20

FULL HOUSE, ACES HIGH

MRS. ELIZABETH BROWN could claim several descriptors in her life. Now that she was at the end of it, she preferred to be known as a doting grandmother, a wicked backgammon player, a well-read book club attendee, and a widow of a good man. (No need to mention also being a widow of a shitty man.)

A lot of things ran in her family, including an overbite, a tendency to always be warm when everyone else was cold, and a monumental unwillingness to back down when faced with hardship. In her life, some called that “stubborn.” If they wanted to insult her sex, they called it “willful.” She called it “survival.”

A few years back, there had been a bit of a shake-up in her life. She had come across the Tao Te Ching and had given it a read. It was poetic and interesting, but a little too pleased with itself for being deep. Still, the book had a point when it said that maybe going around an obstacle was easier than smashing through. She was reminded of that when she recognized her own stubbornness manifested in her granddaughter.

It had apparently skipped her son, God bless him.

When she had gone to visit Lovely, she had easily fallen back into the caretaker role. Hoping for a warm welcome, she had instead found Lovely hungover, injured, and broken. Lovely was fragile, but Mrs. Brown had never seen the use of mincing words to spare someone’s feelings. After the ridiculous doctor’s appointment, Lovely had asked about her hereditary tendencies. Mrs. Brown had given her honest opinion and then held Lovely while she cried.

The girl finally took a shaky breath and scrubbed the tears from her eyes. “Better?” Mrs. Brown said. She nodded. Mrs. Brown took her by the shoulders. “We’re going to lunch.”

Lovely shook her head. “I’m still hungover as shit.”

“Well, I’m hungry. Do you know the last time I had good Chinese food?”

Lovely shrugged. “I guess ten years ago?”

“Ten. Years,” Mrs. Brown confirmed. “Also three months, four weeks, and one day. It’s good to keep track of things. Now, we need somewhere neutral to sit and talk.”

“Neutral? Why?”

Mrs. Brown patted her cheek, pausing to appreciate that Lovely had the same beautiful shade of dark brown skin as her departed husband. “Because I have some things to say, and I don’t want you to storm off to your room.”

“If you want to trick me into a situation I can’t run away from, you might want to hide your intentions,” Lovely said, but she smiled, as Mrs. Brown had expected.

She grinned and nodded. “It’s true. Your grandfather said I would have made a shitty spy. He hated it when I announced I was bluffing during poker games.”

“That was because half the time you were lying,” she said.

“I had to keep him on his toes,” Mrs. Brown said.

Lovely’s face fell as she looked at her injured hand. “Gran, what am I going to do?”

Mrs. Brown sighed. “I have some thoughts. If they don’t work out, we’ll get you some physical therapy. A better doctor. We’ll go to Arlington if we have to. We’ll do what we always do: whatever we have to in order to survive.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Lovely said in a low voice, as if she didn’t want Mrs. Brown to hear.

“What was that?” she asked in a firm voice.

Lovely’s angry brown eyes met hers. “I said I was afraid of that. Doing what we always do. Do we always have to take the hard road? I’m afraid, Gran, for more than just my hand.”

“And you’re afraid of what?” Mrs. Brown asked, knowing the answer but wanting her to say it.

“I’m worried that I’m too much like you.”

“Would that be so bad?”

“I don’t want to end up like you, Gran. You gotta understand that much.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes, I suppose I do. But whatever I passed down to you, you still have your own free will. Make your own choices, Lovely. You’re the one who decided to fight to protect your friend. No one made you become the Bride.”

Lovely groaned and rolled her eyes, the tension between them breaking as Mrs. Brown had meant it to. “Don’t start calling me that, please. It is bad enough reading it in the papers.”

“All right. Now, let’s go get some lunch,” Mrs. Brown said.

Mrs. Brown was pleased to see that Lucky 9, one of her favorites, was still open.

They sat at the Lucky 9 bay window where they could watch people walking on the sidewalk. Lovely swirled the stringy egg floating in her egg drop soup and stared listlessly at the hand doctor listings in Arlington on her phone as Mrs. Brown daintily slurped hot and sour soup.

