Rolling in the Deep (5 page)

As diligently as our lawyers have prepared us for this moment, it’s still a shock to walk into a room filled with cameras flashing and microphones pointed in your direction. Filled with people you don’t know calling your name.

A man in a khaki suit stands on a makeshift stage with a blue curtain behind it, holding a giant check. It’s the sort of scene you’d imagine in your telenovela fantasy of lottery winning—cheesy and low-rent, like it was set up hastily on the floor of the DMV.

It’s a surreal contrast to what is actually happening: the handing over of almost two hundred million dollars to a couple of Cogmans coworkers who met only two months ago. It turns out that ours was the only winning ticket.

The only one.

Sold at Patty’s deli, which means she’ll get a nice bonus from the State of New York.

And after taxes Holly and I will take home over eighty million dollars each.

Cash.

On the advice of our lawyers, we’ve opted for a single lump-sum payment. Whatever we don’t use right away can be invested. It can generate even more money, potentially, although the concept of more at this point is vaguely ridiculous. I can’t begin to conceive of how to spend what I have now.

And of course that’s the first question the reporters ask. After the announcer says, “I welcome Ray Lopez and Holly Ward,” and hands us the absurdly large check, we take our seats at a long table and hold a press conference.

I’ve agreed to do most of the talking, for Holly’s sake. She’s uncomfortable with the cameras, with the fanfare and spotlight, and I don’t blame her. It’s Drew she’s thinking of, and the unwanted attention he’ll have to contend with.

We drove to the lottery commission offices in separate cars. Holly is wearing a conservative navy dress, her hair pulled back in a clip—trying, I think, to be as nondescript as possible. I’m wearing a tie, because I know my mother would kill me otherwise.

It’s the same tie I wore to her funeral.

“What will I do with the money?” My voice sounds far away. I inch the microphone closer. “Well, it’s all very new. I don’t think either of us has had time to think yet about what comes next.” I try to smile in Holly’s direction, but she’s looking at her hands folded on the table. Her face is very pale.

A young reporter from the
Poughkeepsie Record
stands up in the back of the crowd. “Did you think you were going to win?”

I laugh. “No.”

“You must have made plans, though. Daydreams, right? About what you would do if you did win?”

I glance at Holly. “My guess is we’re both thinking about our families, and what we can do for them now. And the charities we can donate to. The…people we’ll be able to help.”

I sound like an idiot. I glance at the lottery commissioner. Is it time to leave yet?

“Ms. Ward.” The
Poughkeepsie Record
guy remains standing. “You have a child, right?”

Holly stiffens beside me. I realize belatedly that I’ve opened the door to this question by mentioning our families.
Shit.

I drag the single microphone closer to my face. “We both…um…both Holly and I would very much like to be as private as possible through this process. I’m sure you—” I clear my throat. “I’m sure you can understand that. Not…I mean, not wanting to mention our particular family members, especially the kids.”

The reporter all but rolls his eyes, but he backs off. “You both work at Cogmans, right?”

“Well…” I smile. “For now.”

That gets a big laugh from the room. Another reporter pipes up. “Not going to keep your job, then, eh?”

I let out a brief laugh. “No. Holly?”

She smiles slightly, and shakes her head. Everyone laughs again.

I give a pointed look to the commissioner, who steps in front of the table and begins to wrap things up. He makes sure to invite the reporters to the Powerball website where our “story” will soon be available to the general public.

As we rise and exit the room, reporters and camera people rush out behind us and try to grab individual interviews.

“Mr. Lopez. Mr. Lopez.” The
Poughkeepsie Record
guy steps into my path and shoves a minirecorder in my face. I’m trying to turn him down politely when Holly slips out a side door and disappears.

I change tactics, clearing my throat loudly to attract the attention of the press that remains. The least I can do is give her a five-minute head start out of the parking lot.

“I just want to thank everyone for coming out today to meet us. And thank the whole Powerball operation for giving us this amazing opportunity. Everyone’s been really nice, and we’re grateful, as you can imagine.”

“Mr. Lopez, hey.” A reporter is here from NY1, I see now—my favorite morning news guy from Staten Island.

“Hi, Roger!” I say, genuinely grinning. “Never thought I’d be interviewed by you. That’s so cool, man.”

By the time I’m done joking around with him and dodging any serious questions from anybody else, Holly is long gone.

I say my goodbyes and thanks to everyone at the commission office, they confirm that the money will arrive in my bank account in about ten days, and I jump in my truck and head home.

Alone.

Somehow, it’s anticlimactic. Like I’ve gotten used to the excitement already and now regular life—the simple act of driving down the highway—is flat and unremarkable. As though I deserve, now, to have only remarkable things happen to me.

Or maybe I just miss Holly.

