Running on Empty

by Don Aker

  He reached across the table and enfolded her right hand in his. “Just enjoy it, okay? Happy anniversary.”

  “But—”

  “Allie,” he said, “I was there, remember? I know how much this cost you.” He pointed with his other hand toward the buckle he was wearing, the polished silver gleaming in the candlelight.

  “It wasn’t about the money,” she said softly. “I just wanted something to show you how much you mean to me.”

  He smiled at her, his heart suddenly full, and more than anything he wanted to stand up, take her in his arms, and kiss her, but he could see their server returning with their water, so he just squeezed her hand again. “That’s what this is for, okay? So just enjoy it.”

  They did. After eating amazing salmon appetizers, she had the lamb while he enjoyed a thick steak prepared exactly the way he liked it—just a shade above blue. Their server, a young man with the kind of smile you saw in “after” photos in dental magazines, told him it was Kobe beef, which came from cows massaged daily to improve the quality of the meat. That detail amused both of them, and Ethan briefly wondered what Ike would think of it. He was pretty sure he knew, though—he could almost hear the cook’s familiar snarl.

  The server seemed to anticipate their every need, appearing from nowhere whenever water glasses needed refilling or plates needed whisking away. Ethan imagined some of his Chow Down regulars eating there, and he caught himself grinning at the image of “the girls” grilling this guy for personal information.

  And then, of course, he was thinking about Boots and how they’d ended up at Carruthers in the first place.

  It wasn’t until dessert arrived—crème brûlée for her and amaretto cheesecake for him—that Allie mentioned the lottery ticket. “So,” she said, her spoon making tiny indentations in the crème brûlée, “you said you got one of your customers to cash the ticket for you?”

  Ethan allowed a forkful of the incredible cheesecake to melt on his tongue before telling her he’d run into the guy outside the convenience store where, moments before, a scanner had identified the ticket in his hand as a winner to the tune of $1,008.62. “His name’s Hornsby. I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going, just staring at the ticket as I left the store. I walked right into him.”

  Allie spooned some of the crème brûlée into her mouth, and he saw her eyes close in that way they did whenever something truly delighted her. Like their first evening at Irene’s Ice Cream Emporium when she’d sampled cranberry coffee, which was still her favourite. So he was surprised when she laid the spoon down now, dabbed at her lips with her napkin, then neatly folded it and placed it on the table beside her water glass.

  “You don’t like it?” he asked.

  “It’s fantastic.”

  “But you’re not finishing it.”

  She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have let you talk me into ordering dessert,” she chided him softly. “I know when I’ve had enough.”

  He looked at her and smiled—her self-control was just one more thing he loved about her—but that didn’t stop him from putting another forkful of cheesecake into his mouth. Unlike Allie, he would eat until the food was gone, self-control be damned.

  Oddly, she didn’t return his smile. Studying her face in the soft candlelight, he felt as though something had just happened, had just passed between them, but he wasn’t sure what it was. “Allie—” he began, but she’d spoken at the same time. “Sorry, what’d you say?” he asked.

  She said nothing for a moment. Then, “How’d that Hornsby guy cash the lottery ticket for you? All the banks were closed when you ran into him, and ATMs don’t usually allow withdrawals that big.”

  “He had the money on him.”

  “He just happened to be carrying around a thousand dollars?”

  “I think,” said Ethan, returning to his cheesecake, “he was carrying a lot more than that.”

  “And that didn’t seem a little weird to you?”

  Ethan felt the muscles in his jaw grow tense, but he didn’t want the evening to take a wrong turn. “The good news,” he explained, eating the last of his rich dessert, then leaning across the table for a spoonful of hers, “is that he had the money I needed. I had to get it from somebody. I couldn’t cash the ticket myself.”

  Allie’s expression told him she was still hung up on something about Hornsby, but before she could say more, he continued, “When the guy saw how stunned I was, he asked what was up, so I told him about the scanner. He didn’t believe me at first, so I took him back into the store and showed him. He offered me eight hundred bucks on the spot for the ticket. I held out for nine.”

