Julie and Romeo Get Lucky Page 17

  I took Sarah firmly by the arm and walked her to the hall. “Out!”

  “What!” she cried. Her mouth made a perfect round ‘O’ of incredulity. I slammed the door.

  “See this?” Mort said to Sandy. “This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about. You don’t treat a child that way. It’s abusive.”

  I was ready to go all the way. It was time for Mort and me to enter the battle we had been skirting since the day he left me for Lila, the battle that, when it ended, would allow only one of us to live. I didn’t even care if it was me. All I knew was that the world was no longer a big enough place for both of us. I jumped on him, my hands on his neck.

  “Mom, no, Mom, don’t!” Sandy cried.

  I could feel someone pulling me from behind, then I heard Lila screaming, with Nicolette screaming behind her like a weird echo. It was a flailing ball of adults, and Little Tony was crying, “No, no!” He got ahold of Lila and Sandy got ahold of me.

  “Your mother’s insane!” Mort said. “Isn’t this what I told you? You can’t raise a child in a house like this.”

  “Roth?” Romeo said thickly. “Roth? Is that you?” Suddenly, the bed was bouncing so badly I was worried we had compressed yet another piece of his spine.

  For a moment we were all quiet. Mort put his feet on the floor.

  Little Tony ran around to the other side of the bed and picked up Romeo’s hand. “It’s just me, Romeo,” he said in a quiet voice. “Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep. I was just playing.”

  “Crazy kid,” Romeo said, and reached up to touch Tony’s head. Before his hand dropped, he was asleep again.

  Nicolette was on the floor crying, and Sandy picked her up and handed her to Lila. “She needs to go downstairs,” Sandy said.

  Lila took her daughter in her arms and hugged her. She closed her eyes. “All of you are crazy,” she said quietly.

  “You didn’t see me getting into that bed,” Sandy told her, and herded her out the door.

  Mort got out of the bed.

  “Julie, we need to talk.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. Maybe it was sore from where I had tried to strangle him. But he didn’t seem to be rubbing it to make a point; he didn’t seem angry at me at all, now. It was as if none of this had happened. “If we were talking about a hundred thousand, I would be completely hands off. You know that. I’m not a greedy guy. But if it’s seven and a half million, that’s what it is, right?”

  “Get out, Mort.”

  “If it’s seven and a half million, then I have to tell you, some of that should come to us. I’m the girl’s grandfather. I’m sixty-five years old. I have a two-year-old kid.”

  “I know the numbers, Mort. Out.”

  “Business has not been perfect. It’s not been bust, but how is a guy my age going to make enough money to send a girl to college fifteen years from now? I might not even be around when she goes to college. Do you realize that? Lila says I’ve got to make provisions, and she’s right, but the chances of me getting far enough ahead to put that sort of money aside at this point—well, unless I win the lottery, I don’t know how it’s going to happen.”

  Mort amazed me. He was like one of those ants that walks in a straight line. If a building is in his way, he just goes over the top of it, never around. He never loses his focus; he never hears what anyone else is saying; he just goes ahead. I could take off all my clothes and stand on my head, and he would just keep talking.

  “Could we at least have this conversation in another room so we don’t wake Romeo up again?” I said.

  “The guy seems to be about as alert as a can of tuna fish.”

  “Look Mort, as far as I’m concerned, this is Sandy’s decision to make. If they want to cut you in on the ticket, then mazel tov. I will do nothing to stand in the way. But I’m not the person you should be pleading your case to. Get out of my bed, my room, and my house. Leave me alone. I have nothing to do with this.”

  “Oh Jules, are you really so blind? You’ve got to know the way things work around here. You’re the lynchpin, the compass. Nothing gets done unless you give it the okay. You’ve got to talk to them for me, plead my case. Otherwise, I don’t stand a chance.”

  “Roth?” Romeo said again. “Is that Mort Roth?”

  “Go back to sleep, Cacciamani. Go back to sleep in my bed.”

