Burn: A Novel (3 page)

She ended up stumbling home at dawn, thankful for the first time that she worked second shift and could get in some sleep. She hadn’t drunk that much, just a couple of beers over the past five hours, but fatigue had sucker-punched her. Maybe twenty-three wasn’t as young as she’d thought it was, because while she’d bounced back for a while, the bounce hadn’t been all that high and now she could barely put one foot in front of the other.

She did remember to set the alarm clock, fell facedown across her bed, and didn’t move until the alarm went off eight hours later. She lay in bed blinking at the ceiling and trying to remember what day it was. Finally everything clicked—oh, yeah, it was Friday—and the first thought that followed was that Dylan was gone, gone, gone. The second thought was that she had to go to work. She jumped up and hit the shower, humming a happy little song in honor of her freedom, and with remarkable good humor put on a clean ugly blue shirt. Not even the shirt could depress her today.

Why hadn’t she realized before how
over
she and Dylan were? Why had she let him keep hanging around? Sure, it hadn’t actually been that long, but she’d let the situation go on a good four or five weeks longer than she should have, kind of hoping it would improve when she knew damn good and well it wouldn’t. It never did. She had to learn to see around that big blind spot she had. Well, not quite a blind spot. She’d known Dylan wasn’t what she’d wanted him to be, just like her dad wasn’t the dad she wanted. She’d given up on good old dad a long time ago, but at first, for a couple of weeks, Dylan had shown real promise. Then reality had set in, and it hadn’t been pretty.

She got through her shift at work, and faced the weekend off with the same sense of lightheartedness. She could do what she
wanted, when she wanted. And what she wanted was to go out again with Michelle, so they made another night of it and closed down Bird’s again.

It wasn’t until dinner break at work on Monday that she heard about the lottery. She was in the dingy break room with her coworkers, unenthusiastically chewing on a ham sandwich and chasing it with a Pepsi, listening to them talk about how there’d been a jackpot winner this time, but no one had come forward with the winning ticket. “It was sold over at that convenience store on Twenty-seventh,” said Margo Russell. “What if the ticket was lost? I’d shoot myself if I lost a ticket worth three hundred million!”

“Two hundred and ninety-five million,” someone corrected.

“Close enough. What’s five million, one way or another?” Margo joked.

Jenner almost choked. She sat frozen, unable to swallow the bite of sandwich in her mouth. Her throat felt paralyzed, along with the rest of her. The convenience store on Twenty-seventh Street? That was the store where she bought the beer.

The thought, the possibility, could barely form itself. Could
she
have …? Sheer terror, the sense of standing on the edge of a cliff and teetering back and forth, made sweat form along her hairline.

Then common sense asserted itself, and the world around her swam back into normal focus. She chewed and swallowed. Nah, things like that didn’t happen to people like her. She doubted she’d won even five bucks. There had been a lot of people in there buying lottery tickets. The odds against her winning had to be at least a thousand to one, maybe two or three thousand to one. She hadn’t paid any attention to the drawing on Friday night, hadn’t checked the newspapers, hadn’t watched any news, because she’d been too busy having fun with Michelle. The lottery tickets were still right where she’d dropped them, in the bottom of her denim bag.

Several issues of that day’s newspapers were scattered around the break room. She picked one up and began flipping through
it, looking for the lottery numbers. Finally she found the notice and tore it out. A glance at the clock on the wall told her she had five minutes before they had to be back to work.

Her heart was pounding as she hurried to her locker and with shaking hands spun the dial on the padlock. Don’t get excited, she scolded herself. Getting her hopes up just meant a bigger letdown. The odds were heavily against her. This was just to make sure, so she wouldn’t spend the rest of her shift wondering about it—kind of like making sure Dylan was a loser and a jerk so she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life wondering if she’d made a mistake in dumping him. After she’d checked the tickets and satisfied herself that she hadn’t won, she’d joke about it with Margo and the others, just like she’d joked about Dylan with Michelle.

