Now in the murky light shed by the Tiffany-type globe over the well-scarred bar, Ernie silently admired Loretta, reflecting that even though she had to be in her mid-fifties, she had kept her figure very, very well. However, he wasn’t really concerned about her. The winning lottery ticket, which he had pinned to his undershirt, was warming the area around his heart. It was like having a glowing fire there. Two million dollars. That was one hundred thousand dollars a year less taxes for twenty years. They’d be collecting well into the twenty-first century. By then they might even be able to take a cook’s tour to the moon.
Ernie tried to visualize the expression on Wilma’s face when she heard the good news. Wilma’s sister, Dorothy, didn’t have a television and seldom listened to the radio, so down in Philadelphia Wilma wouldn’t know that now she was wealthy. The minute he’d heard the good news on his portable radio, Ernie had been tempted to rush to the phone and call Wilma but immediately decided that that wouldn’t be fun. Now Ernie smiled happily, his round face creasing into a merry pancake as he visualized Wilma’s homecoming tomorrow. He’d pick her up at the train station at Newark. She’d ask him how close they’d come to winning. “Did we have two of the numbers? Three of the numbers?” He’d tell her they didn’t even have one of the winning combination. Then when they got home, she’d find her stocking hung on the mantel, the way they used to do when they were first married. In those days Wilma had worn stockings and garters. Now she wore queen-sized pantyhose, so she’d have to dig down to the toe for the ticket. He’d say, “Just keep looking; wait till you see the surprise.” He could just picture the way she’d scream and throw her arms around him.
Wilma had been a darn cute young girl when they were married forty years ago. She still had a pretty face and her hair, a soft white-blond, was naturally wavy. She wasn’t a showgirl type like Loretta but she suited him just right. Sometimes she got a little cranky about the fact that he liked to bend the elbow with the boys now and then but for the most part, Wilma was A-okay. And boy, what a Christmas they’d have this year. Maybe he’d take her to Fred the Furrier and get her a mouton lamb or something.
Contemplating the pleasure it would be to manifest his generosity, Ernie ordered his fourth Seven and Seven. His attention was diverted by the fact that Loretta Thistlebottom was engaged in a strange ritual. Every minute or two, she laid the cigarette in her right hand in the ashtray, the stein of beer in her left hand on the bar, and vigorously scratched the palm, fingers, and back of her right hand with the long pointed fingernails of her left hand. Ernie observed that her right hand was inflamed, angry red and covered with small, mean-looking blisters.
It was getting late and people were starting to leave. The couple who had been sitting next to Ernie and at a right angle to Loretta departed. Loretta, noticing that Ernie was watching her, shrugged. “Poison ivy,” she explained. “Would you believe poison ivy in December? That dumb sister of Jimbo decided she had a green thumb and made her poor jerk of a husband rig up a greenhouse off their kitchen. So what does she grow? Weeds and poison ivy. That takes real talent.” Loretta shrugged and repossessed the stein of beer and her cigarette. “So how ye been, Ernie? Anything new in your life?”
Ernie was cautious. “Not much.”
Loretta sighed. “Me neither. Same old stuff. Jimbo and me are saving to get out of here next year when he retires. Everyone tells me Fort Lauderdale is a real swinging place. Jimbo’s getting piles from all these years driving the rig. I keep telling him how much money I could make as a waitress to help out but he don’t want anyone flirting with me.” Loretta scratched her hand against the bar and shook her head. “Can you imagine after twenty-five years, Jimbo still thinks every guy in the world wants me? I kind of love it but it can be a pain in the neck, too.” Loretta sighed, a world-weary sigh. “Jimbo’s the most passionate guy I ever knew and that’s saying something. But as my mother used to say, a good roll in the sack is even better when there’s a full wallet between the spring and mattress.”
“Your mother said that?” Ernie was bemused at the practical wisdom. He began to sip his fourth Seagrams and Seven-Up.
Loretta nodded. “She was a million laughs but she told it straight. The heck with it. Maybe someday I’ll win the lottery.”
The temptation was too great. Ernie slipped over the two empty bar stools as fast as his out-of-shape body would permit. “Too bad you don’t have my luck,” he whispered.
As Lou the bartender yelled, “Last call, folks,” Ernie patted his massive chest in the spot directly over his heart.
