Julie and Romeo Get Lucky

by Jeanne Ray

  They held up their plates and were grateful. Sarah even went so far as to say, “Grandma, these are very good.”

  I thanked her.

  After they had left for school, with Sandy throwing one last nervous look at me over her shoulder, I made a plate of pancakes for Nora and took them into the living room. “I don’t want to hear a word about white flour and gluten,” I said. “I saw you eating pizza last night.”

  “Give me the pancakes,” she said.

  “There’s been another claim on the Mass Millions tickets. We’re down to half.”

  Nora took a big bite of pancakes first and chewed them thoughtfully. “How is that possible? I didn’t hear any screaming from the kitchen.”

  “We haven’t told her yet. Sandy wanted to wait until after school.”

  “You’re going to need to tell her while you’re standing in a hospital emergency room. Is there any more syrup?”

  I went back to the kitchen and brought out the bottle. “Just save some for Romeo.”

  “I looked up the game odds online.” She pulled a Post-it note off her rolling desk and held it up to me. “The chances of a perfect match were listed at 13,983,816 to one. I wonder what that would make the odds of two perfect matches?”

  “Around 28 million?”

  Nora shook her head. “Odds don’t double. They increase exponentially. I think we’re talking about some very, very big numbers.”

  I went back to the kitchen and fired up the stove for a third time that morning and made a batch of pancakes for Romeo. When I told him about the ticket he scarcely feigned interest.

  “Maybe she’ll win again later,” he said philosophically. “Has Mort gone?”

  “I think they’re still lurking on the periphery.”

  “Has he come back to the house?”

  “Chew your pancakes. No, he hasn’t come back. You’ve got to put him out of your head.”

  “I have a lot of free time to think about things, up here. Al just brought me the unabridged Moby-Dick on tape. From now on, I plan either to be thinking about killing Mort or killing whales.”

  I took a bite of the pancakes. They were good. I had forgotten to make a plate for myself.

  “Concentrate on the whales. I think Mort has pretty much figured out that there’s no money around here for him. He’ll slink back to his cave soon enough.”

  “I still can’t believe that you married him,” Romeo said, with uncharacteristic grumpiness.

  “Youthful folly,” I said. “Nothing more than that.”

  It was only 9:00 A.M. when the phone rang. Nora was hard at work making the world safe for condominium complexes and Romeo was with Ishmael on the high seas and I was finishing up the last of the breakfast dishes.

  “Mrs. Cacciamani?” a voice asked.

  Distracted by a hundred different thoughts, I said yes.

  “This is Mrs. Oates calling from Somerville Elementary. I’m calling about Sarah.”

  I started to say, no, you want to speak to my daughter who is really Mrs. Cacciamani, but instead I gave the only logical response I could. “Is something wrong with Sarah?”

  “I’m afraid she’s quite upset. We can’t seem to calm her down.”

  Sure enough, in the background I could hear a crying that was distinctly Sarah’s. “Did she tell you what was wrong?” I asked, as if I didn’t know the answer.

  “It seems she’s been telling the children at school that she won the lottery and today several of the children told her that someone else had won. I don’t know what this is all about but I think you’re going to need to come over and get her, or at least talk to her until she calms down.”

  Poor Sarah. Who knew that there were other third-graders who followed such things? I wondered if they had told their parents and their parents in turn clipped out the article for them: “Look, Billy, that little girl Sarah must have been lying.” We should have told her in her own kitchen over the safety of pancakes. Nobody wanted to get news like that in home room.

  I said my good-byes and headed over to the school. Once again I found Sarah on the cot in the back office, the same damp washcloth covering her swollen eyes. This time Little Tony was sitting beside her, holding her hand.

  “They let me out of class so I could stay with her until somebody got here to take her home,” he told me.

  “That’s not our usual practice,” Mrs. Oates said.

  “But she was awful,” Tony said. “She was screaming. Lots of the other kids in her class started to cry.”

