Good Luck (7 page)

The flight back to West Palm—the nearest commercial airport to Ocean Falls—was mercifully short. And when I finally got to Ocean Falls, driving north in the blue Honda Accord rental, I headed straight to my bank.

I thought about going to the drive-through but then decided that depositing a thirty-four-point-four-million-dollar check probably called for a visit to the counter. Or maybe even one of those managers’ desks lined up on one side of the bank.

The bank was quiet. There was only one person queued up ahead of me, an elderly man in golf clothes who had liver spots covering his shiny bald head. I glanced over at the desks, off to the right of the lobby. They were empty.

“May I help the next customer,” the single cashier said in a bored voice. The elderly man shuffled slowly over to her window.

I waited while they transacted his business. A young mother came in, accompanied by her two young sons, and lined up behind me. The younger boy began hanging off the velvet ropes that marked off the area.

“Quit it,” the mother said. “Wyatt, you’d better behave yourself or no
Backyardigans
when we get home!”

“You always say that,” the older boy muttered. “But you never mean it. You always end up letting him watch.”

“Well, I mean it now,” the mother said menacingly. The younger boy, evidently not believing her, continued to hang off the rope.

“I’m a monkey!” he chirruped. “Look, Ma! Oo oo oo!”

His mother looked pointedly in the opposite direction.

“May I help the next customer in line,” the teller said.

“I think she means you,” the mom said to me, her voice sharp. I started and realized she’d caught me watching her.

I turned and quickly walked over to the teller. She was a bit older than me and was carrying an extra forty pounds on her short, square frame. Her features were small for her fleshy round face, although she had lovely eyes—blue and slanted with thickly fringed lashes.

“I have a check to deposit,” I said. “But—”

“Into checking or savings?” she asked, cutting me off.

“Savings,” I said. “But—”

“Did you fill out a deposit slip?”

“Yes, but the thing is, the check is rather large,” I said.

The teller gave me a pitying look.
It may be a large amount to you,
the look said,
but I am a bank professional. I probably handle more money in one day than you make in a year.

“I assure you, whatever the amount is, I am more than qualified to take care of it,” she said. She put her hand out. Her palm was plump, and her fingers were stubby and tipped with long red nails.

Silently, I handed her the check and my deposit slip. She took them, snapped them down on the counter, and it was only when her fingers were poised over the keyboard, ready to enter in the total, that she stopped to look at the amount of the check. Her jaw dropped open.

“What the—” She leaned forward, peering down at the numbers. Then she gaped up at me. I smiled pleasantly.

“Is this supposed to be a joke?” she asked, scowling at me.

“No,” I said. “I told you it was a large amount.”

“Excuse me,” she said. She turned, picked up a phone, and, after a moment, began muttering into the receiver. Then she turned back to me. “Mr. Culpepper, our bank manager, will be out to help you in a minute.”

Unspoken were the words,
And then you’re going to get it
. As though Mr. Culpepper were some sort of a bank ninja who would come cartwheeling in, legs kicking, arms karate-chopping, ready to take out anyone who wasted his teller’s time.

“Thank you,” I said. I stepped to one side so the teller could help the mom of the little boys, both of whom were now hanging off the rope, pretending to be monkeys. The cashier’s large blue eyes kept sliding toward me and then at my check—which she’d kept—and then back at me again.

I had to wait only a moment before Mr. Culpepper came out of the office behind the lines of desks. He was fortyish and baldish, with an affable sunburned face. He wore a blue polo shirt tucked into pleated chinos, which made him look more like a golf pro than a bank manager.

“Yes, Angela, what is it?” he asked the teller.

She handed the check underneath the Plexiglas shield, which he took. I saw him glance at the amount typed out on the check. His eyes widened ever so slightly.

“It’s a joke, right?” the teller asked aggressively.

“No, I don’t think so,” Mr. Culpepper replied. He pointed to the state agency typed at the top of the check.

“The lottery?” Angela squeaked, her eyes opening wide. She stared up at me, her mouth open. I could feel my cheeks flushing, but I smiled serenely at her.

The bank manager also turned to look at me, but he managed to maintain his professional decorum. “Please come right this way,” he said, waving his hand in a flourish.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Back to my office,” Mr. Culpepper said. He smiled broadly. “We handle all of our VIP clients back there. Just so you know in the future.”

“Oh…okay.”

“Would you like coffee? Tea? Pellegrino?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

I had the feeling that Mr. Culpepper was expecting me to be impressed with this more personalized approach to my banking. I wasn’t. In fact, after spending ten minutes in his corporate beige office, listening to him drone on about the various financial-advising services the bank offered, I was starting to think I’d made a mistake not going to the drive-through.

“No, really,” I said finally. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do with the money yet. Right now I just want to deposit the check somewhere safe while I decide.”