“Like they say, Loretta, ‘X marks the spot.’ There were sixteen winnin’ tickets in the special Christmas drawing. One of them is right here pinned to my underwear.” Ernie realized that his tongue was beginning to feel pretty heavy. His voice sank into a furtive whisper. “Two million dollars. How about that?” He put his finger to his lips and winked.
Loretta dropped her cigarette and let it burn unnoticed on the long-suffering surface of the bar. “You’re kidding!”
“I’m not kidding.” Now it was a real effort to talk. “Wilma ’n me always bet the same number 1-9-4-7-5-2. 1947 ’cause that was the year I got out of high school. ’Fifty-two, the year Wee Willie was born.” His triumphant smile left no doubt to his sincerity. “Crazy thing is Wilma don’t even know yet. She’s visiting her sister, Dorothy, and won’t get home till tomorrow.”
Fumbling for his wallet, Ernie signaled for his check. Lou came over and watched as Ernie stood uncertainly on the suddenly tilting floor. “Ernie, wait around,” Lou ordered. “You’re bombed. I’ll drive you home when I close up. You gotta leave your car here.”
Insulted, Ernie started for the door. Lou was insinuating he was tanked. What a nerve. Ernie opened the door of the women’s restroom and was in a stall before he realized his mistake.
Sliding off the bar stool, Loretta said hurriedly, “Lou, I’ll drop him off. He only lives two blocks from me.”
Lou’s skinny forehead furrowed. “Jimbo might not like it.”
“So don’t tell him.” They watched as Ernie lurched unsteadily out from the women’s restroom. “For Pete sake, do you think he’ll make a pass at me?” she asked scornfully.
Lou made a decision. “You’re doing me a favor, Loretta. But don’t tell Jimbo.”
Loretta let out her fulsome ha-ha bellow. “Do you think I want to risk my new caps? They won’t be paid for for another year.”
From somewhere behind him Ernie vaguely heard the din of voices and laughter. Suddenly he was feeling pretty rotten. The speckled pattern of the tile floor began to dance, causing a sickening whirl of dots to revolve before his eyes. He felt someone grasp his arm. “I’m gonna drop you off, Ernie.” Through the roaring in his ears, Ernie recognized Loretta’s voice.
“Damn nice of you, Loretta,” he mumbled. “Guess I chelebrated too much.” Vaguely he realized that Lou was saying something about having a Christmas drink on the house when he came back for his car.
In Loretta’s aging Bonneville Pontiac he leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. He was unaware that they had reached his driveway until he felt Loretta shaking him awake. “Gimme your key, Ernie. I’ll help you in.”
His arm around her shoulders, she steadied him along the walk. Ernie heard the scraping of the key in the lock, felt his feet moving through the living room down the brief length of the hallway.
“Which one?”
“Which one?” Ernie couldn’t get his tongue to move.
“Which bedroom?” Loretta’s voice sounded irritated. “Come on, Ernie, you’re no feather to drag around. Oh, forget it. It has to be the other one. This one’s full of those statues of birds your daughter makes. Cripes, you couldn’t give them away as a door prize in a looney bin. No one’s that nutty.”
Ernie felt a flash of instinctive resentment at Loretta’s putdown of his daughter, Wilma Jr., Wee Willie as he called her. Wee Willie had real talent. Someday she’d be a famous sculptor. S
he’d lived in New Mexico ever since she dropped out of school in ’68 and supported herself working evenings as a waitress at McDonald’s. Days she made pottery and sculpted birds.
Ernie felt himself being turned around and pushed down. His knees buckled and he heard the familiar squeak of the boxspring. Sighing in gratitude, in one simultaneous movement, he stretched out and passed out.
Wilma Bean and her sister, Dorothy, had had a pleasant day. In small doses Wilma enjoyed being with Dorothy, who was sixty-three to Wilma’s fifty-eight. The trouble was that Dorothy was very opinionated and highly critical of both Ernie and Wee Willie, and Wilma could take just so much of that. But she was sorry for Dorothy. Dorothy’s husband had walked out on her ten years before and now was living high on the hog with his second wife, a karate instructor. Dorothy and her daughter-in-law did not get along very well. Dorothy still worked part-time as a claims adjuster in an insurance office and as she frequently told Wilma, “the phony claims don’t get past me.”