  “I’m glad you were here,” I said to Tony.

  “Do I get to go home, too?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think it works that way.”

  He patted his sister’s hand before returning it to the cot. “Bye, Sarah. I’ll see you this afternoon. Don’t take any wooden nickels.”

  She didn’t say a word. Tony shrugged and headed back to class.

  “I don’t think we’ve ever had a child go home from school because of the lottery before,” Mrs. Oates said, as I once again signed the pickup papers.

  I didn’t tell her that Sarah had gone home from school because of the lottery before. “It’s complicated,” I said. “But I can assure you it won’t happen again.”

  I scooped Sarah up and tried to thread her limp little arms into her coat. She just stared off into the middle distance with glassy despair. I led her out to the car, a little zombie, and buckled her in.

  “We’ll go see your mother now, would you like that?”

  She leaned her forehead against the door.

  “Sarah, you haven’t forgotten how to speak.”

  “Did you know?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, sorry to have to tell her the truth. “We thought it would be better to tell you after you got home from school.”

  And then she started to cry again.

  Big Tony was working the front of the store at Roseman’s, and Sandy and Plummy were in the back, putting together dazzling bouquets as fast as their nimble fingers could assemble them. When we walked through the door the little bells chimed. Tony took one look at us, and said, “Uh-oh.” I had a hand on each of Sarah’s shoulders for fear she would decide to experiment with fainting.

  “You knew, too?” Sarah asked him.

  “Um, just for a little while,” Tony said. “Really just for the past hour or so.”

  “She had to come home from school,” I said. “Somebody told her.”

  Sandy’s face just melted, the way you do when you hear that your child is hurt. She came over and knelt in front of Sarah and took her in her arms. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re upset.”

  But Sarah pushed away from her. “Nobody told me!”

  Plummy came out and stood beside the cash register. “Hi, Sarah,” she said.

  “Nobody told me anything! All of the kids were making fun of me. They said I’d never won. They said I was lying.”

  “But that isn’t true,” Sandy said. “You did win. You won a lot.”

  “Not anymore! I don’t have anything anymore! I may as well never have won at all.”

  “I thought you still got more than three and a half million dollars,” Plummy said in a puzzled voice.

  “That’s nothing! It’s not enough. It won’t be enough for me to have everything I want.”

  “Sarah, come on,” Tony said. “That’s a ton of money. That’s more money than almost anybody has.”

  “It was all mine, and she took half, this other person. If we had just turned the ticket in at first, we’d have all the money by now and they couldn’t make us give it back.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Sandy said.

  “You don’t know anything! None of you know anything! I want my money back!” Sarah picked up a bunch of mixed flowers from a bucket on the floor and started tearing their heads off and throwing them. Fistfuls of petals and leaves went shooting up through the air.

  Tony and Sandy and I just stared at her. It was impossible to kn
ow what to say. I felt sorry for her, I really did, but now I was thinking it was time to reconsider corporal punishment. No one believed that the problems of parenting could be solved with a spanking anymore, but I wasn’t so sure.

  Then Plummy started to laugh. The redder Sarah’s face became, the more viciously she attacked the flowers, the harder Plummy laughed. “Daddy, I want an Oompah-Loompah,” she said in a strange British accent. “Get me an Oompah-Loompah NOW.”

  Sarah stopped shredding the flowers and looked up at her. “What?”

  “Daddy, get me the golden ticket!” she said. Then she started laughing again.

  “Why are you laughing?” Sarah said suspiciously.

  “Because you’re perfect!” Plummy said. “You’re the perfect Veruca Salt. She was my favorite character.”

  Veruca Salt was the awful little rich girl who wore fur coats and ran her father ragged with her shrieking demands. To be Veruca Salt was a very, very low thing to be.

  “I’m not Veruca,” Sarah said slowly. “I’m Charlie Bucket.”