  Suddenly Romeo’s eyes shot open wide as if from a terrible dream. “Julie?”

  “I’m getting rid of him,” I said. “It isn’t easy, but I’m working on it.”

  Romeo reached out with one hand, his fingers clawing at the air. “Where is he?”

  “What do you think,” Mort said. “You’re going to catch me and squeeze me to death with one hand?”

  “It would work if I caught you in the right place,” Romeo said.

  I put my hands against Mort’s shoulder and pushed, but he was a very solid sixty-five. “Let me give you some advice, Mort. The next time you want me to do you a favor, send flowers. Write up a simple letter and stick it in a huge bouquet and send it to me. Systematically begging and insulting is never going to get you anywhere.”

  “Julie, get him out of here,” Romeo said.

  “Look at the way he talks to you,” Mort said, and made a tsk, tsk noise that made me want to pull out his teeth. “I’m going downstairs. We’ll talk later. I hope you’re feeling better soon, Cacciamani.”

  “Me too, Roth. I hope I’m feeling better before you leave town.”

  I closed the door behind him, but there wasn’t a lock. Mort himself had taken it off thirty years ago when Nora locked herself in our bedroom one night. I tried to put a chair beneath the knob the way they do in movies, but either it wasn’t the right chair or it wasn’t the right knob. I couldn’t get it to stay.

  “What in the hell just happened here?” Romeo said.

  “Nothing good, and nothing that’s ever going to happen again.”

  “I want to kill him, but I’m so sleepy…”

  I went over and kissed Romeo’s forehead. The veins were jumping out on the sides of his temples, which I didn’t think could possibly be good for his health. “You’ve got to put this out of your mind and get some rest.”

  “And what about you?” he mumbled, slipping under again.

  “Don’t you need some rest?”

  “I do, but first there is a certain eight-year-old I need to kill.”

  Luck seemed to be a key player in our house these days, running in the front door, then jumping out a window the moment you called for it. Good luck and bad luck become so intertwined that I could no longer tell where one left off and the other began. So when I came down the stairs, looking around, and Nora saw me, and said, “They’re gone,” I was so overcome by the good fortune of it I nearly wept.

  “Sandy said no one was killed.” Nora was holding her blanket up under her chin with both hands. She looked distinctly rattled.

  “No one was killed yet would be a more accurate depiction.”

  “From here it sounded bad.”

  I nodded. “Really bad.”

  Sandy came in from the kitchen with both of the children. There were certain moments when Little Tony and Sandy looked so much alike it was eerie. They could line up sometimes and get exactly the same expression on their faces, which in this case was one of complete exhaustion and hollow disbelief. Sarah, on the other hand, was always a little more like her father, the elusive Sandy Anderson, who the last we heard was still riding the waves in Maui. Sarah was going to go her own way in this world.

  “Sarah,” Sandy said in a rasping voice. “Apologize to your grandmother.”

  “She threw me out of the room,” Sarah said. “It was my party, and she made me leave. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Sarah—”

  I held up my hand. “It’s okay. The fact is, I’m not ready to accept Sarah’s apology anyway, so there’s no sense in forcing her to make it.”

  Sarah and Sandy and even Tony looked at m
e with complete disbelief.

  I decided to level with Sarah despite her tender age. “Sarah, you’ve got to think about how far you can push people. I know this is an extraordinary experience you’re going through, but I also know you’re a better person than this. You don’t have to behave so badly, even if you think you’re entitled to do so.”

  Great, huge tears welled up in Sarah’s eyes. “I was going to help everybody,” she said. “I was going to do nice things, but I don’t have to. All of that money is mine, and I’m going to keep all of it.”

  “Sarah, go to your room,” Sandy said. “And do it quietly. Romeo’s trying to sleep.”

  She turned on her heel without another word to any of us. I sat down on the edge of Nora’s bed, and Sandy and Little Tony collapsed on the couch. Sandy put her arm around her son. “Come here, my neglected one,” she said, and gave him a hug. “What was your name again?”