Grabbing her bag, she dumped it upside down in the locker, completely emptying it. Two lottery tickets fell free, and she grabbed them. Where was the third one? What if she couldn’t find the third one? What if she never found it and no one claimed the jackpot? She would go the rest of her life knowing she’d probably missed the chance to have two hundred and ninety-five million dollars.

Calm down. You didn’t win
. She never expected to win when she bought a ticket, she just bought them because the possibility gave her a little buzz, a little moment of “what if.”

She took a deep breath and scrabbled through the pile of stuff, heaving a big sigh of relief when the missing ticket was finally in her hand. She compared the numbers to the numbers on the scrap she’d torn from the newspaper, and almost laughed when reality smacked her in the face. None of the numbers matched. So much for her panic over not immediately seeing the ticket.

She looked at the next ticket, and looked again. 7, 11, 23, 47 … Her vision wavered; she couldn’t see the remaining numbers. She heard herself gasping for breath. Her knees went weak, and she leaned against the open locker. The lottery ticket dropped from her suddenly nerveless fingers, and absolute panic washed over her even though the ticket had gone no farther than the floor.
Sinking to her knees, she grabbed up the ticket and once again began comparing the numbers, laboriously concentrating on each one: 7, 11, 23, 47, 53, 67.

She checked the scrap of newspaper again, then again, looking back and forth between it and the ticket. The numbers didn’t change.

“Holy shit,” she whispered. “Holy shit.”

Carefully she slipped the ticket and the scrap of newspaper into her front jeans pocket, climbed to her feet, closed her locker, and clicked the padlock, then numbly went back to work putting on the ugly coveralls, the white cap that covered her hair. What if she was wrong? What if this was some joke? She’d look like a fool if she told anyone.

She’d check it out tomorrow. Maybe she’d turn on the news in the morning and find the jackpot had been claimed, and when she looked at the ticket again she’d see that she’d read one of the numbers wrong.

“Are you okay?” Margo asked as Jenner slipped into place. “You look kinda green.”

“I just got too hot.” The instinct to keep everything quiet was too strong for her to ignore, even with a good-hearted soul like Margo.

“Yeah, this heat is miserable. You need to drink more water.”

Somehow she made it through the rest of her shift, somehow she managed to drive home, though she gripped the steering wheel of the Blue Goose so tightly her hands ached. She was breathing too fast, gulping in air, and her lips were numb, her head swimming. She blew out a big sigh of relief when she finally steered the Goose into her driveway, cut the headlights, killed the engine. Just as if her heart wasn’t galloping a hundred miles an hour, she got out and carefully locked the Goose’s doors, went up the steps to her creaky little porch, unlocked her own door, and stepped inside the safety of home. It wasn’t until then, after re-locking the door behind her and she was safe, that she pulled the ticket and the piece of newsprint from her front jeans pocket, laid
them side by side on the coffee table, and forced herself to look at the numbers again.

7, 11, 23, 47, 53, 67.

They were the same on both pieces of paper.

She checked them one more time, then did it again. She got a pencil, wrote down the numbers on the ticket, then checked that against the piece of newspaper. Nothing changed. Her heart began to race again.

“Holy shit.” She swallowed hard. “I’ve won the lottery.”

S
LEEPING WAS IMPOSSIBLE
. T
HE CLOCK TICKED INTO
the small hours while Jenner paced back and forth, stopping occasionally to look at those numbers: 7, 11, 23, 47, 53, 67. They didn’t change, either on the ticket or the scrap of newspaper, no matter how many times she checked them. Maybe the newspaper had made a typo in one of the numbers; maybe there’d be a correction in the next edition. And maybe she was crazy, for almost wishing the numbers were wrong, but … holy hell, two hundred and ninety-five million dollars!

What was she supposed to do with that kind of money? Five thousand, yeah. She could handle five thousand. She knew exactly what she’d do with it: pay off the Goose, buy some new clothes, maybe go to Disney World or something like that. She’d always wanted to go to Disney World, no matter how hokey that sounded. Five thousand bucks would be easy.

Even twenty thousand, she’d have no problem with. Fifty thousand … she’d buy a new car, sure, maybe find a small house that was fixable, but run-down enough that she could afford the payments, and use the rest of the money as a down payment. She was okay with renting—she didn’t have to do any repairs, though getting
the landlord to do anything was a pain in the ass—but owning her own place would be kind of nice, too.