  Plummy smiled at her, a smile so generous and true that one could think that nothing but good things could come from it. “No, my darling. Charlie was a poor, generous boy who loved his family. Veruca was a smart, stylish girl who loved her money. Did you get to see all of the movie? Did I take it before you had the chance to see the whole thing?”

  “No,” Sarah said, puzzling hard over what she was hearing. “I saw it.”

  Plummy leaned over the counter and locked Sarah in with her great, dark eyes. “So tell me now, and really think about it—which one are you?”

  And Sarah did think hard. She thought so hard, you could almost see her letting go of the mink bedspread and the chauffeured limousines and the Mickey Mouse waffle iron. You could almost see her reaching back for the people she loved. She dropped the few stems she was still holding and wiped her hands against her skirt. She straightened up her shoulders. “I’m Charlie Bucket,” she said.

  Maybe all of us are connected to our better selves by a strong rope, and if we get too far away from the person we used to be, we can use that rope to pull ourselves back. It’s easy to get lost in distractions, especially when you’re eight, and maybe when you’re eight it’s also easier to find your way back to your essential goodness. After all, there isn’t enough time to fall too far away from what’s right.

  Sarah left the flower shop that day the girl I knew before, a person who was mostly just herself and slightly modeled on the better aspects of Shirley Temple and an impoverished English boy who got a lucky break.

  We held a family conference that night in the living room, with Romeo joining in on a little speakerphone that Nora plugged into her cell. And while Mort and Lila and Nicolette were not invited, they weren’t left out, either. Nicolette’s education was a topic of discussion. It was agreed by a unanimous vote that Alex would be in charge of operating the trust that would look after the money, and because only one person could sign the back of the ticket and claim the prize, we also agreed that that person should be Sandy.

  “But Mom bought the ticket,” she said. “She should have to do it.”

  “But then she has to gift the money to Sarah and the rest of the family, which creates another layer of taxes,” Alex said. “This way it stays directly in your family.”

  And while it was decided that everyone on the board of the trust, which was all of us, should agree on how the money was spent, it was also agreed that Sarah, who was the owner of the ticket, should get to choose a few things she wanted without having to get anyone’s okay.

  Sarah closed her eyes and thought about it. She thought like Charlie Bucket. “I want my mom to have a house. I want Nicolette to go to college, and I want both of the Tonys to be doctors.”

  “I don’t want to be a doctor,” Little Tony said.

  “Tough. I say you have to be.”

  As for Big Tony, he put his face in his hands so we wouldn’t see him cry.

  Then Oompah-Loompah wandered into the room and rubbed her back against Sarah’s legs, and so it was decided that there should also be a very nice donation to the animal shelter where Oompah-Loompah had come from.

  It took Alex a week to finish the paperwork, then on a Thursday one week before Thanksgiving, Sandy and I picked Tony and Sarah up after school so that we could all go to the Lottery headquarters in Braintree together and turn the ticket in. The kids were practically hopping up and down in the backseat.

  “It isn’t like we’re going to walk in there and they’re going to hand us all the money in a sack,” Sandy explained.

  “I know,” Sarah said, “but it’s so exciting!”

  “I just need to make a quick stop at the bank,” I said, and turned the car into my little branch office. Everyone piled out with me; it was too cold to wait in the car.

  “Hi, Sally,” I said. “I need to get back in the lockbox.”

  “Sure thing,” she said. Sally came back with a big loop of keys. “Hey, Sarah, are you here to open up a big account?”

  “Maybe later,” Sarah said.

  “Well, we’re still waiting.”

  I picked up the piece of tinfoil, right on top where I’d left it, and handed it to Sandy.

  “That’s what you came to get?” Sarah said.

  “I didn’t like carrying it around.”

  “But it’s not in there.”

  We all looked at Sarah, then Sandy peeled back the tinfoil. It was the top panel of a Cheerios box, cut down to the size of a lottery ticket.

