September 8th 2020
Carly Beeper's Blinding Light
This is a piece of short fiction I wrote in 2020.
Carly Beeper, who at thirty-three didn't have a job anymore, got home for the last time in a while. She had come close to affording a car payment and a slightly larger apartment. It looked like a promotion was nigh – until it wasn't. She dropped her keys, the panda-bear keychain and the keychain flashlight jangling, and she got into her bed. Just for a moment, she thought. She had to keep browsing this website: it said something about a neurosurgery that could help her mother, and she wanted to know more about it. She knew that nothing would come of it, not on whatever little checks her employer – her former employer, that big-box retailer – would send her during all this, however long all this lasted. Bank interest and those checks, they would have to sustain her.
The world was falling apart. To begin with, nothing was good anywhere, and if anything wasn't awful yet, it was on its way there. All grandiosity had become shadows in the corners of any daydreamers' eyes, optimism a sin, the binds of addiction's small kindnesses become more than understandable – become expected. To live in nostalgia for glees past, which would never return, was sensible, and in search of new frights or answers, whichever came first, fingers tapped and slid down screens greasy because of long days indoors. Carly, her eyes black from the falling-apart, from the catastrophe of it all, sat wearily in the present and hateful of the future for whatever burdens it would airdrop next.
From supervisor to the unemployment line, she thought. She knew what would come next too: it was out of her apartment and into her mother's house. At thirty-three, she reminded herself.
One of Carly's co-workers told her that if she set up a limited liability corporation, she could call herself a business and apply for a forgivable loan.
“What's a forgivable loan?” Carly asked.
“They'll forgive it, like you don't have to pay it back.”
“They're giving out money like that?”
Just then, another one of Carly's co-workers went tsk-tsk-tsk.
“What?” said Carly.
“You can't just call yourself a business, and forgivable ain't mean you don't have to pay it back.”
That was that for Carly. Figure out how to call yourself a business, figure out how to get the loan, figure out what unforgivable meant, and then what? Really, they'd come get me before I sent out the paperwork, she thought.
Lying in bed, Carly sighed a sigh both pregnant with everything that was going wrong and barren of ideas to fix any of it. Her keys' jangle echoed in her head. Better than a headache. At the same time Carly was thinking this, Carly's mother, a few blocks away, was thinking about hearts. She picked up a card, a five of hearts, and gripped it so that it creased near the bottom. Holding it inches from her face, she thought, Heart beating. Sharp. It's gonna poke me in my chest. She dropped the card, and then she didn't know why her hand was near her mouth.
Carly took out her phone and saw a message from Melinda, her mother's home aide.
“When are you taking over?”
Taking over, Carly thought. She dreaded taking over, and this time was worse. This time, she was taking over and there was no day to mark off in her mental calendar, no end in sight. As long as all this stayed the same, the taking-over would go on, and the next day and the next day, she could only remind herself, in the vaguest of ways, that it wasn't permanent. So then what's permanent? she wondered, woeful.
Closing Melinda's message, Carly opened her phone's browser but stopped herself before she could go back to reading the article about the neurosurgery. Pulling up a news stream instead, she thought that she would let the anchors talk for a minute as long as they said nothing about what was happening. They acquiesced: it was something about a dog.
I could get a dog, she thought. Could hole up here. Get a dog and lay right here. I could lay here with the dog. Pet it, pet it.
Never doing well indoors, Carly felt that if she made it out of all this, then she would deserve the dog. She could leave the dog with her mother while she was working, once she was working again, and at night, she and the dog could curl up together, or the dog could curl up into her.
“We do know now that there was one winning ticket sold, and it was sold right here in Illinois. Those numbers again–”
The sky was falling down clouds at a time, like they and all the blue parts and the afternoon moon were just pieces in a puzzle and when everyone got bored enough they could fit the pieces back. They're acting like they don't know what's happening, Carly thought. Stop talking about the fucking lottery. There's a crisis. Don't you see that?
“And it's the biggest jackpot in ten years,” the anchor would tell her. “Now, back to the pestilence.”
When people talked about what was happening, it was cruel, and when they talked about anything else, it was dishonest. Earlier in the week, before she lost her job, Carly had argued with someone at the grocery store. There was no reason for it: what was the argument even about? Was it bread? Was that it? You would think about something like that, an argument about bread, and you wanted to laugh or cry. There was so much of that already, though. Money, which had never been a friendly thing to Carly, had become spiteful. If her father had saved more for her mother, she could have done something by now – gotten rid of that home aide Melinda, the one her mother said handled her roughly.
She said that, too. Carly's mother did. She said, “That woman hurt me,” not a spasm or a croak of doubt in her voice.
“Melinda?” Carly had asked her mother.
Then it was gone, like those moments her mother would talk to her father, twenty years dead, or say mean things, tell Carly she was chubby or ask her what happened to her husband, when Carly had never married.