I had to say this three more times and assure him yet again that, yes, I understood I wouldn’t have access to the money until the check cleared and, no, I really and truly didn’t want a Pellegrino, before the bank manager finally allowed me to leave. As I hurried through the eerily quiet bank lobby, I could feel the teller’s eyes resting heavily on me. She’d been joined by two other employees, a young man and an older woman I hadn’t seen before, and they were staring at me too. And suddenly all I wanted, more than anything, was to pick up Harper Lee, go home, change into sweats, and collapse on the couch. I’d been in the spotlight enough for three days. It wasn’t a comfortable sensation.

Six

         
FOUR DAYS LATER, ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE.

I later found out that it was all started by a bored reporter on a slow news day. His name was Mitch Hannigan, and he was a prematurely bald, twice-divorced semialcoholic who normally worked the crime beat for the
Palm Beach Post
. But there wasn’t any crime that day—or, at least, there weren’t any interesting crimes. Just the usual gang violence, domestic squabbles, and nickel-and-dime drug busts. So Hannigan killed the time before cocktail hour by calling some of his contacts around the state—reporters at other papers, government lackeys, even a loan shark he knew—to see if there was any buzz floating around. The sort of buzz he could grab hold of and dress up into a real story. And it was in this way—not from the loan shark, but from one of the government lackeys—that Hannigan found out that the sole winner of Wednesday’s eighty-seven-million-dollar Florida jackpot had claimed her money but had refused to allow the lottery office to release any personal information about her to the press. Not so much as a snapshot of her grinning as she accepted an enormous cardboard check. This was, apparently, unusual; most lottery winners welcomed their fifteen minutes of fame.

Sensing that there might be a story there, Hannigan began to dig. I have no idea how hard it was for him. Finding out that I’d been a teacher at Andrews Prep probably wasn’t too difficult; my name and picture were still up on the school’s Web site. Finding out that I’d been fired—and the reason why—must have been harder. Dr. Johnson didn’t condone the Andrews Prep staff speaking to the press about school matters. But somehow he managed it. Maybe one of my former colleagues broke rank to tell him the salacious school gossip.

Or maybe it was Matt Forrester, taking one last vindictive swipe at me.

The night before everything exploded, I didn’t sleep well. I knew why: Guilt was draped over me like a too-hot blanket. I hadn’t yet told my family or friends about my lottery winnings. I didn’t understand why exactly I was hiding it from them, since I knew everyone was worried about me. Emma had told my parents about my job and Elliott but when my mother called, I told her I wasn’t ready to talk about it, buying myself more time before I had to face up to this new life I’d been thrust into.

Telling them would have made it real. All of it, not just the money. And I had been living in a bubble of denial ever since I returned from Tallahassee. I stayed holed up at home with Harper Lee, wearing sweats, eating ice cream straight from the container, screening my phone calls, and watching the never-ending parade of cooking shows, which for some reason I found soothing. I’d never been much of a cook. Maybe it was something I could take up now that I had all this money…and all this time.

I had talked to a financial manager the day before. One of my dad’s golfing buddies, Mel O’Donnell, a former broker, had given me the referral. Mel hadn’t questioned why a high school teacher needed a high-end financial whiz, but then, I had been deliberately evasive, insinuating that the referral was for a friend. In any event, Mel said that Peter Graham, located in Palm Beach, was one of the best financial strategists in the area.

Peter Graham had been professional and to-the-point when I talked to him on the phone. I had an instant picture of an elegant older man sitting behind a heavy mahogany desk, with gilt-framed oil paintings of hunt scenes hanging on the walls of his wood-paneled office.

“What we need to do is sit down face-to-face, talk over your long-and short-term goals, and then draw up a plan for your future,” he said.

“Great,” I said, wondering if my plans to watch an Emeril marathon on the Food Network counted as a long-or a short-term goal.

“How soon can you come in?” Peter asked. I could hear him typing on a computer. “How’s next week for you?”

We set up an appointment for the following Friday, and then I returned to my favorite spot on the sofa, pulled an afghan over my knees, and lost myself in a haze of television. I spent the rest of the day there, getting up periodically to refill my water glass or let Harper Lee out to relieve herself. Despite my Food Network TV obsession, I hadn’t been eating particularly well. Dinner that night was a Fluffernutter on stale whole wheat bread and the last dregs of a bag of potato chips. And then I went to bed and slept fitfully.

When I woke up, there was a phalanx of reporters camped out on my front lawn.

I hadn’t known the press was out there. It did seem to be noisier outside than usual when I jolted awake, sitting bolt upright in bed, my pulse skittering. It took me a few deep breaths to calm down.

Bad dream, I told myself. It was just a bad dream.

In it, I’d walked in on Elliott screwing Naomi. (They might claim to be in love, but to me it was the harsh verbs—
screwing, fucking, banging
—that I’d walked in on; nothing as romantic as
making love
or even
sleeping together
.) But in my dream, they didn’t stop when I opened the door. They just kept going at it while I stood there staring at them, frozen in place, and when they finally finished—a noisy, headboard-banging finale—Elliott informed me that he had just won the lottery and was going to use the money to buy Naomi a boob job. That was when I woke up.