She put down her spoon and dabbed her mouth with her napkin. “I have some news. And an idea.”

“About a hand doctor?” Lovely asked, not looking up from her phone.

“Not exactly,” Mrs. Brown said. “I won a contest.”

She finally looked up from her device. “When did you have time to enter a contest?”

“I haven’t been living like a barbarian, Lovely,” Mrs. Brown admonished. “We had power. We had the Internet.”

“So what was it this time?” Lovely asked, grinning.

Mrs. Brown smiled benignly. She knew she was notorious for entering any contest she possibly could. She maintained she had been a lucky person, despite what others might think when reviewing her history.

In her life, she’d won a set of dishes she didn’t need; a set of souvenir spoons from each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia; free car washes for a year; a month of free pizza; the complete works (signed first editions) of a dead thriller writer she had never heard of; and all-expenses-paid trips to Charleston, South Carolina; New York; Paris; and Columbus, Ohio—even though she hated travel.

Those were not the only contests she’d won. But the others were uninteresting or outrageous. She always refused to confirm or deny what Lovely had told her was the most interesting thing about her. Family legend had it that when Lovely’s dad had been young, Mrs. Brown had won a turkey when she entered a radio contest. She’d driven to the radio station to pick up her prize, but they presented her with a live turkey.

It was her prize and she refused to give it up, so she instructed them to put it in her trunk and she drove home. When she opened the trunk, the turkey had burst out, flailing with its wings, knocked her down, and gone running down their suburban street. Mrs. Brown had run after it, demanding it stop because she had won it fair and square. Her husband had found her at the foot of a tree, screaming at the branches where the terrified turkey had sought safety.

Lovely had been entranced by this story and had always asked for more details. How did a fat turkey get into the tree? What happened after Gramps showed up? What did they end up eating for Thanksgiving?

Her resistance to telling the story didn’t stop her husband from using the story in one of his acts. She’d given him a blank check to write stories about her, something other spouses of comedians had been shocked about. Gramps would tell stories about her idiosyncrasies, their sex life, her cooking, her parenting methods, and more.

“I lived it. He embellishes for effect. But I know the truth,” she’d once told Lovely, who had been horrified to hear that Gramps’s latest set had described how they kept their sex life alive when she was pregnant, complete with body movements, hand gestures, and slides of heavy construction equipment appearing behind him.

“But aren’t you embarrassed?” Lovely had asked.

Mrs. Brown had smiled. “Honey, when something absolutely terrible happens to you, little things stop mattering so much. Gramps loves me. He has stayed by my side during the worst times in my life. A story about me being ungainly and pregnant and still wanting to be a sex-positive woman is nothing compared to the other shit I’ve been through.”

“What’d you win?” Lovely asked, looking back at her phone. “Oh, here’s info on a doctor in Columbus. You should have saved that trip you won.”

“That was twenty years ago,” Mrs. Brown said. “You were four, and had all your digits. But actually, it is a trip for two.”

“Is this a trip like to Paris, or a ‘trip’ like going to Lake Lure?” She made air quotes when she mentioned the small North Carolina mountain town.

“I guess it’s closer to Paris,” Mrs. Brown said thoughtfully.

“Well, that sucks since you hate traveling. Who’s getting the tickets this time?” Lovely said. Mrs. Brown had given Lovely’s parents her Paris tickets right after her mother’s cancer diagnosis, and she’d sent Lovely and her cousin Marlon to New York City together the year after to see the new hit show, The Roman Guide to Slave Management. Mrs. Brown had actually left her own home to take the trip to Charleston, since it was historic.

She did use the Columbus trip for medical needs, donating the prize to the Ohio State University Patient Support Services Fund for someone who could use a free trip for an oncology appointment or treatment.

“I’m taking the trip. I can’t give these away; it’s part of the deal. No transfers.” Mrs. Brown pursed her lips. “I’m annoyed because I had entered with hopes to win the second prize. It was a new Toyota.”

Lovely put down her phone, finally giving her Gran her full attention. “Hold up, a new car was the second prize? Gran, what did you win?”