If Carly waited until the morning to go to her mother's, then Melinda would stay the night. She would charge to stay the night, but she would stay the night. There was no money for any of that. No money for anything now really, Carly thought.
Unemployed, loanless, filing her taxes as a person and not as a business, she would let Melinda stay the night and the next day, see her mother, who would understand none of this anyway, and at thirty-three years old, she would hand Melinda a handwritten IOU, break her lease, and move her things into her childhood bedroom.
---
Early the next morning, Carly awoke to empty streets that would stay empty for months. She got into her Honda Accord and turned on the radio long enough to hear a chipper host say “...extended the lockdown for Lake Forest and the rest of Lake County.”
“Loads of fun on the radio today,” Carly responded.
Silently Carly rehearsed what she would say to her mother's home aide Melinda. We may need to check back in. We may need to see if you're available. If there's still a need, we could. I will be taking over. I'll look after Mom for now. Thank you, I may check back in with you.
As she pulled into her mother's driveway, she saw Melinda was already packing her 2003 Astro, sliding boxes into the back seat stacked high enough to make the rearview useless. At forty, Melinda was spry, her quick steps impressive under the large box she was carrying.
It looked to Carly like Melinda was angry about something, but to Carly Melinda always looked angry, a little angry at least. There was no telling which Melinda would ever show up, the one who called her mother “my pal” or the one who could put her phone down only long enough to nearly avoid burning a mac-and-cheese lunch.
“Hey, Melinda,” Carly said. Wanting to sound friendly-eyes, she irked herself sounding more gritted-teeth instead.
“Hi,” Melinda said. She smiled, less a smile than a wrinkle at the nose.
“Listen.”
“Yeah, I know. I heard. My sister works the early shift. So I figured,” Melinda interrupted, her turn to try and fail to sound magnanimous.
“Oh,” said Carly, disappointed in herself for forgetting Melinda's sister. “That's right. Yes. We may need to see if you're available. Still, after this. Whenever this is.”
“Okay. She's inside there. I just set her up with the TV. She slept all right last night. I guess – oh.” Something caught Melinda's eye from her back seat. She reached into the top box, the one that would blind her on her drive home. Then she said, “This is yours.”
It was an envelope.
“Health insurance,” Carly said, turning it over. “Thanks.”
“I think that's it. I'll be seeing you. Stay safe,” Melinda said.
“Thanks,” Carly said. She nodded her head at Melinda, who got into her Astro, and took an exhale for herself to walk into her mother's house.
Inside the front room, Carly's mother was sitting silently in the chair that she only left at bedtime, the cushion flat from all of the hours that she spent there sleeping sitting-up. The paint at the arms was chipping because she picked at them with her fingernails. The chair was what it was, though. No one could stop her from picking, and she seemed peaceful sitting there. It was the rest of the front room that troubled Carly: there were stains from nothing in particular all over the carpets, and her mother's stuffed animals, the bear and the fox and the rabbit, were on the floor instead of on the couch.
“Where'd this card come from?” Carly said, bending over and picking up the five of hearts.
Carly's mother remained silent, sizing Carly up.
“This house is a mess, Mom,” Carly said. She thought, She got out of here in a big hurry. Disaster site.
Carly gathered her mother's stuffed animals and placed them on the couch.
“What is that?” she asked, sniffing. Something, closer to the couch than to her mother, was rancid. Carly sniffed again, and her nose led her downward, telling her to look underneath the couch. “Mom?” she asked.
If Carly's mother had been considering Carly at all, she had stopped. The TV, loading the next recommended video, was holding on to her.
“What is that smell,” Carly said to no one. She got onto her hands and knees and angled her head so that she could see underneath the couch. It was dark. To see, she took out her keys and jangled her keychain flashlight into her hand, shining it and squinting her eyes.
“Is that? What?” Carly said. Then, her phone rang. “Shit.”
Carly dropped her keys and reached into the pocket of her jeans for her phone.
“Hello?”
The TV loaded another video, and the volume was louder. Close up on a man's face, the video blared. He said, “Did you hear about this? This is going around. This guy came out last week and said that he had already had it but he got it again.”
“Hello?” Carly said again, not sure if she had missed something. “Mom, turn that off.”
Her mother didn't say anything. Carly picked up the remote and muted the TV.
“Yes, this is she. Well, this is her daughter. I'm legal. Yes, her conservator. Yeah, I can hold.”
If I don't get rid of this mess soon.
Phone between her ear and her shoulder, Carly sprawled out onto the floor. She reached her arm underneath the couch and slid backward, holding a ceramic bowl, a rotten, half-eaten turkey sandwich inside it. Standing up, she held the phone away from her face long enough for someone to come on the line and say, “Hello? Hello?”
