Mrs. Million (2 page)

Barbaraannette’s smile grew impossibly wider. “Toag, if those numbers are what I read them to be, I don’t believe I give a damn what anybody thinks.”

T
HE LONGEST HOURS OF
her life, Barbaraannette thought, were those spent at her niece’s birthday party—seven shrieking sugar-charged kids—all the while feeling that Powerball ticket wrapped in Saran Wrap and stuck to her right buttock. Toagie had laughed at her when she’d stashed the ticket in her undies, but Barbaraannette had said, “It’s nine million dollars, Toag. Shut up.”

It took the girls two hours to play their games and open presents and eat their cake. Barbaraannette was too keyed up to eat any herself. She sat in a chair with the ticket stuck to her butt hoping her body heat wouldn’t fade the numbers. She did her best to act interested when Britty showed off her presents but all she could think about was the time.

When she’d called the phone number on the ticket, the woman at the Minnesota State Lottery Headquarters in the Twin Cities, seventy miles from Cold Rock, told her she could bring it in anytime before 6:00
P.M.
Otherwise she’d have to wait till Monday. Barbaraannette didn’t think she could wait till Monday. She was afraid the ticket would somehow change, or be stolen, or that she would wake up. She was too nervous to drive herself, and she wasn’t ready to share the news with anyone else, so she’d had to sit through Britty’s party, waiting for Toagie. In that time she imagined several hundred things that might prevent her from realizing her good fortune.

They were now headed south on I-35 in Toagie’s battered and sputtering minivan, twenty miles to go. Brittany curled up in the back, sleeping off her sugar buzz. Barbaraannette kept herself busy imagining a variety of fatal highway accidents. The way her sister drove, it was easy.

“What’s the first thing you’re gonna do?” Toagie asked, passing a Green Giant semi on the right.

Barbaraannette cringed, envisioning death beneath ten tons of frozen broccoli.

Toagie laughed. “You want to get there by six, right?” She swerved onto the shoulder to miss a dead skunk, then back into the right lane. “So what are you gonna do with the money?”

Barbaraannette willed her fingers to unclench. “I don’t know, Toag.” Her leg was cramping from stomping on a brake pedal that was not there.

“You gonna buy a new car?”

“My car’s not that old.”

“Well you have to buy
something.
I mean, jeez. All that money? Nine million? You know what I’d do? I’d buy a horse.” A red car pulled out onto the freeway a quarter mile ahead. Barbaraannette pumped her imaginary brake pedal; Toagie sped up and switched lanes.

“I might invest it in something,” Barbaraannette said. “Maybe buy some stocks. Buy some stock in Green Giant. Everybody eats broccoli.”

“Bill doesn’t,” Toagie said, referring to her occasionally employed husband.

“Maybe I’ll invest in a beer company, then.”

Toagie laughed, but it sounded forced. Barbaraannette instantly regretted her comment. Things had been rough for Toagie and Bill the past few years.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do, Toag. You know what I keep thinking, though? I keep thinking about Bobby.”

“You think about Bobby way too much.”

“I wonder what he’ll think if he hears I got rich.”

“He’ll wish he’d never left you, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t know.” Barbaraannette called up an image of Bobby Quinn’s face and felt the empty space he’d left inside her. “Six years, who knows what he’s been doing. If he’s even alive. I think about him sitting in some cabin in Alaska. He used to talk about Alaska a lot. He thought you could go there and find gold.”

“He thought a lot of things. That man made my Bill look like the Rock of Gribalcher.”

“Gibraltar.”

“Whatever. If you can’t get your mind off him maybe you oughta take some of that money and get yourself a shrink.”

Barbaraannette looked out at the passing landscape, fields of black dirt, here and there a pile of snow. Not as much snow as they had up in Cold Rock, though. Spring came a week or two earlier to the Twin Cities.

She’d been thinking about Bobby a lot, lately. Maybe she should use some of the money to hire another private detective, try to find him, see if he wanted to come home. She’d tried it once before, but the guy had got nowhere, just wasted her money. The thought of Bobby returning set off a whirlwind of confused thoughts, memories of her wedding, Bobby’s grin, his thick hair, making love, watching him sleep—Toagie was talking again, something about boats.

“What’s that?” said Barbaraannette.

“I said, you could buy a boat.”

“What would I want a boat for?” They had turned off the free-way—when had that happened?

“You could go sailing.”

Barbaraannette shook her head. If Toagie had won the lottery the money would be gone by the end of the week. “It’s supposed to be right up here,” she said. “The woman said you could almost see it from the highway.”

