’t be part of something like that. Someone must be making him do it.”

“Will you talk to him?”

“Yeah, I’ll talk to him.”

“Do you think you can convince him to let me out of this?”

“I’ll try.”

Twenty-Seven

Dave was sifting through Amy’s record collection when she returned from her bedroom.

“Grayson agreed to talk about your relationship, but he wants you to be there. He said he doesn’t want to get caught in a triangle of misinformation.”

“All I care about is that he agreed to meet.”

Grayson met them at a dessert café. He already had a slice of cheesecake and a piece of maple fudge in front of him when they entered. He greeted Amy with a long hug and Dave with a quick handshake.

“So…what did you want to see me about?”

Amy wiped her hands across her thighs. “I want you to know…I want you to know that I’m seeing Dave.”

“I know.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I knew something was up; you’re happy.”

“You’re okay with it?”

“I’m okay with anything that makes you happy.”

“Thank you.”

Grayson took a bite of the fudge and gestured to Dave. “I knew it would be good for you to spend some time with him.”

Amy’s eyes dropped to the floor. Being reminded that she’d met Dave through Grayson made her uncomfortable.

“You two are obviously more than friends, which is fine by me as long as it benefits you. But remember, I have a business relationship with him that precedes your relationship, and if that business doesn’t work out, it’s going to be awkward.”

Dave dropped his hands below the table so Grayson couldn’t see that they were unsteady. “Actually, I want to talk about that.”

“That sounds dramatic.”

“Dave says you’re forcing him to work with you,” Amy interjected.

“And what else has Dave said?”

Grayson locked eyes with Dave, so Dave answered. “I told her you said that I’d owe the money you planned on investing if I didn’t pick a stock, and I said you threatened that you’d make me pay what I owed.”

Grayson leaned back in his seat, and a wry smile filled his face. “He’s not lying to you.”

Amy looked like she might cry.

“He’s just being melodramatic. We said all of that. We just don’t mean any of it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“His luck only becomes a factor when he has something at stake, so the more risky a venture we bring him in on, the more important it is that he believes the stakes are high, even grave.”

“So he wouldn’t really owe you the money?”

“No.”

“Really?” Dave asked.

“That’s right, it’s all motivation.”

“And you would never hurt him?” Amy asked.

Grayson released an amused scoff. “I’m an executive, Amy, not a thug.”

Dave felt confident enough to press the moment. “So I’m free to stop working with you whenever I want?”

“Of course you are, but being that everyone is profiting from this partnership, including the two of you, I see it as my duty to make sure you participate.” His eyes locked on Amy. “If you don’t like the idea of him being coerced, talk to him, get him motivated to make a profit, and we can avoid these dramatic charades all together.”

“What about the extreme betting?”

“We took you to see how much money people are willing to invest in a man with your gift. I promise you that you won’t ever be running from a dog.”

Grayson forked the last of his cake until his phone buzzed. “I’ve got to get going.” He kissed Amy on the cheek one more time. “Stay this happy.”

They watched him leave, and Amy ripped open two more packs of sugar and added them to her coffee before stirring the liquid counter-clockwise. “What if you’re lucky?”

“Amy…”

“What if you’re lucky, and you have this incredible life waiting for you, if you just accept it?”

“That would be very sad.”

“Exactly.”

“But if there is something to this string of events that has been working in my favour, there’s nothing I can pursue as long as Thorrin feels I’m his employee.”

“Maybe the incentive they are giving you is what you need to bring out your luck.”

“Incentive? They intimidate me, manipulate me and hustle me. None of that is incentive.”

“Yet you’re making more money than you’ve ever made in your life.”

“It’s bound to stop, and I have no interest in owing them money.”

“What if it doesn’t stop, and you’re walking away from a fortune?”

“Everything stops eventually. And if there is something working in my favour, I have no control over it.”

“Because you haven’t embraced it.”

“What exactly do you want from me?”

“I want you to embrace your potential.”

“I can’t embrace anything as long as Thorrin’s in my face. So let me deal with that, then we can talk about potential.” Two hours later, Dave walked through the internet café towards Otto’s office.

Seeing a bunch of teenagers and tourists at Otto’s place of work always surprised him, but they made for effective camouflage, and the business actually turned a profit.

He knocked twice on the back door before entering to see Otto hunched over a birdcage, where a lime-green parrot sat on a perch.

“Good morning, Otto. Good morning, Otto,” Otto repeated in his best parrot-talking-human voice.

Dave smiled. “It’s almost noon.”

