Good Luck (5 page)

What if I end up homeless?
I wondered, my anxiety kicking up into hyperdrive.
What if I can’t pay my mortgage, and the bank seizes my house, and I end up turning into one of those sad, aimless souls panhandling on the street corners?

Then sanity returned.
Get a grip
, I told myself.
You will not end up homeless. If worse comes to absolute worst, you can always move back in with Mom and Dad.

This thought was nearly as depressing as the image of myself living on the street. And that’s when I popped the cork from the second bottle of champagne.

Now, the morning after, I was facing up to the consequences of consuming one-and-a-half bottles of champagne on an empty stomach, as I hadn’t eaten since the grilled cheese sandwich I’d had at Maisie’s. Thinking of food made my stomach turn queasily. Meanwhile, Harper Lee wasn’t giving up her one-dog crusade to get me up.

“Please,” I begged her. “Can’t you grow an opposable thumb and let yourself out just this one time?”

Harper Lee pounced again and made another attempt to shower me with smelly dog kisses. It was more than I could take. I gave in.

“Fine,” I groaned. “Fine. I’ll get up.”

Somehow I managed to ease myself into a sitting position. Once the initial wave of nausea passed, I stood. Slowly, painfully, I staggered to the front door. There I made the mistake of glancing at my reflection in the large mirror that hung next to the door. I looked like nine shades of shit. My skin was so pale, it was almost green. My dark curls were mashed up one side, making my head look like a poorly trimmed shrub. My eyes were puffy and red.

And then I realized: This was what hitting bottom looked like.

But before I could dwell on this grim thought, Harper Lee began to twirl in circles and bark out a series of high-pitched yelps. I knew that bark. It meant,
If you don’t let me out right this instant, I’m going to pee on the rug
. So I turned away from the mirror and opened the front door.

Harper Lee shot out past me, moving like a black streak, and headed straight for her favorite patch of grass. I staggered back a little. If I’d thought the light had been bright in the home, where it was at least partially filtered through the blinds, then I was completely unprepared for the siege of blinding white sunlight that now hit me. I lifted my hand up to shield my eyes. Elliott had come by at some point and retrieved his things off the front porch. A pity, really. I would have enjoyed a good bonfire. I’ve always believed that the therapeutic effects of revenge are seriously undervalued in our modern culture.

Harper Lee finished her business and went to stand at the bottom of the driveway, just next to the plastic-wrapped newspaper sitting there. This was our daily morning routine—first a pee, then I’d bring the paper in to read over breakfast, then we’d go for a walk.

And then I’d go to work.

Well, that wasn’t going to happen. We needed a new routine.

“Come on, Harper Lee,” I said. “I don’t want the newspaper.”

Harper Lee didn’t move. She stood her ground and stared balefully back at me.

“The news is depressing. It’s all about war, and terrorism, and rampant crime. And I can’t deal with any of that right now. I’m already all stocked up on depression.”

Harper Lee barked once. She wasn’t going to let this go.

I sighed and staggered down the stairs and driveway in my bare feet. As I passed by the hose, which Elliott must have left out the last time he watered, I stubbed my big toe on the sprinkler.

“Ouch!” I glared at Harper Lee, who had decided to sit and wait for me. She opened her mouth, unfurled her tongue, and began to pant unrepentantly. Limping now, I made my way down to her, muttering under my breath about how nobody likes a stubborn dog. When I finally reached her, I bent over—a painful move in my condition—and picked up the newspaper.

“Happy?” I asked Harper Lee. She jumped to her feet and trotted jauntily ahead of me on our way into the house.

When I got inside, I slid the newspaper out of its plastic sock and dropped it on the kitchen counter. Moving slowly, I got out the plastic container I kept Harper Lee’s dog food stored in, dumped a half cup into her bowl, filled the other bowl with water, and then switched on the coffee machine. Then, remembering I’d been too drunk to grind beans the night before, I switched off the coffeepot and poured myself a glass of water instead. I took two sips and then ran for the bathroom, where I promptly vomited up the water, along with what felt like most of the champagne.