“There it is.” Toagie pointed toward a glass-fronted two-story building. A sign affixed to the wide, white fascia read MINNESOTA STATE LOTTERY. She turned into the parking lot. A white van topped by a thirty-foot-high telescoping pole was parked near the entrance. The top of the pole carried a complicated-looking array of disks and antennae. The lettering on the side of the van read: EYEWITNESS NEWS.

Toagie pulled into a parking slot. “Looks like you get to be on TV,” she said.

Barbaraannette licked her lips. Her mouth was dry and her in-sides were buzzing.

Brittany, still wearing her paper tiara from the party, woke up and inserted herself between the two front seats. “Where
are we?”

“We’re at the lottery headquarters, honey,” said Toagie.

“What
for?”

“We’re here so your aunt can pick up a check, honey.”

Brittany said, looking at her aunt, “How come she’s breathing so funny?” Barbaraannette was staring at the TV truck, one hand at her throat, breathing rapidly.

“You okay?” Toagie asked.

Barbaraannette nodded, forced a deep breath into her lungs, held it for a moment, blew it out. “I’m fine.”

“How come you look so funny?” Britty asked. “Are you gonna cry?”

Barbaraannette shook her head, still staring at the TV truck.

P
HLOX WAS SAYING HOW
if a person took every nickel they ever earned and put it all into lottery tickets they would have a better shot at getting rich than if they just went along living from paycheck to paycheck clipping coupons and buying generic at the Safeway and hoping a rich uncle they didn’t know they had was about to die, because with the lottery a person would get all the money at once. That was the idea. You put money in and in and in, and then one day it all comes out in a rush, the way a piggy bank explodes when it gets too full.

Bobby Steele said from his La-Z-Boy, “When was the last time you saw a piggy bank blow up?” He’d just got home from Wild Wally Wenger’s Westernwear Warehouse, Tucson’s biggest Western wear outlet, where he worked in the boot department selling pointy toes to the snowbirds. It was better than some other jobs he’d had.

“You buy enough tickets, it’s almost got to happen,” Phlox said. She stood behind him, messing with his collar. “They don’t make this stuff up, you know.” Phlox was a devoted lottery junkie. She purchased a couple lottery tickets every day on her way to work at the Desert Diamond Casino where she worked as a dealer. Phlox didn’t play cards herself, or put money into the slots. She watched the suckers throwing their money away every day, making the Tohono O’odham elders wealthy. But the lottery, that was another story. That was run by the government, not the Indians, and you could win enough to set you up for life. So far she’d only hit once, last November, a thousand bucks on an instant win ticket.

Bobby stared past the Mexican silver-capped toes of his Tony Lamas at the television. “You want to know what I think?”

“I always want to know what you think, Punkin.” Phlox dragged her lavender nails through Bobby’s wavy blond hair. From a distance it still looked good but up close, looking down at the top of his head, she could see a lot of scalp. She’d been cleaning a lot of hair out of the bathtub drain lately, but that was okay. He looked good in a hat.

“I think I’d like for you to grab me a beer.”

“No problem, Pookie.” Phlox sashayed into the kitchen, where she found a cold Miller tucked back behind a sack of yellowed celery. When she returned, Bobby was surfing the channels. She watched the flickering images for a few seconds, then handed her man his beer. “What you looking for?”

“Diamondbacks are suppose to be playing.”

Phlox grabbed his shoulders and squeezed. “Wait, go back!” She waited for him to click to the previous channel, a news program. Over the shoulder of the news anchor she could see the Powerball graphic.

“This is about the lady just won it,” Phlox said. “You hear about this?”

The news anchor said, “Ever think about what
you’d
do if
you
won the lottery? Well, one Minnesota woman knows
exactly
what she’s going to do with her 8.9 million dollars. Val Frankel has a report from our affiliate in St. Paul, Minnesota.”

The Powerball graphic spun away to reveal a woman gripping the edge of a microphone-studded podium, coils of reddish brown hair bouncing as she jerked her head back and forth, changing position as her attention was demanded by one or another reporter. A large banner displaying the Minnesota State Lottery logo—a red-eyed, pointy-billed loon—hung behind her. The camera angle made it appear as if the loon was pecking the side of her head. The woman’s cheeks were flushed, and when the light hit her just right, her bright blue eyes could be seen darting excitedly.

“She’s kind of pretty,” said Phlox. “Only she could use a perm.”