  Allie turned toward that expansive wall of glass, and somehow he knew she wasn’t looking at the water or the lights or the moon beyond it. He felt her studying his reflection, watching his mirror image as he watched her. She turned to face him. “I have a problem with lottery tickets,” she said softly.

  “Why?”

  She ran the tips of her fingers across the folded napkin, slowly tracing and retracing a design on it that he didn’t recognize. “Do you remember me telling you how my parents moved to Halifax because of my dad’s job?”

  Ethan nodded.

  “That was the truth.” She continued tracing the design on the rich fabric. “But it wasn’t the whole truth.”

  He blinked. “I thought your old man wanted to try something different, which is why he took that consulting job.”

  She turned to the glass wall again, and he sensed her trying to find the words that would explain what had happened, as if she were getting it clear in her own head first. “He did want to try something different. But he didn’t really have a choice.”

  Now Ethan was beginning to understand. “So he got fired from his other job?” he asked.

  She frowned. “No. He was really good at it.”

  Just then their server returned. “Was there a problem with the crème brûlée?” he asked, nodding at what was left in the dish.

  Allie shook her head. “It was great. I’m just stuffed.”

  Looking at Ethan’s empty plate, the server asked, “Will there be anything else, sir? More coffee?”

  Ethan liked that he’d called him “sir.” The guy had just increased his tip by a few bucks. “Only the check, thanks.”

  The server removed their dishes, skilfully balancing china, silverware, and crystal water goblets. After he’d left, Ethan turned to Allie. “So if your dad wasn’t fired, why’d he have to leave his job?”

  When she began to speak, there was a sadness in her voice, like a shadow beneath each word. “You know those lottery pools you hear about? How people working at the same place all pay a certain amount of money each month to buy tickets?”

  Ethan nodded.

  “Dad was in charge of the lottery pool at his office. Ten people belonged to it, and they played the same numbers every week, along with Insta Piks when the prize got really big. Both the 6/49 and Lotto Max. Dad usually bought the tickets several draws in advance, but then I began noticing him stopping at kiosks or ducking into stores when we were going somewhere together. Lots of times. Then every time. He couldn’t seem to walk by one.” She hesitated, and Ethan could almost feel her forcing herself to go on. “Bethany noticed it, too.”

  Their server returned and laid something on the table beside Ethan, a leather folder with a stylized C embossed in gold on the front. “I hope you return to Carruthers soon,” he said. “Have a good evening.”

  “You, too,” said Ethan absently, ignoring the folder. He turned back to Allie. “Go on,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Not here.” She bent down to get her purse on the floor beside her, then stood up.

  Ethan stood, too, reaching for the leather folder and opening it. Seeing the total on the bill inside, he raised his eyebrows, breathing in through clenched teeth as he mentally calculated the tip he’d have to leave. He took out his wallet, grateful that he hadn’t made it to the bank that day after all. If h
e had, he likely wouldn’t have kept enough cash. He counted out the bills and placed them in the folder before closing it, thinking of the number of hours he’d worked at The Chow Down to make in tips what he’d just left for their server. Then he turned and took a final look around him. He doubted he’d be returning to Carruthers any time soon.

  Outside, he took Allie’s hand and they walked in silence. Clouds obscured the moon and there was a bite in the November air. He felt Allie shiver and he released her hand, draping his arm over her shoulder and drawing her close. When they reached her mother’s parked Buick, which Allie had borrowed, Ethan knew she had a lot more to say. They continued down toward the harbour a block away, stopping when they reached the boardwalk that followed the water.

  As they stood staring across the harbour at Dartmouth on the other side, he felt Allie lean into him. He held her even closer and waited for her to continue. Finally, she did.