Beyond fifty thousand, though, was scary territory. She didn’t know anything about investments or crap like that, and while she didn’t have any experience with extra money,
real
extra money instead of just a twenty here and there, she was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to stick it in a bank and just let it sit. She was supposed to
do
things with the money, move it around according to the mysterious ways of the market, put it to work.

She didn’t know how to do any of that. She knew what stocks were, sort of, but had no real idea what a bond was or what it did. Scam artists would be waiting in line to take advantage of her—good old Jerry, her dad, would be first in line—and she was lost as to how she could protect herself.

After yet another look at the ticket, nausea overwhelmed her and she ran to the bathroom, hanging over the cracked old toilet for a long time even though nothing except hot water came from her mouth. Finally she took some deep breaths, and bent over the sink to splash cold water on her face. Then she braced her hands on the cool porcelain and stared at herself in the mirror, knowing that the reflection she saw was a lie. According to the mirror, nothing had changed, yet she knew that
everything
had changed, that the life with which she was comfortable no longer existed.

She looked around the bathroom, at the dingy tile on the floor, the cheap fiberglass shower, the flyspecked mirror, and she almost collapsed under the overwhelming sense that what she saw wasn’t real. All of this stuff suited her fine. This was where she belonged. She was comfortable here, in a run-down, aging duplex in a going-downhill neighborhood. In another ten years this area would be a slum, and she’d have moved on to some place that was pretty much on the same level this one was now, and she’d have been okay with that. This was her life. She scraped by, she managed to pay her bills, and she and Michelle had the occasional blast at Bird’s. She knew where she fit in this world.

But this was no longer her world, and the sickening realization
was enough to make her bend over the toilet once more, her stomach heaving. The only way she could keep things the same was to never claim the winnings, and, yeah, like
that was
going to happen. She wasn’t stupid. Nervous and nauseated, maybe, but not stupid.

She would be saying good-bye to almost everything from this life. She thought of all her friends, both casual and close, and of them all she thought only Michelle would stick. She and Michelle had been friends practically from the day they’d met, back in high school. She’d spent as much time at Michelle’s house, probably more, than she’d spent at her own home—wherever that had happened to be, with Jerry dragging her from place to place and always leaving behind a couple of months of unpaid rent. The way he figured it, he paid rent for only two or three months out of the year, and the rest of the time he got to live in a place for free because it usually took the landlord a couple of months to kick them out. In Jerry’s world, only fools paid rent every month.

Jerry was going to be a problem. It wasn’t a question of
if he’d
cause trouble, but
how much
.

Jenner had no illusions about her dad. She hadn’t seen him in months, didn’t even know if he was still in the Chicago area, but as sure as the sun rose in the east he’d turn up as soon as he heard about the lottery, and do whatever he could to get his hands on as much of the money as possible. Therefore, she had to take steps to protect the money before she claimed it.

She’d read about people setting up plans and stuff that sheltered the money, sometimes waiting weeks before going public that they’d won. That’s what she would do. She’d keep working at Harvest until she actually got the money, but as soon as possible—today—she’d find someone whose job it was to know what to do with this kind of cash.

By three a.m., she was exhausted, both physically and mentally. She stripped down and climbed into bed, then set her alarm for eight just in case she was able to doze off. She had too much to do to risk oversleeping. Around dawn, she fell into a fitful sleep, waking
often to check the clock, and finally getting up before the alarm went off. After taking a shower, she nuked a cup of instant coffee and sipped it while she blow-dried her hair and put on makeup.

At eight thirty, she was watching the clock as she flipped through the phone book’s advertising pages. There was nothing under “money handlers,” which was frustrating, because how the hell else would it be listed? Maybe there was something under “banks.” What she learned was that there were a lot of banks in the Chicago area, and most of them advertised themselves as “full service” banks. What was that? Maybe they pumped gas for your car and checked the oil. Banks cashed checks, right? What else was there? Unfortunately, the ads didn’t say what those services were, so she was still in the dark.