Several questions were being shouted at her simultaneously. In response to a shouted request, she displayed her winning lottery ticket in one hand and a photograph in the other. The babble of voices faded into a voice-over.

“Earlier this afternoon, shortly after presenting her winning ticket to lottery officials, Mrs. Barbaraannette Quinn announced that she is offering a one-million-dollar cash reward for the safe return of her missing husband.”

Closeup of fuzzy photograph: a smiling man, perhaps thirty years old, standing in a boat holding up a stringer of bass.

“Robert Quinn was last seen six years ago when he left the couple’s Cold Rock home to go fishing on the nearby St. Croix River. He never returned. His boat was found the next day, his fishing gear and his life jacket still on board, washed up on the bank of the river. The following week, his Jeep Cherokee was discovered, broken-down and abandoned, in Mitchell, South Dakota.”

Cut to a photo of a muddy red Jeep Cherokee parked in front of the Corn Palace.

“Since that day, there has been no further trace of Robert Quinn.”

Closeup on Val Frankel, the reporter. “Kidnapping? Murder? Abandonment? The fate of Robert Quinn remains a mystery. His wife, Barbaraannette, has held firm to the belief that Robert will one day return. And she’s offering a million dollars to the person or persons who can bring her husband home.”

Another graphic: a wedding photo. Zoom in on Robert Quinn, a strikingly handsome man with narrow features, sparkling blue eyes, thick, wavy blond hair, and a rakish grin.

Phlox’s long nails sank into Bobby Steele’s shoulders. She giggled.

“He looks a lot like you, Puddin,” she said.

Jayjay Morrow was hanging out at Rudolph’s Red Nose, elbows on the bar, watching the news and working on a bottle of Schell’s when he felt a hand touch his shoulder.

“Jonathan?” The voice was light, crisp, and familiar. Jayjay looked at the hand—small, delicate fingers, precisely clipped nails—and at the bearded man who was attached to it. The guy from last week, the professor. Jayjay smiled and nodded, then returned his attention to the news story. A million dollars! And it sounded like she’d have plenty left over. Maybe he should write her a letter, see if she’d send him something.

The news program switched to a story about the floods in Missouri.

The bearded man, his hand still on Jayjay’s shoulder, sat down on the next stool and said, “Did you know that one has a greater chance of being struck by lightning than of winning the lottery?”

Jayjay said, “I got hit by lightning once.” He turned to dislodge the hand. He couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but he remembered him from last weekend. They’d had a few drinks at the Nose, then dinner at the Olive Tree, and then they’d gone over to the guy’s house and he’d stayed all night and the next morning the guy had laid a hundred bucks on him. “I was thirteen I got hit,” Jayjay said.

“Indeed!” The bearded man leaned in closer. His breath smelled of wintergreen. “What did that feel like?” A faint whistle from his small nostrils.

Jayjay sipped his bloody Mary. What would it feel like to be hit by lightning?

“Like a bar of hot steel rammed through my body.”

“Remarkable!” The man clapped his tiny hands together.

“Yeah.” Jayjay grinned. People told him he had a beautiful smile. His teeth were perfect, his cheeks dimpled. “It was just like that. Hot steel.”

The bearded man said, “Do you have dinner plans this evening?”

T
OAGIE SAID, “YOU KNOW
a course you are out of your mind and then some Barbaraannette O’Gara.”

“My name,” said Barbaraannette, “is Barbaraannette
Quinn.”
She cut into the slice of cake with the edge of her fork, stabbed it, and placed the small wedge of devil’s food into her mouth. Toagie had saved her a piece. For day-old Cowboy Cake it was not half bad. She took a sip of coffee. Cake and coffee-an odd breakfast, but it tasted good.

“Your name, big sister, is I-got-my-head-up-my-rear-end, far as I’m concerned.” Toagie lit a cigarette. “I always heard that money makes you stupid, now I know it.”

Barbaraannette swallowed. “What’s done is done, Toag.” After Toagie had dropped her off last night Barbaraannette had locked her doors-something she seldom did-climbed into bed and ignored the phone, which commenced ringing every five or ten minutes until almost midnight. She’d spent the night in fits of sleep punctuated by waves of remorse, embarrassment, and anger. Seven o’clock in the morning the phone had started ringing again. She’d answered it a couple times, thinking it might be Toagie or Hilde or somebody else she wanted to talk to, but both times it was a man, a different man each time, with the investment opportunity of a lifetime. Why did they think she was so hot to make money when she had so much of it?