“No one just gives away two and a half million dollars,” Mom says. It’s one a.m. but her eyes are bright. I am sitting on her bed and so are Severin and Bex; everyone awakened when I screamed. Even Trevor is there, sort of—the phone is lying on the bed too, and the speakerphone is on.
“You still smell like Axe,” I say to Mom.
“That might be me,” Severin says.
“It’s definitely not me,” Bex says, but she smells her underarms anyway. “I don’t even wear deodorant.” She picks at the fuzz of her moon and stars pajamas.
“You people can’t smell me.” Trevor states the obvious, his voice coming from down by the bedspread.
“Maybe it’s not real,” Mom says. She looks at the check for the millionth time. The two and a half millionth time.
“It’s the biggest tip I’ve ever heard of,” Severin says.
“It’s a fucking big tip,” Trevor says, as if it was his own idea.
“We should all go back to bed. We’ll have to figure out what to do in the morning,” Mom says.
“Figure out what to do? Figure out how we’re going to spend it,” Severin says.
“A nice fat donation to tsunami relief, for starters,” Bex suggests. “An Xbox.”
“We can get a new muffler,” Trevor says.
“We? Hey, people. This is my check here,” I say.
“Who can sleep anyway,” Bex says.
“I’m starved,” Severin says.
“It’s because you drink that protein shake shit instead of really eating,” I say.
“I have the sudden urge to make pancakes,” Mom says. “No, French toast.” She leaps up from the bed.
“Man, I can’t believe I’m not there,” comes the little voice from the bedspread.
“Powdered sugar on it,” Bex says. She bounces on her knees around the mattress and Freud bolts out the door like there’s a fire.
Mom hunts under the bed for her slippers. She can find only one, gives up and puts on a pair of socks. I say good night to Trevor, and in a few moments, there’s the smell of melting butter and the ziss of egg-and-butter-soaked bread in a hot pan.
“It’s like some movie,” Mom says, waving around the spatula. “Like one of those movies where a waitress wins the lottery, or something.”
“Holl-ee-wood,” Bex says.
Mom just stands there shaking her head and holding the spatula, and you know that the bread needs turning over.
“Mom,” Severin reminds.
“Mom,” Chico says, under the cover of his cage. He’s supposed to be sleeping. “Mom! Mo-om!”
“Oh! Right,” she says, and saves the bread just before it burns. In a short while we’re sitting around the table, now flecked with snowy white that’s drifted from our plates.
“I don’t know if any of this is really happening,” I say.
Bex pinches me on the arm, then Mom does, then Severin leans over the table to do it too. “Ouch,” I say.
“It’s happening,” Bex says.
When I wake up the next morning, reality takes a slow train back to my brain. In my bed, I’ve convinced myself it’s some weird dream, brought on by a bizarre night of wealth and emotional poverty. But, no, there’s the envelope on my floor. Richard Howards.
“I called your father,” Mom says. She’s standing outside the bathroom door. She pounds on it with her fist. “Did you fall asleep in there, Severin? Come on, you’ll use all the hot water.”
“You what?” I ask. We all seriously need some coffee.
“Your father? Well, first I called Bomba, and after I got tired of hearing her screaming ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ I called him.”
Mom calling Dad has happened only twice in the last few years since my father remarried—as far as I know, anyway. The first time, Mom phoned Dad when Bex was taken to the emergency room with a high fever and possible meningitis. The second time, Severin was three hours late coming home because the car battery died, and Mom was sure he’d been kidnapped or murdered. So this was right up there with illness and death and homicide.
“What’d he say?”
“Well, he agreed with me. We have to find some way of giving it back.”