When I finally finished throwing up—I sat for a while on the floor, resting my throbbing forehead on the cool bathtub rim—I rinsed my mouth with mint mouthwash and staggered back out to the kitchen. Harper Lee had finished wolfing down her breakfast and was now nosing around her empty bowl, searching for any stray bits of kibble she might have missed. When she was satisfied that she’d gotten it all, she turned her attention to her water bowl, drinking noisily. Finally, with a contented sigh, she padded off to her wicker-basket bed by the back door, hopped in, turned three times, and settled down for the first nap of the day.

I worked up the courage to make coffee—grinding the beans was especially painful—and while it was brewing, I stood staring out the back window, my arms wrapped around myself, trying desperately not to feel anything, to push back the dark, fetid thought bog I’d sunk into the night before.

To distract myself, I glanced down at the newspaper, despite the pledge I’d made to Harper Lee that I had no interest in reading the news. The headline at the top of the paper caught my eye:

W
INNING
L
OTTERY
T
ICKET
S
OLD
L
OCALLY

S
OLE
W
INNER
T
AKES
87 M
ILLION
D
OLLAR
J
ACKPOT

Huh,
I thought, wondering idly if I knew the winner. It was possible—Ocean Falls wasn’t exactly a teeming metropolis, even when the town swelled with snowbirds escaping the northern cold for the Florida beaches and golf courses. They were already starting to stream in, even though it was only late September.

I bet it was a snowbird who won,
I thought resentfully. One of the ruddy-faced men with a closet full of green pants and salmon-pink blazers, or women with curl-set hair, coral lipstick, and lined faces set in expressions of permanent irritation. The sort who played golf all day and then went to dinner at five-thirty and knocked back three martinis before the early-bird steak special arrived at the table. The generation who’d been able to buy a four-bedroom house fifty years ago for twenty thousand dollars and then resell it at current prices for enough money to fund a retirement full of Bahamian cruises and Las Vegas vacations.

There was just enough coffee in the carafe to fill a mug. I did so, feeling a rebellious stab of pleasure. Elliott always hated it when I interrupted the brewing cycle. “You have to let the carafe fill all the way,” he’d complain. “Otherwise, the first cup is too strong and the rest are too weak. They need to mix together.”

“Here’s to you, Elliott,” I said out loud, holding my mug up in a mock salute. “You selfish, cheating piece of shit bastard.”

I took a sip of coffee and began to read the story:

An $87 million jackpot fueled record high sales of Florida Lotto tickets Wednesday, reports the Florida Lottery Commission. But it was a local Ocean Falls Quik-Rite store that sold the winning ticket with the unusual numbers: 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, and 53.

“I never seen nothing like it,” reports Bernice Purcell, owner of the Quik-Rite, located on Hibiscus Lane. “All of those numbers coming up right in a row like that. It was spooky.”

I dropped my cup of coffee. The mug fell to the ground and shattered into a dozen pieces. Coffee splattered everywhere, pooling on the beige tile floor.

“Shit,” I said, bending over reflexively to pick up the pieces. But then I stopped, stood back up, and grabbed the paper. Surely I hadn’t just read what I thought I’d read—had I? No. It wasn’t possible. I was just hungover and stressed out, and my eyes were playing tricks on me. I smoothed out the paper and began to read again, this time carefully taking in every word.

But the story stayed the same. The winning numbers were 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, and 53.

I spun around and ran out into the living room. The canvas tote bag I used for a purse was still there. I had a sudden irrational fear that the ticket wouldn’t be there, that I’d lost it or, even worse, somehow accidentally put it outside with Elliott’s things—and he and Miss Fake Tits would walk off with my multimillion-dollar jackpot. I scrambled for my wallet, yanking it out of the bag, and riffled through it, my heart pounding.

It was there. A thin white receipt with the two sets of numbers printed in black. The computer-generated quick-pick numbers…and the set I’d picked: 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53.