Very few people believed they were sisters. Dorothy was, as Ernie put it, like one side of eleven, just straight up and down with thin gray hair which she wore in a tight knot at the back of her head. Ernie always said she should have been cast as Carrie Nation; she’d have looked good with a hatchet in her hand. Wilma knew that Dorothy was still jealous that Wilma had been the pretty one and that even though she’d gotten heavy, her face hadn’t wrinkled or even changed very much. But still, Wilma theorized, blood is thicker than water and a weekend in Philadelphia every four months or so and particularly around holiday time was always enjoyable.
The afternoon of the lottery drawing day, Dorothy picked Wilma up from the train station. They had a late lunch at Burger King, then drove around the neighborhood where Grace Kelly had been raised. They had both been her avid fans. After mutually agreeing that Prince Albert ought to marry, that Princess Caroline had certainly calmed down and was doing a fine job, and that Princess Stephanie should be slapped into a convent until she straightened out, they went to a movie, then back to Dorothy’s apartment. She had cooked a chicken, and over dinner, late into the evening, they gossiped.
Dorothy complained to Wilma that her daughter-in-law had no idea how to raise a child and was too stubborn to accept even the most helpful suggestions.
“Well, at least you have grandchildren,” Wilma sighed. “No wedding bells in sight for Wee Willie. She has her heart set on her sculpting career.”
“What sculpting career?” Dorothy snapped.
“If we could just afford a good teacher,” Wilma sighed, trying to ignore the dig.
“Ernie shouldn’t encourage Willie,” Dorothy said bluntly. “Tell him not to make such a fuss over that junk she sends home. Your place looks like a crazy man’s version of a birdhouse. How is Ernie? I hope you’re keeping him out of bars. Mark my words. He has the makings of an alcoholic. All those broken veins in his nose.”
Wilma thought of the outsized Christmas boxes that had arrived from Wee Willie a few days ago. Marked Do not open till Christmas, they’d been accompanied by a note. “Ma, wait till you see these. I’m into peacocks and parrots.” Wilma also thought of the staff Christmas party at the Do-Shop-Here Mall the other night when Ernie had gotten schnockered and pinched the bottom of one of the waitresses.
Knowing that Dorothy was right about Ernie’s ability to lap up booze did not ease Wilma’s resentment at having the truth pointed out to her. “Well, Ernie may get silly when he has a drop or two too much but you’re wrong about Wee Willie. She has real talent and when my ship comes in I’ll help her to prove it.”
Dorothy helped herself to another cup of tea. “I suppose you’re still wasting money on lottery tickets.”
“Sure am,” Wilma said cheerfully, fighting to retain her good nature. “Tonight’s the special Christmas drawing. If I were home I’d be in front of the set praying.”
“That combination of numbers you always pick is ridiculous! 1-9-4-7-5-2. I can understand a person using the year her child was born but the year Ernie graduated from high school? That’s ridiculous.”
Wilma had never told Dorothy that it had taken Ernie six years to get through high school and his family had had a block party to celebrate. “Best party I was ever at,” he frequently told her, memory brightening his face. “Even the mayor came.”
Anyhow, Wilma liked that combination of numbers. She was absolutely certain that someday they would win a lot of money for her and Ernie. After she said good night to Dorothy, and puffing with the effort made up the sofabed where she slept on her visits, she reflected that as Dorothy grew older she got crankier. She also talked your ear off and it was no wonder her daughter-in-law referred to her as “that miserable pain in the neck.”
The next day Wilma got off the train in Newark at noon. Ernie was picking her up. As she walked to their meeting spot at the main entrance to the terminal she was alarmed to see Ben Gump, their next-door neighbor, there instead.
She rushed to Ben, her ample body tensed with fear. “Is anything wrong? Where’s Ernie?”
Ben’s wispy face broke into a reassuring smile. “No, everything’s just fine, Wilma. Ernie woke up with a touch of flu or something. Asked me to come for you. Heck, I’ve got nothing to do ’cept watch the grass grow.” Ben laughed heartily at the witticism that had become his trademark since his retirement.
“Flu,” Wilma scoffed. “I’ll bet.”
Ernie was a reasonably quiet man and Wilma had looked forward to a restful drive home. At breakfast, Dorothy, knowing she was losing her captive audience, had talked nonstop, a waterfall of acid comments that had made Wilma’s head throb.