I feel nettle prickles of irritation. “Wait a sec,” I say. “I’m eighteen, here. This isn’t something everyone else decides.” I might have agreed with them. In fact, I did agree with them. It was annoying, though, when parents got so, well, parental. For God’s sake, give me my bottle and a graham cracker, you know? And the money—I was excited about the money, sure, but not in any real way. It reminded me of when Severin and I were seven and my parents were still married and my dad told us he was taking us to Disneyland. Severin and I shrieked and ran around the house and hit each other and my Mom smiled and told us to calm down and they kissed. Dad even had slick pamphlets that Severin and I spread out on the kitchen table and read aloud. We fought over which ride we would go on first. But even then I knew in my deep inner pieces that we were never going. Dad, my father of restlessness and poetry and soul-searching, who kept Thoreau and Emerson on his bedside table like people keep Bibles—he couldn’t be on the teacup ride, and I understood that, even at seven, even as I hit my brother in giddy thrill and snatched the pamphlets from his hands. He couldn’t be on the teacup ride, and I couldn’t be the sudden owner of a shiny new two and a half million dollars.
“For God’s sake, Severin.” Mom pounds. “Now! I’m going to be late for work!”
“Jeez, chill, Mom,” he says.
“Estrogen surge,” I say.
The doorknob turns and we back away and Severin escapes with a towel around his waist and his hair wet. A whoosh of steam dashes from the bathroom, a ghost running out. The mirror is a moist haze that Mom will have to wipe away with a towel or her robe sleeve.
“Do you smell what I smell?” I say.
“Yeah, Severin. Lay off my Axe,” Mom says.
“You used half a can, apparently,” I say to him, but Severin’s in his room already, slams the door on us.
“God, I love that smell,” Mom says.
“No one just gives away two and a half million dollars,” Melanie says. We are in her room. She has a new poster on her wall, in a frame. The posters in my room—a close-up of hands on guitar strings and the back of Hunter Eden onstage (yeah, we all know his ass could keep Levi’s in business for all eternity)—those posters were hung up using bits of masking tape looped into circles of stickiness. But this has glass and a mat, the whole works. It has six rows of fish, with their scientific names in italics underneath. I’m surprised it doesn’t have one of those little let’s-pretend-we’re-in-a-museum lights over it.
“Nice poster, Mel,” I say.
“Shut up,” she says. “My father gave it to me.”
“You should ask him for the bedspread.”
She ignores me. “This is mind-blowing. I just can’t believe it.” She shakes her head. “Who would do that? No one would do that. He wants something. Maybe he wants you.”
“No, he doesn’t. He’s not some Internet perv, trust me.”
“Pervs don’t wear T-shirts saying they’re pervs,” Melanie says.
“Don’t tell anyone about this, okay?” I say. I don’t want this to be some running conversation at school, like when Lauren Liu got chosen for a Coke commercial or when Zen Markson’s mother committed suicide. I am not other people’s entertainment.
“I won’t,” she says. And then, “Oh my God,” Melanie shrieks. It’s the kind of girly sound that makes me hate her and love her at the same time. Being friends with Melanie makes me feel like I’m in junior high and have just been asked to walk to the bathroom with a cheerleader when I know she’s perfectly capable of going on her own. Melanie is fascinating and baffling, exciting and annoying as hell. “I just realized something.”
I shriek too, just to try it out. I sound a little like Freud, the time Mom had to give him a bath after he’d knocked over a bottle of motor oil Trevor was using in our driveway.
“I’m going to Malibu this summer,” she says.
“Malibu, like where Barbie is from?” I say.
“Indigo, you could come with me.”
I laugh.
“No, I mean it. I wanted to ask you before, but Dad says you’d have to pay for your own plane fare, and…”
“You knew it would be an issue.”
“You could buy your own plane now,” she says.
“That’s ridiculous. Plane fare will still be an issue.” But Melanie has popped up from her folded-leg position on the bed and has gotten her cell phone, which is the kind that has the calendar and the camera and does everything for you but clean your room and balance the national debt.
“Okay, look.” She taps the screen with a little metal stick, shows me the screen. “The end of June. You can come down for a few weeks. We can rent a convertible. Hell, you can buy a convertible.”