“Holy shit,” I whispered, slumping back against the wall, the ticket clenched in my hand. And then my legs gave out. I slid down until I was seated with my knees bent before me. I don’t know how long I’d been sitting there, stunned into torpor, when the phone rang. I ignored it. But then a moment later my sister’s voice over the answering machine filled the house:

“Lucy, are you there? Please pick up if you are. Something terrible has happened!”

Four

         
FIVE MINUTES LATER I WAS HALF-WALKING, HALF-JOGGING
to my parents’ house, still wearing the gray T-shirt and blue-and-white-striped pajama pants I’d slept in the night before. No one had picked up when I called my sister back—my sister still lived with our parents in the house we’d grown up in—and I’d actually grabbed my keys and headed to my car before remembering that the Volvo was at the shop. They lived only a couple of miles away from my house, so I decided to head there on foot.

The fear was so palpable it was practically humming through my body. What was wrong? Was it my father? I’d noticed a marked increase in the number of prescription pill bottles lined up on my parents’ kitchen counter, but when I’d questioned him about it, Dad had waved me off, insisting that it was just a side effect of getting older these days.

“Blood pressure, cholesterol, that sort of thing,” he’d said, shrugging. And I hadn’t pressed him on it, hadn’t made him tell me whether it was more serious than that.

Why didn’t I make him tell me?
I wondered, furious with myself for not pushing him on the subject.
What if something is seriously wrong and he didn’t want to burden me with the worry?
My stomach clenched at the thought.

Or maybe it was my mother…but, no, that was impossible. Mom walked five miles a day and ate a disgustingly healthy diet. She couldn’t possibly be sick—could she? I’d always thought of her as invincible. But what if—and suddenly my thoughts veered to a dark, scary place—something had happened to her? What if she’d fallen down the stairs? Or gotten into a car accident?

I sped up to a jog, until my pounding headache and the lack of a bra forced me to slow down to a walk again a half block later. I hadn’t wanted to waste time dressing, although I did take thirty seconds to hide the lottery ticket in the freezer, stashing it inside a box of frozen waffles, in case a criminal decided to burgle my house at seven o’clock on a Thursday morning and discovered a winning lottery ticket worth eighty-seven million dollars.

Eighty-seven million dollars.

I couldn’t get my mind around the surreal number. It was as though I’d woken up in someone else’s life. The life of an adrenaline junkie. The sort of woman who sleeps in black lingerie, likes to film herself having sex, and dreams of becoming a contestant on a reality television show.

When I finally turned onto my parents’ winding tree-lined street, from which you could catch glimpses of the Intra-coastal Waterway between the houses, I was sweating heavily and seriously considering throwing up again. I didn’t know the etiquette for barfing on your parents’ neighbor’s lawn, but it was probably best avoided, if possible, so I powered on.

My parents’ house was the fifth one on the right. It was a white two-story colonial with a glossy black door and black shutters. There were the ubiquitous palm trees gathered in the front yard, along with a huge, flowering hot-pink bougainvillea and a fragrant white jasmine vine my mother had trained over an archway. I hurried up the walk and burst through the door without knocking.

“Hello? Is anyone here?” I called out.

A pack of barking, whining, howling dogs surged toward me. They ranged in size from a tiny teacup Yorkie all the way up to a tall, rangy greyhound, and as a group they were an intimidating lot. Over the years, more than one delivery man had gotten sight of the pack and, with a look of terror on his face, stopped in his tracks, dropped whatever boxes he was carrying, and sped off in the opposite direction. But I knew that the dogs—which my mom, with my dad’s grudging approval, fostered until she found them good homes—were for the most part harmless. My mom had strict rules barring aggressive or dangerous dogs from the pack, although we’d all lost a fair number of shoes to our canine guests. The dogs surged around me now, grinning and wagging their tails, but I didn’t stop to pet them as I normally would.

“Mom!” I called out. “Dad?”

“Lucy? Is that you?”

My mom’s voice. It sounded like she was in the kitchen. Heart pounding, I hurried back there—and found Mom and Dad sitting at the breakfast table, reading the paper and drinking coffee. There was a plate of blueberry scones and a carafe of orange juice on the table. They looked up with twin expressions of surprise on their faces.