  “Sarah,” Sandy whispered. “Where’s the ticket?”

  “It’s in my shoe.”

  “You switched it?”

  She nodded. “I thought it would be safer with me.”

  Sarah unlaced her left winter boot and produced yet another piece of tinfoil from underneath her sock.

  “I’m feeling a little ill,” I said slowly, and sat down in a chair at the long table used to sort through important family papers. I had locked away a Cheerios box top, while the winning ticket continued to pound the playgrounds of Somerville backed by a piece of a Kix box.

  “Did anyone know the ticket was in your shoe?” Sandy asked.

  Sarah shook her head.

  “So all that time you were telling kids that you’d won, and they didn’t believe you, you never took out the ticket and showed them?” Little Tony asked.

  Sarah rolled her eyes, the last vestige of her now all-but-forgotten bad behavior. “Really,” she said. “I’m not stupid.”

  Epilogue

  KNOWING WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN THE FUTURE HAS never made the future get here any more quickly. Nora’s stomach continued to rise at an alarming rate, until finally she lost the privilege of sitting up in bed and had to spend her last two months ruling her empire while flat out on her back. She said that any cervix would be incompetent when it came to holding in so much baby.

  She valiantly managed to keep them with her until two weeks into her seventh month, at which time she gave birth to two girls and a boy, all of whom were healthy and tiny. They named one of the girls Ella for my mother, and another girl Rose for Alex’s grandmother, and the boy they called Charlie for no reason at all. Nora said she’d just gotten used to hearing the name.

  She came home a full month before the babies, who slept in warm plastic incubators back at the hospital until they grew to more respectable sizes. In that month Nora spent her days at the hospital, but at night she and Alex kept coming back to our house to sleep in the hospital bed that was still in the living room. I never asked why, nor did I ask if she planned to bring the babies back to live with me as well.

  They were so cute, those babies, and as crazy as it would have been, I would have given it a try. I was finally discovering what Nora would know someday herself: Your children leave soon enough, and all the time you have them around you is actually a wonderful thing.

  Tony and Sandy and Little Tony and Sarah found a house that was halfway between my house and Romeo’s in
Somerville, and on the day they finally left, which was the same week that Nora and Alex and the rental bed had gone, I stood in the driveway and cried.

  Tony was working on his applications to medical school, Sandy had become the star florist after Plummy’s return to New York, Sarah had taken up the cello, and Little Tony, after many questions and badgering, finally admitted that what he’d really like to have were tap-dancing lessons. I still see them almost every day, but it isn’t the same as running into them in the kitchen in the middle of the night, which is a good thing and a sad thing, too.

  As for Romeo, in the time that it took him to finish Moby-Dick he made a full recovery. One day I came home from the flower shop (I had started going back for a couple of hours in the afternoon) and found Romeo sitting in the armchair, dressed and reading the newspaper. All of his belongings, which had slowly migrated over to my house these past months, were folded neatly into three paper bags, which were sitting by the door.

  “I’m ready,” he said.

  “Ready for what?” I asked, but it was only a hopeless stall on my part. I knew what he meant. I also knew that I wasn’t ready at all.

  He put his hands on his thighs with a light slap and stood up. It was so elegant and effortless a gesture, anyone would have thought he was a man who stood up by himself all the time.

  “I’m ready to face the stairs. Dominic came by today and gave me a clean bill of health. He says I’ve been loitering, actually. He thinks I could have gone a long time ago.”

  “But what did Al say?” I always knew the priest was on my side.

  “Al said it was about time I started making you sandwiches for a change.”

  I closed my eyes, hoping to keep back the big tears that were welling up there, but eyelids can only do so much.

  “Hey,” he said, and came and put his arms around me. “Are these tears of joy?”

  I shook my head. “I just didn’t think it would be today,” I said.

  Romeo kissed one eye and then the other, then he took my hand and led me to the top of the staircase. “Sarah’s not down there waiting for me, is she?”