“I don’t know, Mel, that’s a lot of time to take off work.” I imagine Mel and me in a pink Barbie Camero, wearing little plastic Barbie shoes and Barbie wedding dresses, our veils flying out, some giant hand driving us around on the kitchen floor.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re still going to work?”
“I told you, I’m going to give it back.”
Melanie pretends to punch numbers into her phone. “Hello? Yeah, I want to report that I’ve got an idiot in my house? Uh-huh. A certified f-ing lunatic. Please come and take her away before I kill her myself.”
“Hey, let’s play Name the Fish. I’ll hold my hand over the labels and you can tell me what they are.”
“You are a millionaire!” she shrieks. She is hugging me. I picture a cartoon scene where my tongue is gaggling out from the force of her embrace.
“Air, air,” I Freud-shriek back.
“Girls,” Melanie’s mother says, her head suddenly in Melanie’s room. “I told you, I’d like you to keep the door open when you’re visiting.”
Melanie’s mom is gone again, but I can feel her presence still lingering in the hall. “Quick, hide the pot,” I say loudly.
Do you ever have those moments when your dream life and your real life intersect like spirits from the dead who appear in the here and now to knock over vases and picture frames? When you wake from a dream of a long kiss or an angry moment and you take that feeling into the new day? The sense floats, looks for something to latch on to, feels both right and not right, too present for something imaginary. This is where I am now, when I walk into Carrera’s, my work shoes on and laced, the news I have to share trailing ahead of me and behind me, wispy but insistent as perfume samples in a magazine. The news is the real and not real of a dream. The here and now but not now.
“Well?” Jane says from behind the register. She is wearing dangly bead earrings, jeans, and a T-shirt, a white one, which has the smeary gray haze of once having been washed with a blue towel. Clothes that may not understand two and a half million dollars. Even Jack lifts up his head. His red cloth collar with the bone hanging from it with his address and name etched on—I’m suddenly sure that even he won’t understand two and a half million dollars.
“You were right,” I say. “It was big.”
“Oh God,” she sighs. She shares this with Mom—the equation of “big” with “disaster.” It makes me wonder, right then, if the Moores, or even Melanie’s mother and father, would ever feel this equation, and I don’t think so. Wealth gives you the expectation of more wealth, and struggle gives you the expectation of more struggle. The willingness to embrace the idea of “a surprise” is dependent on our past surprises being good ones. Maybe this is obvious, but I don’t think so. Pessimism and caution and cynicism and the inability to be spontaneous are character flaws to those who’ve had good fortune, and common sense to those who haven’t.
I put on my apron, tie it behind my back. I shout a hello to Luigi, who greets me with a “Ciao” that comes through the open rectangle window that leads to the kitchen. Poor Luigi—he’s like those other isolated workers stuck behind small openings—bank tellers and limo drivers and movie theater ticket sellers. The most we see of him is his dark, hairy arm sliding plates through to the other side, though he doesn’t seem to mind.
“For Christ’s sake, Indigo. How much longer are you going to make us wait?” Trina says.
I peek under the foil of Harold’s pie dishes. “Lemon or berry?” I ask her.
“No chocolate?” she says. She looks slightly panicked. “Berry. Chocolate ice cream.” It sounds disgusting, but it’s not my job to argue with the customers. I notice something shocking about Trina. There. Under the table. No boots. No knee-high boots or calf-high ones or even ankle-high. No I’m-no-virgin white ones, no you-can’t-handle-what’s-in-these red ones, no tie-me-up black ones. She’s wearing Reeboks, oh God. She had to walk here, I realize. I realize, little bits of Trina are disappearing.
“Until everyone else gets here. I don’t want to tell this a thousand times,” I say.
Nick is next, and he looks like hell. He’s got a sweatshirt on from some resort, and this looks rudely prosperous and overconfident next to his jeans that have seen too many wearings without being washed—you can tell because they’re loose and low-slung without meaning to be. He’s unshaven—whiskers sprouting up sure as the lawn our neighbors, the Elberts, just reseeded. He doesn’t even greet us. Just slides and slumps into his table.