“Hi, honey,” Dad said. “To what do we owe this surprise?”

My mother smiled brightly. “I’m glad you’re here. Your father and I were just talking about the Humane Society’s Paws and Claws Ball. I’m committee chair, and I’ve been trying to think up something catchy and different to do this year. What do you think about a casino theme?”

The Humane Society was one of my mother’s many causes. Every animal-welfare group in the country had her on speed dial. She also fed feral cats, patrolled the beaches for turtles’ nests so they could be cordoned off, and, of course, there were the dozens upon dozens of dogs she’d fostered over the years. Harper Lee had even spent a few days as part of the pack, until I saw her and fell instantly in love. The dogs followed me into the dining room and—apparently exhausted by their guard duties—flopped onto the floor. My mother suddenly frowned, looking me over.

“Are you wearing pajamas?”

My parents were both already dressed. My dad was wearing a blue button-down shirt, charcoal-gray slacks, and a red striped tie. It was a variation of what he always wore to the office, even though he was a dental surgeon and so could wear scrubs if he wanted to. My mother had on a gray track suit with navy-blue piping on the arms and legs. Her blond-and-gray-streaked bob was smooth, and she was wearing peach lipstick.

“Emma left me a message saying there was an emergency, and no one picked up when I called back!” I said. “What’s going on? Is everyone okay?”

My parents exchanged an exasperated look.

“Emma,” my father said wearily.

“Everyone’s fine,” my mother assured me. “Emma’s just…well, she’s a bit worked up over the wedding.”

Emma, my little sister, was getting married in February and had been wedding-obsessed from nearly the moment her fiancé, Christian, had slid the princess-cut solitaire diamond onto her finger.

“She’s turned into a bridezilla,” Dad chipped in. I looked at him, nonplussed. I had no idea he’d ever heard of the term
bridezilla
.

“No, she hasn’t, Richard. She’s just having a hard time seeing the bigger picture. It happens to a lot of brides,” Mom said.

My father snorted and rustled his newspaper.

Mom looked at me, her brow furrowed in concern. “Are you feeling all right, Lucy? You look a little peaked. And why are you so sweaty?”

“Because I ran over here thinking that someone’s arm had fallen off or something! My car’s in the shop.”

“Not again! It’s time you traded in that old junker for a more reliable car,” Mom said. “How are you going to get to work? I suppose your father can drive you in on his way to the office. Can’t you, Richard?”

“Of course,” Dad said.

“So everyone’s arms are firmly connected to their bodies? No one’s been mauled by a renegade dog? Or been electrocuted in the bathtub?”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Lucy. Everyone’s fine,” Mom said calmly. “Sit down and have a scone. Do you want some coffee?”

I sat. And I accepted a mug of coffee and a scone, reasoning that even if I wasn’t hungry, the dense biscuit would probably soak up some of the cheap champagne still sloshing around in my system.

“What’s Emma all worked up about?” I asked.

“She thinks your father has set an unreasonable budget for her wedding,” Mom said.

I looked at my mother. This was the emergency? A too-low wedding budget?

“What’s the budget?” I asked.

“Fifty thousand,” Dad announced.

I gaped at him, then at my mom. “Fifty thousand dollars?” I repeated.

“Fifty thousand dollars,” Dad said again. He looked at my mother. “What do you think your parents spent on our wedding? I bet it was less than a thousand dollars.”

“Yes, well, inflation and all of that,” Mom said vaguely. Finances have never been her forte. She looked at me. “What do you think, Lucy? Is that a reasonable wedding budget?”

“Reasonable? I think fifty thousand dollars is an insanely large amount of money to spend on a wedding,” I exclaimed.

Which suddenly reminded me with an electric jolt: the lottery. I hadn’t told them about my winning ticket. Or about losing my job. Or about Elliott.

“Hmmm. I agree that sounds like a lot of money, but I’ve heard these events can get quite expensive,” Mom mused.

Dad snorted. “More than this house cost thirty years ago,” he said.

“That can’t be true,” Mom exclaimed. “Can it?”