  “It was such a stupid thing, you know? People buy lottery tickets all the time. Dad did it even before he took over that office pool. Even Mom picked up a ticket now and then if the jackpot got ridiculous, like twenty or thirty million. Doesn’t everybody?”

  Ethan nodded, his face moving against her hair. It smelled sweet and earthy, like peaches.

  “The funny thing—” She shook her head. “No, nothing about it was funny.” A moment passed before she continued, “The ironic thing was the pool never won any money. Nothing big, I mean. Some free plays and, once in a while, a few dollars they just rolled over into more tickets. Mostly, though, they didn’t win anything, you know?”

  They stared at the harbour some more, the breeze strengthening, roiling the water so that waves began to slap the piers beneath them.

  “I don’t know who realized it was a problem first,” Allie continued. “Bethany, I think.” She paused. “Maybe Mom knew earlier but she didn’t say anything. To us, anyway.” She reached up and tugged Ethan’s arm around her further. He wrapped both arms about her and she turned into him, her face against his chest. When she resumed her story, Ethan had to strain to hear her words.

  “One night, Dad was supposed to take Bethany and her friends to a movie, another one of those dumb werewolf flicks that had just opened, but he got delayed, and by the time they reached the theatre, the line up was enormous. Completely sold out, so he ended up having to take them to one of those animated Disney films instead. Bethany was pissed.”

  “Pretty hard on the guy, wasn’t she?”

  “That’s what I thought,” Allie explained, “until I heard what had made them late. He’d stopped at a gas station and was paying with his credit card when a glitch put the registers off-line. Took a while to get everything up and running again.”

  “Bethany and her friends would’ve been more pissed if they’d run out of gas and ended up walking,” offered Ethan.

  “He wasn’t buying gas.”

  “Lottery tickets?”

  She nodded. “Lots of them. Bethany said the cashier offered to void all of them so they wouldn’t have to wait, but Dad wouldn’t let her. He said one of those tickets might be a winner and he couldn’t chance it.”

  “He had a point.”

  Allie raised her face so she could look him in the eyes. “He’d bought over two hundred dollars worth of tickets, Ethan.” She let that sink in before repeating, “Two hundred dollars worth.”

  Ethan whistled under his breath.

  She pressed her face against his chest again. “Turns out he’d been buying tickets like that for weeks. Maybe months. When Mom found out, she asked him to go for counselling.”

  “Did he?”

  “Not at first.” He felt her draw a breath, release it. “It was a bad time for us.”

  Ethan thought about how Russ Fontaine seemed like such a righteous kind of guy, one of those family-first fathers. So not like Ethan’s old man. Surprising the things you didn’t know about a person, how a man could keep something that controlled him—even defined him—hidden from everyone he was close to. “What happened?” he asked.

  She drew another breath. “Mom finally threatened to leave him if he didn’t see someone.”

  “And he did?”

  She nodded, her face moving against him.

  “So his counsellor told him he had to quit his job?”

  “No. But he had to quit the lottery pool. When he asked if someone else could take it over, they wanted to know why. He could have lied, I guess, but he took his counsellor’s advice and told them the truth. It made things pretty awkward around the office.”

  “Was that why your Dad decided to find another job?”

  Allie didn’t respond right away. Then, “You know how we talk about everything in our family?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We talked about this, too. A lot. It wasn’t easy hearing my dad tell us how let down he felt. How people at work looked at him differently. A lot of people don’t understand addiction, don’t understand why a person can’t just say no to whatever monkey’s on their back. The gambling monkey, especially.” She shrugged. “Your parents are the ones you count on to take care of problems, right? Your dad isn’t supposed to be the problem, the reason you have to leave your home, your friends, your school. I was really mad at him for a while.”

  Ethan felt her sigh, the sound lost beneath the waves and the breeze, and he could sense her struggling against tears.