“Look who the cat dragged in,” Trina says. She’s as direct as she likes her coffee. Black, no sugar or cream.
“Yeah, well,” Nick says.
Jane goes to him, sets her strong hands on his shoulders. “Today’s the anniversary?” she asks.
He nods. He pushes his palms to his eyes.
“You said it was coming,” Jane says.
“Year two,” he says.
“It’s so hard,” Jane says. “When my mother died…”
“I thought this was supposed to get easier,” he says. He takes his palms from his eyes, which are red and baggy; they have the new wrinkles of apricots left too long in the fridge.
“They don’t tell you that the second anniversary is harder,” Jane says. “You think you’re supposed to be better. Hits you worse.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Grief is harder when it simmers than when it boils,” she says.
“I wish I still smoked,” Trina says.
I don’t even bother getting on Trina’s case for this. I put in Nick’s order without asking him, add an order of toast that I’ll take from my tips, or rather, tip, if necessary. I want him to have something to crunch, rather than just swallow down. You are not completely helpless if you can crunch. I also ask for a hot chocolate with whipped cream, because whipped cream can remind you why it’s good to be alive.
I am wondering how I will be able to share my news, lay this gold egg on a battleground. Some kind of feeling is working around my insides; this finger, looping and curving on steamed-up glass. My conscience. Guilt, maybe. But I don’t have time to think about it; a mismatched couple comes in—a very large woman and a tiny man, one of those couples that bring to mind Bomba’s expression, “There’s a lid to every pot.” And then Funny arrives and she’s bouncing and smiling, her dark eyes gleamy, the corners of her mouth turned up like an elf’s. Her smile relieves some of my guilt.
“People, people, people,” Funny says. Funny is small. Tiny, really, but you forget she’s tiny because of her intense dark hair and sharp, focused eyes. But I see it now, with her thin wrists and small fingers clutching a magazine. It’s not a regular magazine, all shiny and bold and shouting, but a quiet, whispering one with thick paper and thoughtful fonts.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“People, people, people,” she says again. “I’d like everyone’s attention.” Even the large woman and tiny man raise their heads. They have the look of restaurant dread you get in those places where you’re supposed to interrupt your dinner to join in to some rousing group-singing of “Happy Birthday,” belted out by overenthusiastic waiters and waitresses as a sparkling candle melts into an oversize sundae.
“Funny Louise Coyote is officially a published poet,” she says.
“What?” Jane clasps her hands together. Her eyes are wide. “You sold a poem?”
“Well, ‘sell’ is a relative word. I get ten copies of the magazine. You know, the landlord won’t take those instead of rent—”
“My God, Funny, that’s wonderful,” Jane says.
Even Nick smiles. “Well done, Funny,” he says. That’s the kind of good man he is. A man who looks outside himself, a non-murdering man, a man who never leaves a messy table and wipes up sugar he’s spilled.
“It’s in there? Let us see,” I say.
“It’s not in this one,” Funny says. “This is just the magazine. It won’t come out for two more years.” She holds it close to her chest.
“Wow,” I say.
“If the magazine stays in business that long. I mean, I know no one really reads it, but that’s beside the point,” Funny says. Funny sets the magazine carefully on the seat beside her. She places the napkin onto her lap daintily. She lines up her silverware. She makes the bottoms of her knife and fork and spoon all even.
“It’s not something you do for fame and fortune,” Jane says. “It’s a heart thing.”
“Right,” Funny says. “Pancakes,” she tells me. “Eggs, bacon.” I write it down.
“Beware of heart things,” Trina says. “That’s all I can say.”
Big lady and small man have gone back to their uneven conversation, and the bookstore guy comes in and so does Joe. Joe eases up onto his counter stool and sighs. He reminds me of Eeyore. His bald head is shiny but has a terrain of its own; bumpy, a barren planet. His thumbs grasp the edge of the plastic menu that he could recite by heart. His jacket smells like smoky outside morning. I pour Joe’s coffee.