This morning Tony helped me find a lawyer. By the time I met with her and got myself in order, Holly’s lawyer had already contacted me with a request to cease contact until we’d had a chance to draw up a contract. That hurt a little, I can’t lie. But lawyers don’t trust someone’s word of honor, I know that. It’s best for both of us to have something in writing.

Apparently fights among coworkers who share lottery tickets are pretty common. Some people write up an agreement before the drawing. You can even download templates for it online. Maybe I should have done that, for Holly’s sake. So she wouldn’t worry. But who the hell thought we would actually win?

I wish I could talk to her about the press conference today. No one else could possibly understand how seriously weird that shit was.

I know some people get the money and go off the deep end. Like, drown in a pool full of coke or something. I read a story once about a guy who kept his winnings secret from his wife, had a daughter from a previous marriage claim the money, and then left the wife penniless. I can’t imagine the depravity this kind of windfall could lead a person to.

And then there’s the people asking for money. It’s only a matter of time before that starts happening, and I have no idea what I’m going to say. Why am I the one that money fell out of the sky and landed on? It was only dumb luck that I won. It’s not like I worked for it—not like I earned it.

Truly, there are people in every location on the planet who need this more than I do. Sure, it’s not easy hustling two jobs, living paycheck to paycheck. But I had a roof over my head, enough cash for food.

People all over the world are starving. They live in cardboard boxes. Their children don’t have any shoes, and can’t go to school. And they didn’t win the damn lottery. Why me, and not them?

I wonder if Holly is thinking thoughts like this, alone in her car on the thruway, heading home. I wish we were driving together. I wish I could call her.

But she doesn’t know me yet, not really. There’s no reason for her to trust that I won’t try to manipulate this money away from her. Her lawyer is right. That’s the way the world works. Both of us have to be careful. This money—miracle that it is—also makes us targets. Over the next few months it’s likely we’ll be inundated by demands for cash—legitimate requests and scams alike. Like Holly, I’ll have to be vigilant.

I just don’t want to be vigilant where she’s concerned.

What I want—if I’m honest—is to crawl into bed with her and not come out until all of this drama blows over.

“I still don’t understand why you wouldn’t let me come with you to the press conference.”

Beth kneels beside me, in the dirt, wearing a canvas hat, transferring seedlings from plastic containers into a newly built garden bed.

“I just…I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.” I grab a seedling and start a new row. “I wanted to get it over with.”

“Not make a big deal? Are you serious? Honey, this is about as huge a deal as it gets.” She sits back on her heels and eyes me carefully. “Are you okay? You look like you’re about to be sick.”

My eyes fill, and I wipe them on my sleeve.

“Holly.” Beth reaches across the soil and puts her hand on my knee.

“Brett called.”

“Oh shit. Let me guess. He wasn’t happy for you.”

I laugh a little at that. “How’d you know?”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, you know. Who is this Ray guy and all that. And obviously I’m sleeping with him but I might want to think about Drew for once in my life and make sure Ray doesn’t run off with the money. Did I even think to get myself a lawyer? And my fifteen minutes of fame are probably keeping me too busy to take care of my kid, so maybe Drew should just stay with him.”

Beth takes off her hat. “Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

“Holly, he can’t threaten to keep Drew from you.”

I sigh, and dig a new hole in the soil.

Beth is a good friend and I know she loves me. But right now, if I have to listen to another lecture about not letting Brett bully me, I’m going to lose my mind. She doesn’t understand what he’s capable of.

When I first met Brett, it was only a few months after my mother died. Every day for weeks, he came into the café where I worked and completely ignored me, which I was grateful for. All the girls who worked behind the counter were talking about him—how athletic he was, how he looked like he belonged on a beach in California. I never would have even thought to try talking to him.

And then he chose me. That’s how it felt, that I was picked by him, like a berry from a bush. One day he came in and stared at me from his table for a very long time. The next day he asked me to a Broadway show. It didn’t occur to me to say no.

From that first date, he did all the talking. It wasn’t long before he plucked me out of the café and brought me in to work at the bookstore where he was a manager.

At first, I enjoyed being around all those books. The relative quiet and the fresh smell of pages were soothing, ordinary. I brought piles of novels home to read every week—classics and thrillers, romance and crime fiction—I loved all of it. But Brett was unexpectedly hard on me at the store, singling me out and criticizing my work in front of the other employees. Then he’d drive me home and act like nothing had happened. “It’s just so no one suspects we’re together,” he said. “I could get fired for dating a subordinate.”

In retrospect I think he just enjoyed the power he could wield over me in public, but I was too checked-out to see that. I was still reeling from Mom’s funeral, trying to pack up her stuff and figure out how to live in our apartment all alone. He told me he’d had a tough life, a hyper-critical father, and sent flowers to apologize when he’d been particularly severe. I tried to be understanding.