“A trip for two to the Eternity. You know, that space station the news is always going on about? They’re accepting human tourists now, and I entered a contest to win two tickets.”

Lovely stared at her. Her full spoon was right in front of her face. A cloudy drop slid down the bottom of the spoon and dripped onto the plastic tablecloth. Mrs. Brown reached over and wiped it up with her napkin.

“The alien space station? Eternity? Of course I know it, everyone knows it! How are you getting there? You hate flying!”

“I’m not flying on a plane. We have to take an alien shuttle.” She didn’t like the sound of that, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“How can you refuse to go to Paris but be okay going to outer space?” Lovely asked.

Mrs. Brown frowned. Lovely should know the answers to that. She held up three fingers, then folded the first one down. “First, we don’t waste in this family, Lovely. I didn’t refuse to go to Paris; I gave the tickets to your parents. But if I have tickets and can’t give them away, then I will use the tickets.”

Lovely rolled her eyes. Mrs. Brown’s son Marcus had once tried to explain the concept of a sunk cost fallacy to Mrs. Brown when she insisted on going to the movies, even though she was sick and had a high fever. She’d already purchased the tickets, and that was a binding agreement in her eyes. She’d shaken her head when her son had argued further. “Before you were born, your father started his career on stage getting booed and heckled, night after night. I supported us by doing some accounting work for the area churches and saved every penny we could until he started making good money performing. It is not a bad habit to be frugal. We are not going to waste money on things we are going to buy and then throw away!”

“But you’re rich now!” Marcus had complained. “You can afford to lose twenty bucks and stay home.”

“Our rainy-day fund is not to be thrown away either!” Mrs. Brown had snapped.

In a desperate need to help his mother heal and not infect everyone in the movie theater with her plague, Marcus had taken a young Lovely to the movies so the tickets wouldn’t be wasted.

No, she wasn’t going to waste these tickets; the benefits outweighed the risks by far. Not even if the prospect of leaving the planet and going among aliens terrified her. She hadn’t let terror stop her before. To her, terror was just an emotion that either helped you do what you needed to do or got in the way.

“So are you taking Daddy or Marlon with you?” Lovely asked. It was a fair question. Her father and cousin loved travel more than anyone in the family, and Marlon was a big fan of science fiction. He’d been wild for the alien visitors after First Contact, and had even met some sluglike aliens while visiting Washington, DC. He’d sent Mrs. Brown a photo.

“I considered taking Marlon, yes, but I thought I would extend the invitation to you, if you’ll come.”

Lovely’s eyes widened. “Me? Why?”

Mrs. Brown was still holding two fingers up. She folded her middle finger down. “Second, because I hear that alien technology might have a way to fix that hand of yours, and I’d love to hear you play the violin again.”

Lovely’s face darkened, but then she gave a nervous smile. “Are you serious?”

Mrs. Brown smiled. It had been a long time since she’d made someone smile like that. It felt good. “Of course I am, Lovely.”

Lovely looked dazed, no doubt still struggling out of the pit of despair that held her recent thoughts. Then she focused on Mrs. Brown’s remaining finger. “What’s that last reason?”

“Ah. Well,” Mrs. Brown said, folding the finger down. “That’s a personal one. I’ve learned how to use a gratitude journal in the last ten years, and I have a message to deliver.”

Lovely’s gaze sharpened, and she frowned. “What could you possibly need to tell someone who lives on a space station?”

Mrs. Brown smiled and pulled a copy of Time magazine out of her bag.

“Gran . . . what are you up to?” Lovely asked, a warning tone in her voice.

Mrs. Brown pushed the magazine toward Lovely. “Time has a story about all the first humans allowed on the station. There are going to be some famous people on that shuttle!”

“Still, if those other two reasons didn’t apply and you hadn’t won the tickets, would you still be so eager to go?”

Mrs. Brown thought for a moment. “I don’t know, honey, but ‘what if’s don’t matter. These are the cards we’re dealt, and I’m not folding when I’ve got a killer hand.”