“Come on, Indigo,” Jane says after I take the bookstore guy’s order. An omelette, which means he’s okay with things mixed together. He’s not fussy about clarity. The rest of him shows this too. His shirt is untucked and the orange T-shirt peeking from underneath is a color that doesn’t match. He’s got an earring, but earrings don’t necessarily mean cool anymore, just trying to be. He’s edging through his thirties reluctantly, the earring says. He’s a walking omelet of contradictions. “Leroy’s always late, if he even comes. I’d say we’re all here.”
“He’s coming,” Trina says. “I see him.” She leans forward to look out the window, showing us the small of her back from her shirt that’s eeked up. “He’s parking that piece of crap car. Okay, he’s locking the door, not that there’s anything to steal. Keys in his shirt pocket. Whistling. He’s whistling. Almost at the door, and…”
“Give me your best hangover cure,” Leroy says.
“You want to stay in shape, you gotta lay off that, what did I tell you?” Joe says. He shakes his dark, bumpy head.
“Lack of sleep hangover,” Leroy says. “No booze involved. I worked all day, then all night. I got this job watching this old lady because they’re worrying about her falling and I’m supposed to stay up all night because she walks around. She isn’t gonna fall. She’s steadier than me. I put on some music, and she danced. I wasn’t supposed to let her dance. Why bother being alive if you can’t dance?” He snaps a vine-covered finger.
“I can see this job’s going to last,” Trina says.
“I shimmied her around the room.” He chuckles. “Man, she loved that.”
“Come on, Indigo,” Jane says. “Everyone’s here. Spill it.”
“Oh man, that’s right,” Leroy says. “What was in the envelope? He suing you or something?”
I think about making this big. For a moment, I see it cinematic. Indigo lifts her pant legs, steps up onto a counter stool, onto the counter itself. She holds her hands out, makes her grand statement, and they swarm her, lift her, carry her around, turn circles with her in their arms. It’s a joy moment, the arms of friends, their goodwill.
But instead, I see their faces, and I can’t speak. There’s Nick, and he is wiping the edges of his mouth with a napkin, and Jane, hands on her hips. Trina in her Reeboks and Joe, looking like a visual sigh. Leroy, grinning. Both inked hands clasped in expectation. Leafy fingers intertwined, the forearm mermaid, upside down in waiting. And Funny, leaning back, smiling, whose good news no longer feels like relief to my strange guilt. It is an ace to my four aces. News I will trump.
“He gave me two and a half million dollars,” I say quietly.
“Holy fuck,” Leroy breathes.
“What?” the bookstore guy says. “I didn’t hear.”
“Nobody gives away two and a half million dollars,” Jane says.
“I knew he was loaded,” Trina says sadly. “Damn it.”
“Can you repeat that?” Nick says. “I think I didn’t hear right.”
“You heard right.” I grab a towel, start wiping the counter. I wipe the same spot over and again. I make circles. I make circles because circles are starts and middles and ends and starts again.
“My, my, my,” Joe says. He whistles long and low. It’s a ten-syllable whistle. “Now you’ve got yourself some trouble.”
“What are you talking about?” Leroy says. “Joe, you don’t know jack.” Jack raises his head from where he lies on the floor. Joe hears the friendly punch, boxes the air in Leroy’s direction. “This is an opportunity. An opportunity? No, wait. This is a new universe. He handed you a universe.”
“Who would do that? No one does that,” Jane says. “Unless he wants something.”
“Some psycho,” the bookstore guy says.
“No,” I say. “He doesn’t want anything.”
“My God,” Trina says. Her hand is to her heart.
“And I thought I was having a good day,” Funny says.
“I’m giving it back,” I say. They stare at me. And I have a weird sense of me here and them over there. Like there is the breeze of sudden space between us. I have my first two-and-a-half-million-dollar realization: Having money requires the ability to ignore the selfishness of having money.