I was adrift then. I didn’t have any direction. Mom was gone, I’d never had a dad to speak of, and I was all alone. I had a few friends from school, but since all I ever had time for was work or studying, those friendships were tenuous.

My world was upside down when Brett walked into it. He set everything to rights in the way that suited him best. He was in charge, and I followed.

By the time I woke up to the full extent of his control over me, I was pregnant with Drew, and once he was born it was all about him. There wasn’t time for classes anymore. I worked nights at a gas station in town, when Brett could be home with the baby. I slept whenever I could, which wasn’t often.

Brett found every possible reason to criticize me as a mother. I breast-fed Drew, and that made Brett furious. He didn’t like sharing my body, and he didn’t like that it made Drew prefer me. Drew would cry, and Brett couldn’t soothe him, even with the bottles of milk I pumped in advance. I’d come home at dawn to find them both awake, the house a mess I’d spend the rest of the day trying to clean.

Brett accused me of excluding him on purpose. He told me I was spoiling Drew, and that’s why he would cry until he got what he wanted. He complained every day about the disorganization of our home, the poor quality of the dinners I cooked.

I knew that I’d made a mistake. That I had to get away. But I was afraid of Brett. He had this incredible power over people, to make them believe whatever he said. Beside him I always sounded like a blithering idiot, like someone far less intelligent. If it came down to a custody battle, I feared he would find a way to persuade a judge that I was an unfit mother, and I wouldn’t be articulate enough, together enough, to defend myself. He would take Drew away from me.

And I was only twenty-two years old. I had no family. My few friends had trickled away, irritated by Brett’s arrogance and mean sense of humor.

Only Beth remained. We’d known each other casually in school, and went out for lunch every few months, maybe. She was wild, which I envied and feared in equal measure, and she was the last one I expected to help out with a newborn. But when I had Drew she started showing up more. I think she realized the abject state I was in. She had no idea how to handle a baby, but she gave me moral support. She confirmed that I wasn’t crazy—that things were as bad as I thought they were and not, as Brett insisted, all my fault.

Without her, I don’t think I would have found the strength to leave Brett. It took me a full year, but with Beth’s help I found an apartment of my own. I spent the last of my mother’s meager life insurance policy on legal fees for the divorce.

And Brett has been punishing me ever since. It made him crazy that anyone would leave him. I think he believed it could go on like that forever. That he could keep treating me the way he did. That he could go on sneaking around with other women, and I’d look the other way.

I thought it would make things better when he found a new partner, although I feared for that woman, whoever she was going to be. Thank God it was Emma, who at least has something to hold over Brett. Her money offers him a certain lifestyle he doesn’t want to lose. With her, he was able to quit his job at the bookstore and go to law school. Which has only made his threats more pointed. Now, on top of his arrogance and newfound money, he has what he believes is the legal expertise to open the custody case again and contest the arrangement. Even more so now that Emma is in the picture, a replacement mother—far more stable, he says, than I am.

I try to tell that to Beth now, but she shakes her head, wiping her brow with a dirt-covered arm.

“He’s not going to do that, Holly.”

“But he’s worried about Drew being in the spotlight, which is real, don’t you think?”

She makes a face. “It’s also real that you have a shitload of money now, and could buy your privacy if you wanted to. Build a gated mansion—whatever. You have the means to protect him.”

“But what if the kids at school find out? How are they going to treat him now? What if he—Oh, God.”

Beth draws back. “What?”

“What if someone…if someone, like, kidnapped him. For money.”

“Holly. This isn’t a crime novel. No one’s going to kidnap Drew.”

I point my trowel at her. “You don’t have to be so dismissive.”

Beth softens. “You’re right. I’m sorry. This must be impossible to wrap your head around. It must be scary as hell, and I totally see the parts of it that are overwhelming or upsetting and all that. But I guess I just don’t…I mean, aren’t you happy? You’re not, like, excited or anything, that you won? Just a little bit?”

I look out past the perimeter of our community garden, at the housing projects across the street. A teenage volunteer from one of those apartments pushes a wheelbarrow filled with a bag of fertilizer toward the shed. She’s here on a school day, on a project we arranged with her teachers. At three o’clock, she’ll pick up all four of her siblings and take care of them herself until her grandmother gets home after bedtime.

“I’m an asshole,” I tell Beth. “I know that. A normal person would be through the roof right now.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“No, but you don’t need to. I know it.” I shake my head. “I keep waiting for it to start feeling good. To be, you know, exciting, like you said. I keep thinking tomorrow I’ll wake up and it’ll sink in, and I’ll celebrate.”

“Think of all the things you never have to worry about. Ever again. Like how to pay for Drew’s college.”