“It most certainly is true,” Dad said. He peered at me over his reading glasses. “I hope you’re not here to announce that you’re about to get married too. I’ll have to file for bankruptcy.”

“No,” I said carefully, trying to ignore the painful stabbing sensation brought on by thoughts of Elliott and the engagement that would never be. I wondered if every time I looked back on our relationship, I would picture him having sex with Naomi and her fake breasts. A wave of nausea swept over me. No, I couldn’t think of him, not now.

“But I do have something to tell you.”

But just then, Satchel—a furry mutt of undetermined parentage—began to hump Virgil the Yorkie, causing the latter to bare his sharp little teeth and growl ferociously. Undeterred, Satchel gripped on tighter, prompting Virgil to start barking hysterically. An elderly poodle and a Corgi mix enthusiastically joined in the howling, and Mom had to wade in and separate the dogs, hushing them. Dad, meanwhile, completely oblivious to the cacophony, continued to stew about modern wedding prices.

“We may have to take out a second mortgage to pay for this event,” he said. “I don’t know why they can’t just exchange vows on the beach and then have a clambake or something. Why does it have to be such a production?”

“I don’t think Emma is the type to get married barefoot on the beach,” Mom said, as she reclaimed her seat. The Yorkie padded over and hopped into her lap. Mom patted the dog absentmindedly as she took another scone from the plate.

I drew in a deep breath. “I won the lottery last night,” I said. “The eighty-seven-million-dollar jackpot.”

My parents stared at me for a minute, and then, unbelievably, they both began to chuckle. I stared back at them, not sure why they were laughing. Maybe they’d both been teetering dangerously close to the edge of insanity, and my lottery news had pushed them over.

Oh, my God,
I thought.
I’ve broken my parents.

“That would be something, wouldn’t it?” Dad said, still chuckling. “But all joking aside, the winning ticket was apparently sold somewhere in town.”

“I wasn’t joking,” I said.

“I wonder if we know who won. Wouldn’t that be exciting? Maybe I could get whoever it is to make a donation to the Paws and Claws Ball. Or get them to donate a new roof for the shelter!” Mom enthused.

I looked from her to my dad, stunned into silence. I couldn’t believe this. They really thought I was joking.

“Where’s Emma?” I asked, pushing away from the table. My hangover seemed to be getting a second wind. It felt like my sinuses had been stuffed with cotton balls and my eyes rubbed with sand.

“She’s upstairs. Go talk to her, will you? Maybe you can calm her down,” Mom said.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I muttered, as I turned and trudged out of the kitchen.

Emma was not crying, but she was lying on her pink canopy bed with Ginger—our ancient golden retriever and the one permanent fixture in the house’s ever-changing dog pack—staring up at the ceiling with a morose expression on her lovely face. Her long, glossy hair—straight and naturally blond, like Mom’s—fanned around her on the frilly shams. Emma’s room was much as it had been when she was thirteen: the canopy bed draped in tulle, the pink walls, the framed black-and-white prints of ballet shoes.

“Hey,” I said, walking in and sitting down on the edge of the bed. Ginger snuffled and opened one eye. When she saw it was me, she closed it again, but her tail thumped in greeting.

“Hey,” Emma said in a flat monotone. “What are you doing here?”

“Are you serious?”

Emma glanced up at me, her delft-blue eyes widening. “You look awful. Are you still wearing your pajamas?”

I stared at my little sister. With her doll-like features and petite yet perfectly proportioned body, she was indisputably a lovely girl. But at the moment I had no interest in admiring her beauty; I was too busy trying not to strangle her.

“Emma,” I said through gritted teeth. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on and why you left me that message, or should I just go ahead and kill you now?”

“You sound mad.”

“Look, you psychopath: I ran all the way over here—literally ran, on foot—thinking that something really awful happened, and then when I finally get here, Mom and Dad announce that everything’s fine and that the only drama going on is that you’re wigging out about the budget they set for your wedding. And I can’t imagine that anyone in their right mind—even you—would consider that to be an emergency,” I said.