“Are you okay?” Jane asks. She’s at my elbow. Takes the towel from me. “You look really pale. Sit down, Indigo.”
“I’m a little…in shock.” I know it sounds crazy. I know it does. But I feel like I might cry. I suddenly see where I’m standing, and that’s at the edge of change—really, really big change. Not the small, daily movements of regular change. Not the regular breaths of life-movements. It’s tectonic-plate change. A shift so monumental that the landscape will be forever altered, and my toes are at the edge of it, and it’s jolting, and then all at once the ground really does seem to move. The actual ground is really slipping under my feet, and…
“Someone get a cold washrag,” Jane says. She’s peering down at me, and I don’t know what’s going on, because I have a sudden, strange view of the ceiling. What I realize is there’s some crap up there, stuck, above Rosso Verona, probably flung there by that Hitler toddler. Someone’s going to have to get a chair and get it off.
“There’s pancake on the ceiling,” I say.
“Indigo, are you all right? You fainted,” Jane says. “Give her some space, everyone.”
Leroy’s looking down at me, and so is Nick, and the bookstore guy, who is being elbowed out of the way. Even Jack is looking down—I see the underside of his furry chin. Funny appears with some hard brown paper towels from the bathroom, soaked in water. Nick’s holding napkins that he dunked in his ice-water glass. Joe’s got the towel I used, but there’s crap on that, too. Restaurant work is messy.
I sit up on my elbows. “Whoa, I’ve never fainted before,” I say. “That was weird. Like human consciousness melting. Kind of cool.”
“Yeah, it’s cool how you scared the shit out of us,” Leroy says. “That was cool.” He acts pissed at me.
Joe leans over, pulls down the skin under my eyes, stares inside. His brown eyes are staring right into mine. His eyes look huge. “Hey, quit that,” I say. “You’re creeping me out.”
“She’s fine,” he says.
“Should we call 911?” Jane asks.
“She’s ready for another round,” Joe says.
“I bet you didn’t eat a good breakfast,” Funny says. “In all your excitement.” I sit up.
“You’re right.” She is right, I realize. I didn’t eat anything since French toast at two a.m. I had completely forgotten about food in all the talk about money. I look around at my new world. I realize the tiny man and the big woman are gone.
“Dine and dash,” I say, and point.
“They left bills on the table,” Nick says.
“Fifty dollars.” Jane counts. “For two breakfasts.”
“They left rather in a hurry,” Nick says. “When you hit the ground.” Now that I’m standing again, he wipes his own face with the napkins.
“Sit down, for God’s sake,” Trina says to me.
“Hey, fifty bucks. Another big tip,” I say.
Jane hands me a piece of Harold’s pie on a plate. “Ha, not on your life,” she says. “Eat. Indigo, my God. I don’t know how to process this.”
“Me either,” I say.
“Finish all of that,” Trina says. “If you faint again, I’m going to faint. I can’t handle anything medical.”
“Those emergency room shows…,” Nick says.
“The worst,” Trina says.
“She’s fine,” Joe says. He seems pleased at being the expert. He even hitches his belt up. He crosses his arms and gives a small nod.
“Two and a half million dollars? It’s a dream come true,” Trina says. “God, I wish I’d waited on him.”
For the rest of my shift, Jane insists I either go home or take it easy. Everyone is treating me as if I’m fragile and new. Nick asks when I’ll be quitting Carrera’s. Trina asks if my family will be moving. Funny says I won’t have to work for the rest of my life. Leroy tells them to back off, for God’s sake.
I know I’m not saying good-bye when I leave that day. But it feels like a kind of good-bye. I feel that empty place of something left behind.
Leroy calls my name as I head toward Trevor’s Mustang.
“Indigo!” he shouts.
“Leroy!” I shout back.
“This is a good thing,” he says. “Got it? A universe.”