I nod, and bite my lip because it’s starting to tremble. “I’ll be able to take care of him now.”

“You can retire! You can maybe have a little fun for once.”

“Fun?” I laugh. “What is that?”

Beth stands and stretches. “You can find out! You can take a trip to Paris. You can hire a private dance teacher and learn the merengue.”

“Is that what you’d do?” I gather up the supplies and rise, too, dislodging a cascade of dirt from my lap.

Beth smiles, considering. “I don’t know. If the instructor were really, really hot, maybe.”

“I can help out the garden. That will feel good.” I look around at our small plot of land. “We could make this space bigger, maybe expand into the empty lot. We won’t have any trouble getting supplies anymore. Maybe we could hire a part-time person to keep it up and organize the volunteers.”

“Exactly.” Beth nods. “That’s how you need to be thinking. About the possibilities, about all you can do. You have to stop being afraid.”

“It’s just that, you know…think of all the millions of people who paid for a Powerball ticket.” I walk toward the shed to set down our empty seedling containers. “And they lost, and I won. Why? It’s not…it’s not fair. I feel like I don’t deserve it, no more than anyone else did. So why me?”

Beth hangs up her apron on a nail on the shed wall. “It’s just luck, Holly. It’s not about fairness or whether you deserve it. It just happened. It’s random.”

“It doesn’t feel right.”

“Well.” Beth punches me lightly on the shoulder. “Sorry. But you’re gonna need to suck it up. You won the money. You feeling guilty about it isn’t going to magically make the world a fair place where everyone gets what they need or deserve.”

It’s dark inside the shed, and cool. It smells like worms and spring.

Beth stares me down, and then continues. “You worrying, about Brett or Drew or whatever, isn’t going to make anything better either. All you can do is live the best life you possibly can. Be kind and share what you’re able to share. And enjoy it. For God’s sake, you’re rich, sister. This is what people spend their whole lives dreaming about.”

I set my tools down on a table with three legs, which stands upright only because we’ve wedged it against the wall. It slips occasionally, though, and everything we store on it lists into the corner.

I can fix it now. I can buy a whole new damn table. A new shed. A new everything. A little sob of energy rays through me, like a spark through my stupid tears.

It feels the same way kissing Ray felt—too wild to be trusted. Too out of control. And random. Totally random.

“I wish I could talk to Ray about it,” I tell Beth.

“Why don’t you?”

“You know why. The lawyer—”

Beth rolls her eyes. “Fuck the lawyer. And fuck Brett, too. If you want to talk to Ray, talk to him. He’s probably freaking out as much as you are. And who else understands what’s happening to you right now better than he does?”

“He understands a little too much,” I say carefully.

Beth narrows her eyes and leans in. “What does that mean?”

I don’t know what to say. I just look at her. The quiet and stillness of the shed is like a confessional.

“I was going to tell you. I just…there was so much going on, and—”

“Oh my God, Holly.” Beth’s eyes light up like it’s Christmas. “Did you sleep with him?”

I bite my lip. “No, but I…I kissed him. He kissed me. We—”

“You kissed each other. I get it.” Beth shakes her head, grinning widely. “You have to tell me absolutely everything. When?”

“The night we found out about the ticket.”

“Holly, that was like three days ago.” Beth pulls up a rusty folding chair.

“I…” I shut my eyes tight and sit down on the dirt floor. “I just…Beth.”

She stills. “Was it bad?”

I shake my head, silent.

Beth watches me steadily. “You’re turning bright red.” When I cover my face with my hands, she lets out a little huff of surprised breath. “So it was good. By the looks of you, I’m guessing it was very good.”

I nod into my hands.

“No wonder you’re freaked out. With that happening on top of everything else.”

I press my fists against my mouth and look into Beth’s eyes. They are warm and concerned, and I try to imagine what it would be like to be sitting here in this shed by myself, without her. Trying to process all this alone.

“He’s just so…he’s so…”

“Hot?”

I laugh and shut my eyes again.

“Yes.”

Beth smiles. “Damn, girl. Win the lottery and kiss a smoking guy on the same day? I don’t know. Some people might be feeling kinda psyched right now.”

“I know! I’m a jerk.”

Beth touches my shoulder. “No. You’re just scared, is all.”

“I’m scared of screwing it up somehow.”

“You’re not going to screw it up.” She laughs. “And even if you do, you have enough money to pay someone to fix it.”

I snort. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

“Sure it is. Don’t you know anything? All rich people are very, very happy. Nothing bad ever happens to them, ever again.”

I lean forward and rest against her knees, and she wraps an arm around me.

“I get the money next week, Beth. You know what the first thing I’m going to do is?”

She pulls back to look at me. “What’s that?”

“Buy you a goddamn house.”