Sand Castles (5 page)

No need. The new phone on the nightstand rang, a shrill, unfamiliar sound that brought a string of expletives from him. "Ignore it, ignore it," he
told her
hoarsely. "It'll go away."

But it didn't. The machine kicked in after the second ring, and after that they heard a tremulous, "Zack? Zack, are you there?"

Ah, shit.

"It's about Jimmy."

Ah, shit.

At the other end of the line, he heard Zina's voice falter and then turn sniffly. "I know
... I know what you said. But it's him. It
is
him," she insisted poignantly to the machine. "I know it is. So I'm going to
Providence
tomorrow—"

Shit!
He rolled away from his date and snatched up the phone. "Zee, what're you
talkin
' about? Are you nuts?"

"Oh, Zack—you're home," she said, sounding less offended than relieved. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything."

"No, no, nothing," he mumbled, but he grabbed a corner of the sheet and pulled it over his groin. This was Zina he was talking to: an emotional, naive, hopelessly fragile human being. The least he could do was cover up in deference to her goodness.

He tried, as gently as he knew how, to crush her plan. "Zee, I don't think that's a good idea. It would be too stressful for you."

"I'm stressed
now,"
she said simply. "Ever since I saw the photo in the paper."

"You'd be depressed if—when—you found out it wasn't him."

"Zack, don't you understand? I'm depressed
now."

"It could be embarrassing—"

"Not to me. Maybe to him."

"It could be dangerous, for crissake!"

"How? If he's Jimmy or if he isn't, the worst he could do wou
ld be to brush me off. You know
the way these lottery winners have to brush off charities and relatives and con artists. Who knows? Maybe he has a security guard that I won't be able to get past."

"Ah, geez..." Zack glanced at his date, sitting where she'd landed at the edge of the bed when he'd dumped her to grab the phone.
Brittany
was wearing a polite smile—but that was all, and she knew that he was well aware of it.

He smiled back, also politely, while he focused on the crisis at hand. "Zee, I haven't asked you for much in life, but I'm asking you now: don't do this. For me. Don't do this."

He heard her shocked intake of breath. "Zack! How can you ask me not to?"

He turned away from
Brittany
now and hunched over the phone with one hand slapped over his free ear, feeling like a soldier in a foxhole during a firefight. "What will you gain, Zina?" he said, forcing himself not to scream at her. "What can you possibly gain? He's moved on, wherever and whoever he is. Let it
go."

After a long pause she gave him an answer, spoken softly but resolutely, that wasn't a reply to his question. "I have to see him."

He'd lost. It was a novel sensation. He felt the way he would have if she'd beaten him at arm wrestling, and for a moment he wasn't quite sure what to say. Later he realized that his ego had been smarting: he'd been her brother for thirty-four years, and yet there he was, outranked by an asshole she'd known for little more than that many weeks.

But at that moment, all Zack cared about was keeping his sister from a self-inflicted wound that he was convinced could end up being fatal.

"All right," he told her. "I won't object to hunting him down—if you agree to a compromise."

"What kind of compromise?"

"It's too complicated to get into over the phone; I'd better come over. I'm on my way."

He hung up and turned around to face the music. Beautiful, blond, naked
Brittany
was scrutinizing him through narrowed blue eyes.

Brittany
didn't like what she was seeing, he could tell.
Brittany
didn't like it at all.

"You can't be serious."

Wendy stood at the stove, a strip of bacon hanging from between two fingers, and stared in disbelief at her husband. He was in boxers and a T-shirt, sitting at the kitchen table with his hands wrapped around a big blue plastic glass filled with orange juice and ice. Five seconds earlier he had looked rumpled, smug, and adorable. Now he merely looked unshaven.

"Maybe I shouldn't have said anything," he said, going defensive.

"Ten thousand
dollars?"

"It's not like we don't have the money."

"For
lottery
tickets?"

"It's not a big deal, Wen. Don't make it into one.'"

Ignoring the unmistakable warning in his voice, Wendy slapped the bacon across the
surface of the cast-iron
griddle. "You couldn't discuss this with me first?"

"Aren't you mistaking me," he asked, "for Ed?"

She gave him a sharp look. "What's that supposed to mean? That I'm Dorothy?"

"I didn't say that," he answered coolly, and he turned his attention to drinking down his juice.

She watched him, thinking,
Ten. Count to ten.

Sometime during the first, sleepless night after the news that he had won that staggering sum, they had warned one
another that moments like these were bound to arise. They had promised as they clung to one another, that they would consider both sides of any differences that might pop up between them. Wendy, for one, was determined to keep that promise.

She took her time separating the next greasy bacon strip from the slab, trying to understand what could motivate him to grab for more when he already had so much.

"What's so
damned
urgent about lottery tickets?" she blurted. "It's not as though the state is running out of them."

So much for seeing both sides. "I'm sorry; I didn't mean to be snotty," she said, throwing him a glance of pale regret. "But you've got to admit, ten thousand is a big step up from ten dollars when it comes to a lottery budget."

"As it happens, Powerball is up to
a hundred and fifty
million," he said, pouring himself more juice from the carton. "It was worth jumping in, statistically speaking."

"I do
not
get that," Wendy said, annoyed that she did not get that. If there were many more gazillions of people buying tickets in a particularly hot week, and only the same handful or less were going to win, then how could everyone's chances possibly improve? "It makes absolutely no sense," she grumbled.