To distance herself from Ben’s snail-paced driving and long-winded stories, Wilma concentrated on the pleasurable excitement of looking in the paper the minute she arrived home and checking the lottery results. 1-9-4-7-5-2, 1-9-4-7-5-2, she chanted to herself. It was silly.
The drawing was over but even so she had a good feeling. Certainly Ernie would have phoned her if they’d won but even coming close, like getting three or four of the six numbers, made her know that their luck was changing.
She spotted the fact the car wasn’t in the driveway and guessed the reason. It was probably parked at the Harmony Bar. She managed to get rid of Ben Gump at the door, thanking him profusely for picking her up but ignoring his broad hints that he sure could use a cup of coffee. Then Wilma went straight to the bedroom. As she’d expected, Ernie was in bed. The covers were pulled to the tip of his nose. One look told her he had a massive hangover. “When the cat’s away the mouse will play.” She sighed. “I hope your head feels like a balloon-sized rock.”
In her annoyance, she knocked over the four-foot-high pelican that Wee Willie had sent for Thanksgiving and that was perched on a table just outside the bedroom door. As it clattered to the floor, it took with it the pottery vase, an early work of Wee Willie’s, and the arrangement of plastic baby’s breath and poinsettias Wilma had labored over in preparation for Christmas.
Sweeping up the broken vase, rearranging the flowers and restoring the pelican, now missing a section of one wing, to the tabletop stretched Wilma’s patience to the breaking point.
But the thought of the magic moment of looking up to see how close they’d come to winning the lottery and maybe finding that this time they’d come really close restored her to her usual good temper. She made a cup of coffee and fixed cinnamon toast before she settled at the kitchen table and opened the paper.
Sixteen Lucky Winners Share Thirty-Two Million Dollar Prize, the headline read.
Sixteen lucky winners. Oh to be one of them. Wilma slid her hand over the winning combination. She’d read the numbers one digit at a time. It was more fun that way.
1-9-4-7-5
Wilma sucked in her breath. Her head was pounding. Was it possible? In an agony of suspense she removed her palm from the final number.
2
Her shriek and the sound of the kitchen chair toppling over caused Ernie to sit b
olt upright in bed. Judgement Day was at hand.
Wilma rushed into the room, her face transfixed. “Ernie, why didn’t you tell me? Give me the ticket!”
Ernie’s head sunk down on his neck. His voice was a broken whisper. “I lost it.”
Loretta had known it was inevitable. Even so, the sight of Wilma Bean marching up the snow-dusted cement walk followed by a reluctant, downcast Ernie did cause a moment of sheer panic. “Forget it,” Loretta told herself. “They don’t have a leg to stand on.” She’d covered her tracks completely, she promised herself as Wilma and Ernie came up the steps to the porch between the two evergreens that Loretta had decked out with dozens of Christmas lights. She had her story straight. She had walked Ernie to the door of his home. Anyone knowing how jealous Big Jimbo was would understand that Loretta would not step beyond the threshold of another man’s home when his wife wasn’t present.
When Wilma asked about the ticket, Loretta would ask, “What ticket?” Ernie never mentioned a ticket to her. He was in no condition to talk about anything sensible. Ask Lou. Ernie was pie-eyed after a coupla drinks. He’d probably stopped somewhere else first.
Did Loretta buy a lottery ticket for the special Christmas drawing? Sure she bought some. Wanna see them? Every week when she thought of it, she’d pick up a few. Never in the same place. Maybe at the liquor store, the stationery store. You know just for luck. Always numbers she thought of off the top of her head.
Loretta scratched her right hand viciously. Damn poison ivy. She had the 1-9-4-7-5-2 winning ticket safely hidden in the sugar bowl of her best china. You had a year to claim your winnings. Just before the year was up, she’d “accidentally” come across it. Let Wilma and Ernie try to howl that it was theirs.
The bell rang. Loretta patted her bright gold hair, which she’d teased into the tossed salad look, straightened the shoulder pads of her brilliantly sequined sweater, and hurried to the closet-sized foyer. As she opened the door she willed her face to become a wreath of smiles not even minding that she was trying not to smile too much. Her face was starting to wrinkle, a genetic family problem. She constantly worried about the fact that by age sixty her mother’s face had looked as though it could hold nine days of rain. “Wilma, Ernie, what a delightful surprise,” she gushed. “Come in. Come in.”
The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries Page 86