  “When we first moved here,” she continued, “I was miserable, stuck inside my own head, feeling sorry for myself. I wasn’t very friendly, and I know I put a lot of people off. But then you asked me out.” She looked up at him. “You don’t know what it meant to me. I know this’ll sound silly—”

  “Nothing you say to me could ever sound silly,” he said, his voice husky.

  She hugged him. “It was like turning a corner, like I was finally able to start over again.” Despite the tears in her eyes, she smiled. “I love you, Ethan. For that and for so much more.”

  It was the first time she’d told him that. The words caught him like a stitch. “Allie—” he began.

  She looked down. “It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything.”

  He put his hand under her chin, drew her face toward his. More than anything he wanted to speak those same words, say the thing he’d never said to anyone before. Instead, he leaned down and kissed her and, in the moments that passed, the cold had no meaning for them.

  As they headed back to the Buick a few minutes later, Ethan squeezed Allie’s hand. “I’m glad you told me about your dad,” he said. “I know it wasn’t easy.”

  “I just wanted you to understand why I wasn’t more excited about you winning that money. The lottery thing brought back a lot of bad memories, you know?”

  “I know now.” He squeezed her hand again.

  She brightened. “But at least some good can come of it, right?”

  “Me making up for forgetting our anniversary?” he grinned.

  She returned his smile. “Big time. But besides that.”

  “Such as?”

  “The guy at the diner,” she said. “That Boots person.”

  “What about him?”

  “Sounds like he can really use the money.”

  Ethan stopped, forcing her to do the same. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “His four hundred fifty dollars.”

  “What?”

  “You’re giving him half, right?”

  “Why?”

  “He bought the ticket, Ethan.”

  “Yeah, but he gave it to me. It was my tip.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Allie, I need that money. For my car.”

  She looked up at him, a measure of disbelief in her eyes. “You’d really do that? Not give half to a guy whose idea of a big treat every couple weeks is a western sandwich with no tomato?”

  Hearing her put it that way, he felt like an ass.

  “Ethan,” she continued, “didn’t that woman you work with tell you the guy eats
soup all the time? You just spent three hundred dollars on one meal.”

  He sighed. “You’re right. He deserves some of the money.”

  “You’ll give him half?”

  “How about half of what’s left?”

  Her forehead wrinkled. “Ethan—”

  He threw up his hands. “Okay, okay, you win. Half.”

  Grinning, she kissed him again, then reached into her purse and took out her mother’s car keys, pressing the button on the remote entry control.

  Seeing the Buick’s headlights flash on and off, Ethan momentarily felt like he was watching one of those video lottery terminals pay off, the strobe and sound announcing the Next Big Winner. Except that Boots’s sudden windfall effectively made Ethan the Next Big Loser. But, of course, Allie was right. The guy could really use the cash.

  “I’d give anything to be there when you give him the money,” Allie said, moving around to the driver’s door. “That’d really be something to see.”

  Ethan imagined that moment, and he grinned in spite of himself. Yeah, that’d be something to see, all right.

  He tugged on the Buick’s door handle but nothing happened.

  As he waited for Allie to press the lock release again, a gust of strengthening wind off the harbour sent paper and dirt scudding along the street, and Ethan tugged his collar up against the cold. It felt like a storm was coming.

  Chapter 17

  “So, Palmer!” roared Seth the next morning when he saw Ethan coming down the hall. He was standing beside his locker with Allie and Pete. “Why didn’t you tell us about your big win?”

  “I planned to,” said Ethan as he approached them. “I wanted to surprise Allie with it first. You two goons couldn’t keep a secret if your lives depended on it.”

  Pete faked a powerhouse right. “Nine hundred bucks, man! That’s some serious coin.”

  “Par-tee time, Palmer!” crowed Seth. “And I know just how to help you spend it.”

  Allie shook her head. “He doesn’t have a lot left. We celebrated our anniversary last night.”

  Seth whistled. “Must’ve been some celebration.” He gave Ethan an exaggerated wink and added, “Hope you got your money’s worth.”