  Tony giggled. It was a lovely, unfamiliar sound.

  “Just how far out of hand have things gotten?” Nora asked. She was ready to make her assessment.

  “She called the bank,” I said. “She wanted to know how big an account she was allowed to open.”

  “Well, obviously she’s telling people,” Nora said. “Dad’s here.”

  “She’s told pretty much everybody at school,” Tony said.

  “What?” Sandy said. “She promised she wouldn’t. Why didn’t you tell us?”

  Tony shrugged. “’Cause it doesn’t matter. Nobody believes her. She’s been taking all the kids aside one at a time during recess and making them swear they won’t tell, but nobody even cares ’cause they all think she’s lying. She says she’s going to start coming to school in a limousine with her own driver. She says she’s going to have Friday’s build a restaurant in the cafeteria so everybody she likes can eat for free. She’s been telling all the kids she was going to win the lottery for a long time. Now she says she won. The kids still think she’s just talking.”

  “And what do you say when they ask you about it?”

  “I tell them she’s lying,” Tony said.

  “Smart boy,” Sandy said.

  “I don’t see why you don’t just give her the money,” he said. “She’ll be through with it in a week, and then everything will go back to normal.”

  “Do you really think your sister could spend seven and a half million in a week?” Sandy asked.

  “I think she could spend it in a day,” Tony said. “She’s really been planning.”

  Sandy looked at her watch. “Well, if she’s going to run through the whole windfall on Gummy Bears, I’d better get back to work. I told Plummy I was just going to drop off the kids and come straight back. She’s probably going to report me to the boss.”

  “Can I come with you?” Tony asked. He was enjoying the light of being the good kid and didn’t want to cut it short.

  “Sure,” Sandy said. “Bring your homework. I’ll pick up some pizza for dinner on the way back.”

  “Mushroom and onion,” Nora said. “And pineapple.”

  “On your half, maybe,” Tony said, in a way that belied his eleven-year-old disgust.

  After they were gone, Nora and I just sat there staring at each other. “It’s so peaceful,” I said.

  Nora folded her hands across her ever-expanding stomach. “When a woman is pregnant, especially for the first time, she should be allowed to lie in bed and have fantasies about how sweet everything’s going to be. The children will make me Mother’s Day cards at school, and I’ll stick them to the refrigerator door with magnets. There’ll be lots of kisses and walks in the park and birthday parties, that sort of thing. Being around here doesn’t give a person much of an opportunity to delude herself.”

  “You’ll get all of that,” I told her. “Those are the things you hold on to when you’re trying to get through the other stuff. You go back to your scrapbook and you look at those Mother’s Day cards when it’s two o’clock in the morning and your teenaged daughter hasn’t come home.”

  “If I haven’t apologized for that yet, I would like to do so now, officially: Mother, I am sorry for torturing you.”

  I got up from the end of the bed and kissed her. “Thank you,” I said. “It was nothing, really.”

  “It’s like I told Alex, for the next eighteen years we might as well just batten down the hatches and ride out the storm.”

  “Eighteen years?”

  “Until they go to college,” she said. “Until things settle down.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Well, I know college is going to be a fortune. Three kids, I can’t even imagine it. I can only hope that one of them wants to be a plumber. We’ll be working hard until they’re twenty-two to make enough money.”

  “So you think the mothering lasts for eighteen years and the financial responsibility goes for another four after that?”

  “I’m just saying the bulk of it, the thick of it. I know things will come up after that, but it isn’t the same.”

  “How old are you, Nora?”

  “I’m forty, you know that.”

  “And your sister?”

  “So you’re making a point.”

  “Your sister is?”

  She sighed. “Thirty-six.”

  I picked up one of her cantaloupe-sized feet and started to rub it. She made a small sound of pure hedonistic delight. “One of you should let me know when I’m off duty,” I said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  BEFORE I HAD ANY PERSONAL ASSOCIATION WITH winning lottery tickets, I was always stumped by the fact that winners were given an entire year to claim their prizes. Was that because the person was out of town the week of the drawing and found the ticket lying around later on? Did they then throw it in a drawer, meaning to check the winning numbers and somehow never got around to it? Or maybe the ticket got stuck in the back of a wallet, squeezed between the Mobil card and some grocery store receipts, and it languished there for more than eleven months, only to be discovered in a neatening spree.