"I'm a math major," he reminded her in a weary tone. They'd been through this so many times before. "
You
are not."

"No. I'm a home major," she said, turning up the burner, "and in my simple view of things, we have enough money. One-eighth of eighty-seven million, even after taxes and the cash-out penalty, is enough to live on. In my view."

And in my view you have a gambling problem, Jim; you've always had a gambling problem. Not enough for Gamblers Anonymous, maybe; but you like it too well, that thrill of the wait. Who else plays the Numbers game by calling out digits as the Ping-Pong balls pop up on TV—and then is genuinely disappointed when the balls don't match your shouts?

She said, "How did you pay for them? I don't suppose that they took Visa."

He looked almost sheepish as he said, "I borrowed most of it from Sam; he carries a money clip nowadays. I gave him a check, but naturally I'l
l split any pot with him fifty-
fifty," he added. "That's only fair."

There it was again, that gambler's cockiness.
I will split
—not
I would split.
In his mind, winning was a done deal.

Wendy fixed her attention not on her husband but on the cobalt-blue plastic glass in his hand. She had been toying with the idea of ordering real glasses from Pottery Barn in the same deep blue as the plastic ones. But then yesterday she tossed the catalogue in the recycle bin; she wasn't a hundred percent sure that she would be going with the same blue-and-yellow color scheme in the kitchen
after it was remodeled
, and the glasses might
end
up a waste of money.

Ten thousand dollars.

She felt woozy at the thought of how long it once would have taken them to save that much. And now it meant—what? Pin money in Sam's pocket that Jim had felt free to glom onto like change in a dish on a dresser.

"If you're going to pout," Jim said, cutting through the fog of her dismay, "then at least flip the bacon. It's burning."

"Oh!" Wendy grabbed a fork and began stabbing at the underside of the bacon that was sticking to the pan on the too-hot flame. The bacon popped, and a spatter of grease shot out at her, making her jump back and drop her fork.

"Damn
it!" she cried, and she grabbed the pan to move it off the burner. She forgot to use a potholder and cried out again, then dropped the pan onto the Formica counter and turned on the cold water,
letting it run over her battle-
scarred forearm and fingers.

Jim was behind her, turning off the burner and then grabbing a potholder and moving the pan—
too late to pre
vent a burn
mark
—from the counter.

"
What
the hell's wrong with you
, Wendy
?" he said, but then he saw the red mark on her arm, and he turned instantly sympathetic. "Ouch, that's gonna hurt, poor kid."

"I can't believe I did that," she murmured over the running water.

Jim tried to be helpful by saying, "You were upset, distracted."

"Of course I was upset," she said, taking the clean towel that he offered. "Except for the mortgage and the car loan, we've never paid ten thousand dollars for anything in our lives. And yet here you are, tossing around thousand-dollar bills like
—
like rose petals at a wedding. I can't deal with it, Jim," she said, wincing from the pain she so stupidly had inflicted on herself. "I can't deal with this much money."

A tear rolled out, she didn't know why. Frustration, pain, fear, resentment—it was a complicated tear.

"Hey, hey
,
" Jim said. He slipped his arm around her shoulder as she stood at the sink, patting her arm dry. "This is nothing to get worked up about. Tell you what. I won't buy that many tickets from now on without telling you first. How's that?"

If Wendy were his lawyer, she would have told him that there were truck-sized holes in his pledge. But she wasn't his lawyer. She was his wife, and she knew that he meant well, and she wanted to put the episode behind them. Compared to their night together, the morning so far had been a disaster.

She tried to seem reconciled, so she nodded in mute acceptance of the peace offering. But she was still smarting—enough that she felt entitled to ask a question that burned just as much as hot bacon grease.

"What do you want more money for, anyway?"

"For you," he said softly. "Only for you. C'mon; let's go upstairs and get something on that arm."

****

Zack Tompkins drove down
Providence
's
Wickenden Street
past ethnic caf
é
s and funky stores and admitted to himself that he liked the area. It was night-and-day different from the row of intimidating, upscale shops right around the corner on
South Main
. Here, a medley of bookstores, thrift shops, grocery st
ores, and an honest-to-God old-
fashioned bread bakery snugged up against one another in a jagged line that defined the southern boundary of Fox Point, an old Portuguese neighborhood of plain, two-story houses squeezed between Brown University and the Providence River. The street was colorful, vibrant—at the moment, overflowing with mothers, babies, and college kids—and the best-smelling few blocks that Zack had ever traversed.

Too bad he was there on business.

He crisscrossed through the maze of short streets on the Point, losing himself not once but twice, and reminded himself one more time that he was on a wild-goose chase. Anyone who'd walked off with a lottery purse as big as Jim Hodene had would have packed up his family by now and moved, at a minimum, a few blocks to the north, where brick mansions, stuffy Victorians, and revered colonials stood in easy camaraderie on College Hill. Money went where money was, and Fox Point wasn't exactly the Gold Coast.

Zack was expecting to pull up in front of some modest gable-front house wrapped in vinyl and with a For Sale sign hanging on it. He was correct on two of the three counts.

The house was modest, the house was vinyl; but the house was not for sale.

Far from it. Apparently the Hodenes—still the owners of record—were adding on: there were two contractors' trucks and a van crammed onto the narrow side drive and hanging over the sidewalk.