Eventually, my breathing returned to normal and my body relaxed. At first I could hear voices outside and the sound of car engines starting and stopping. Harper Lee crouched at the edge of the bed with her shoulders hunkered up, growling softly. Suddenly the phone rang, causing me to jump. I fumbled for the handset and looked at the caller ID. The number was blocked, which meant it was a telemarketer, some asshole hoping to catch me half asleep so he could talk me into changing my long-distance service or signing up for a new credit card.

I hit the talk button. “Aren’t there rules about how early you people are allowed to call?”

“Ms. Parker, this is Mitch Hannigan from the
Palm Beach Post
. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“I already have a subscription to the paper,” I said irritably.

I hung up on him. The phone rang again. Again, it was an ID-blocked number. I picked up, hung up, and then turned off the ringer.

Damned telemarketers. They all belong in hell, alongside terrorists and cheating boyfriends
. I stared up at my ceiling, and wondered if I’d be able to fall back asleep. But Harper Lee was stirring restlessly—she kept turning in circles, a sure indicator she had to go to the bathroom—and then there was the racket outside.

What the hell is going on out there? Could one of the neighbors be having a party?
I wondered.
Surely it’s too early.
I glanced at the clock. It was only 7:04, definitely too early for a backyard barbecue.

Harper Lee growled again. The fur behind her neck had ruffled up in indignation at the ruckus.

“Okay, killer, settle down,” I told her. “Shall we go investigate?”

Harper Lee obediently leapt from the bed and stood at the bedroom door. Her ears were pricked up, and her muscular little body was tense. Moving quite a bit slower, I got up out of bed, shrugged on my favorite old green terry bathrobe, and headed toward the front door, Harper Lee prancing along beside me. I opened the door—and my jaw dropped open.

Just outside my door, standing on my porch and spilling down onto the walkway, was a crowd of people. Some of them were wearing suits and holding microphones, others were dressed in T-shirts and jeans and had cameras hoisted up on their shoulders. Beyond, parked by the street, there was a fleet of white news vans. There was the briefest of moments where I stared out at them through sleep-fogged eyes and they stared back at me. And then, moving as one, they pressed forward and began to shout.

“Ms. Parker, is it true that you sexually harassed one of your students?”

“Are you worried that the student will sue you for your lottery jackpot?”

“How do you respond to the anger on the part of some that you were allowed to claim a multimillion-dollar jackpot in light of the accusations that have been made against you?”

“Ms. Parker, is this the first time you’ve been accused of soliciting sex from a student?”

I might have stood there forever, rooted to the spot in horror and mortification. But then Harper Lee began to bark, throwing her head back and baring her teeth in such an un-characteristic display of ferocity, I worried that she might bite one of the reporters thrusting a microphone in my face. I knelt down, scooped her up in my arms, stepped back into the house, and slammed the door shut. I stood there for a minute, leaning back against the door, my breath rasping loudly. The reporters were still shouting, their voices only barely muffled by the door.

“Is there any truth to the rumors that you’re pregnant?”

“How common is it for teachers to have sex with their male students? Is this an isolated occurrence or a cultural phenomenon?”

“Ms. Parker, how does it feel to be known as the Lottery Seductress?”

I blinked and shook my head, like a horse trying to dislodge a fly. This didn’t work; the reporters were still out there, still screaming questions at me. Harper Lee continued to howl with outrage, her barks drowning out the yells of the reporters. And yet I just stood there, utterly dazed, wondering how it was possible that this was my life.

My parents arrived an hour later. The police had shown up by then and marshaled the press off my property. The reporters didn’t leave, though; instead, they milled about on the sidewalk, trampling the petunias I’d planted at the edge of my lawn over the summer.

I stood at the window, peeking out through a starched cotton curtain, and watched as one of the officers escorted my mother and father up the front walk, while the press shouted questions at them. My father was holding my mother’s elbow, and they both looked pale and stricken. I was at the door, opening it just wide enough for them to enter, before they had a chance to press the doorbell.

I heard one of the reporters’ voices, loud and carrying over the rest, yell out, “How does it feel to have a sex offender for a daughter?”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” my mother said, turning to look back at the reporters. Thankfully my dad was there to shoo her inside, and I was able to slam the door.

My parents and I stared at one another for a moment. I was suddenly acutely aware of the fact that I hadn’t yet dressed or brushed my teeth.

“Lucy,” Mom finally said. “What in heaven’s name is going on?”

I bit back the hysterical impulse to start joking.
What do you mean what’s going on? It’s just a typical Tuesday in the life of Lucy Parker, the Lottery Seductress.
But I managed to restrain myself, for my father’s sake more than anything. I’d never seen him look so shaken; he seemed smaller, as though the shock of seeing his daughter featured on the morning news had caused him to spontaneously shrink.

They had seen the news, of course. I’d watched a few minutes of it earlier, before shutting it off in disgust. The story that a disgraced local teacher had won the lottery was on every channel, accompanied by an unflattering photo of me taken from last year’s school yearbook, while grim-faced anchors used words like,
serious allegations of sexual misconduct, multimillion-dollar jackpot
, and—my personal favorite—
as of yet, no comment from Lucy Parker
.