Most people would have been embarrassed, anyone else at least startled, but Otto didn’t even turn. That was his gift. He had the ability to become totally lost in himself at any moment.

“Fucking bird. I paid two grand for this thing. The guy assures me it’ll be talking in four weeks. I’ve had this thing three months now, and not a fucking peep.”

Dave removed three stacks of money from his jacket and put them on Otto’s desk. “That’s the rest of what I owe.”

After a quick inspection, Otto tapped each stack. “Should I be expecting the cops to follow you through the door? How’d you get all this?”

“The stock market.”

“Well, you’re on quite a run. Got any leads for me?”

“No, this just came together.”

“Things seem to be coming together for you a lot lately.”

“That depends on how you look at it.”

Otto ran an index finger and a thumb over his chin. “Well, you don’t owe money any more, and any day you don’t owe money is a good day. Now get out of here before you pass this streak on to my clients and put me out of business.”

Twenty-Eight

As he sprinkled some pepper over a bowl of tuna, Dave decided it was time to move. The apartment didn’t feel like home any more. Every morning he woke up alone there, he felt like he was in a stranger’s place, and every night he lay in bed, he felt the vacancy. The colour of the walls seemed different than what he remembered, the scatter rug a shade or two darker than when he’d bought it, and the brown couches he’d loved so much before now felt like somebody else’s decision.

He forked two stabs of tuna into his mouth before deciding to call his landlord. He sifted through the top drawer of a cabinet in search of his personal phone book, past the yellow pages, several take-out menus and a pad of paper before realizing he’d left it at work. A wave of dizziness warned him not to sit down. A flash of his desk at work crumpling like a pop can replayed itself in his mind. He thought of his phone book in the top drawer of the desk, yet another thing gone forever, and reduced to a memory no more reliable than dreams. He considered how long people would have thought of him if he had died and everyone else had lived. Most acquaintances would have mourned him for a week or two, but before long, he would fade into the recess of their memories, reserved for things they didn’t want to think about. And his dad, well his dad already claimed he didn’t know who he was some of the time, so he figured it wouldn’t take him long to choose to forget that Dave ever existed.

The thought of telling Thorrin he wasn’t going to participate in his tasks any more made him a type of nervous that caused him to lose control of his body. His stomach churned with unease, his palms and upper lip sweated, and the speed of his heartbeat left him too worked up to do anything routine.

This wasn’t the first time he’d felt this way around an older man. Small talk was never a problem, and dealing with new people proved easy enough, but asking permission or confessing anything left him as insecure as a ninth grade student with a speech impediment the day of an oral presentation. And it never got easier with age. Whether he was ten, twenty or thirty, he always avoided being vulnerable around older men.

The day he’d quit his triple A baseball team in Grade Twelve, he’d planned on telling his dad as soon as he got home. He decided against excuses or avoiding the issue and focused on admitting that he would rather work part time and spend his money taking any girl that would go with him on dates instead of enduring another practice for a game he’d lost interest in. But the plan changed when he walked through the front door. When his dad asked how practice went, instinct told him to feign a story about working on his curveball. It wasn’t just the fear of his dad’s anger that stopped him from telling the truth, the biggest motivator was avoiding the disappointment. He tried to tell himself that he didn’t care about making his dad proud, but when he stood there with a chance to be an adult and an opportunity to show he was his own person, he clung to the comfort of lies. It took two days before the coach called home to tell his dad that he’d quit the team. He could tell right away from his dad’s tone what the conversation was about, so he tried to psyche himself up for a battle to defend his decision. But his dad never asked him about his decision. He just gave Dave the penetrating look of disappointment that his son feared so much. Dave felt that look every time he was with him for the next seventeen years.

The same feelings had haunted him when he’d decided to quit his job as an accountant. The need to take some time off had underscored his thoughts for months.

He had no plan or alternative career in mind; he just needed a change of pace for awhile. One morning after a meeting with a particularly dull client, it struck him that there was no better time to take action. He drafted a resignation letter as fast as possible, but he knew he would have to wait a day to give it to Mr. Richer, because he was out of the office. The rush of freedom, possibility and change flowed through him after he left work. It was all about to happen, but when he returned to work the next morning, he felt so anxious that he had to skip breakfast. In an attempt to shun the jitters, he walked straight into Mr. Richter’s office, repeating “I quit” in his head, but there was no quitting with Mr. Richter. He was the type of nice you’re lucky to meet five times over the course of your life. The word “quit” burned in his mind, but he couldn’t will it to leave his lips. He couldn’t disappoint Mr. Richter.