  Every now and then people wander into the lottery office moments before it closes, seeking to redeem a grand jackpot winner that was issued 364 days before. Where had they been all that time? I used to imagine they had spent the whole year madly looking for the ticket, the way I look for my glasses or keys, turning the house upside down day after day after day. But now that I was on the inside, I saw it differently. I suspected all these Johnny-come-latelies just wanted to take the extra time to say good-bye to their old life, to stave off the chaos that money always brings. They took their final year to revel in everything that was simple.

  According to the rules of the Massachusetts State Lottery, a person under the age of eighteen cannot purchase a ticket and therefore cannot claim the prize. If a ticket has been purchased for a minor, a parent or legal guardian may claim the prize for that child and hold the money in trust until the child comes of age.

  No one loved that idea—another ten years of Sarah compiling lists of things she wanted. Well, actually Mort loved the idea, as long as he could be the guardian. He called me on the phone to tell me he had a friend who was making a killing in high-tech stock investments, and if he could just borrow the money for say six months or a year, he could double it, keep half for himself, and give the principle seven and a half million back to Sarah untouched.

  “I thought the tech boom was over,” I said.

  “That was the last tech boom. Jules, you’re so behind.”

  The Massachusetts State Lottery also said that if more than one winning ticket was redeemed, the winners shall split the jackpot. And on a very cold morning after the big bed pileup, while the Roseman-Cacciamani household continued to dither over how to manage its good fortune, a second winner stepped forward. Or, I should say, a first winner stepped forward as we had not stepped anywhere yet. Three million, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars gone, and not a single Barbie had been purchased yet.

  When I read the news, it was so early it was s
till dark outside. Alex had left the paper folded, story up, for me to find. I sat in the kitchen feeling surprisingly ill. I had to keep reminding myself that what we had lost was something we never really had, that it wasn’t ours to lose, and that it especially wasn’t mine to lose.

  “What is it?” Sandy said when she came into the kitchen. I pushed the paper over for her to see.

  “Big jackpot winner in Mass Millions,” she said slowly. “Jo Gottschalk of Lancaster, Ohio, brought the Mass Millions winning ticket into the Braintree office yesterday afternoon. Ms. Gottschalk is a legal secretary in the offices of…” Sandy put the paper down. “I guess that takes care of half our problems,” she said quietly.

  We sat there for a little while without saying anything, just feeling bad that we were so foolishly feeling bad. I got up and brought her a cup of coffee.

  “Why do I suddenly feel so broke?” she said. “Why am I sitting here thinking, but how will we get by on 3.75 million?”

  “I know what you mean. It seems like such a pathetic number.”

  “Belt tightening is up ahead,” Sandy said.

  “Good-bye, mink bedspreads.”

  “No private nanny for Oompah-Loompah.”

  “Seriously, how are we going to tell Sarah?”

  Sandy folded up that piece of the paper and stuck it in her back pocket. “Well, one thing’s for certain. I’m not going to tell her before she goes to school. It’s going to take some time to figure out how to construct this one properly.”

  “Kid, you’re broke. You’re all washed-up.”

  “You know she’s going to take this very, very badly.”

  “I wonder if we could tell her that Mort already lost half the money in the tech market,” I suggested.

  When Little Tony and Sarah came down for breakfast, I was already at the stove making pancakes.

  “Pancakes?” Tony said. “On a Thursday? Did something bad happen?”

  I turned away from the griddle, spatula in hand. Both of the children were eyeing me with deep suspicion. “Nothing bad happened,” I said. “Unless you want to count yesterday. Yesterday was pretty bad. I thought it might be good for all of us to have a clean start. Pancakes are always the best thing for a clean start.”