“Yes, I'm here,” Carly said, bringing the phone back to her face. “Yes, hers is May 8th, 1946. Okay. Wait, what? That doesn't make any sense. No, I mean, it's automatic. She's had this insurance for years. It's always been automatic. No, no. We've literally never missed a payment. If it says that, it must be a data or a system issue or something. Can you even do this right now?”
Carly's mother cleared her throat and said, “The TV.”
Carly looked at her mother, grinned thinly, picked up the remote, and unmuted the TV.
“I don't know that. I know it's been automatic. That's what I know,” Carly said. She stepped out of the front room and into her mother's bedroom, deciding to take the call in there. On her way, her heel knocked, gently, the rotten turkey sandwich's ceramic bowl, and she thought, I have to clean this place right now.
---
For four hours, Carly argued her mother's case. She said, so many times that she started to think it was true, that she checked on the payments every month, this month included. If there was an error, she explained, then it was not she who had made it but the insurance company, someone there, “not you personally, of course.” Years in customer service had prepared her for the moment, her patience glistening, only not quite as brightly as her tact, which seemed refined even to the seasoned professionals on the other end of the call. It was a master class Carly was putting on, and it was going nowhere.
During the third hour, Carly's mother said, “You're always talking.” When she said things like that, Carly wondered if the whole thing was a performance. What would I do if she just stood up, tossed her milkless cereal to the ground, and took a bow, Carly wondered.
At the end of the fourth hour, Carly said, “I need to get some errands done. I'll call back tomorrow.”
Exhaustion from the call and disgust at her mother's unkempt house canceled out, and ordering a pizza, Carly thought that a day into all this, she was stumbling more than she would have liked. Bad things have a way of getting worse before they get better, she thought. That was one of her mother's old favorites, and she meant it to cheer up Carly – Carly skinning her knee, Carly getting braces, Carly spilling ketchup on her prom dress. It never did that, though. Every time Carly thought about those words, she felt like something terrible was looming over her, and her two options were look up and get it in the face or look down and take the lump.
That night Carly dreamed that, in the bed her father had put together for her when she was fourteen, the bed where she was sleeping, breathing tubes and catheters poked out from the closet and through the windows, and moving along winding paths, on their own time and no one else's, they crept up onto her toes and arms, wrapping themselves around her. When she was awake, she would think Not hard to deconstruct that one, but in her sleep, all that she could think was that her pulse against the breathing tubes was booming.
In the morning, Carly thought about her father. She remembered that the same day he put together her bed, he helped her with her algebra homework. He kept stumbling through quadratic equations, which he said he “never needed to build a business.” When her test came back, he told her, “You got a B. Better than a C. Don't need any formula to know that.” Her mother overheard this, and scowling, she told her father, “Don't encourage slacking.”
After another two hours' back-and-forth with the insurance company – “Crooks, all of them,” Carly told her mother – she started to wander through her mother's house, making mental notes of everything that she needed to clean. There was a lot. She found another ceramic bowl, this one empty, in her mother's closet, and a rotten apple in one of the bathroom cabinets. That would have been enough to glue Carly's shoulders into a daylong tense, and then she looked in the garage, more broken-down boxes than overfull trash bags but no shortage of either.
“It isn't just that,” Carly said into the phone. “If she starts coughing, I'll take her to get tested. It's this surgery. But no, it doesn't matter. The insurance policy just shouldn't be canceled. This doesn't make any sense.”
Another manager, the second of the day, put Carly on hold, and Carly took that as her cue to look in her mother's attic. She hadn't been in the attic since her father's passing. If he had converted his fabled riches into gold bars and not, as Carly's mother suspected, blown through it on craps, this is where they'll be, Carly thought.
There was more to clean in the attic, Carly saw, than anywhere else. Nothing was where it should have been. There was a pile of clothes, half on hangers and half off, and beneath the only window, her mother's home-recorded VHSs were cooking in the midspring sunlight, after who-could-say-how-many balmy Julys.
That was when Carly noticed something, not something there but something not there. She lifted the pile of clothes, tossing each piece aside, and then one by one, opened the boxes marked “CARLY” and “MOM” and “DAD.” The boxes marked “DAD” she emptied, carefully removing their contents: decks of playing cards, cartons of baseball cards, carved figurines and signed baseballs, laminated letters and plastic-encased coins. Every box, her frustration grew. And the cobwebs, she thought. Her mind darted from what was missing to what was left to do. Her mother needed health insurance, and she didn't have it. She needed to clean, and she couldn't. This damn never-ending phone call.
“Hello?” a voice from Carly's phone, the insurance company come to check in on her.
Carly, eight feet from her phone, carefully replaced the cards and the coins into their “DAD” box. She lifted the flaps on another box, only to re-close them quickly, recognizing its contents, seeing how neat it was, so unlike the boxes she hadn't opened yet. Another box and another, the kitchen and the front room, her bedroom and her mother's, there was much to do, and Carly couldn't get her mind back on any of it.
“Where's Dad's big elephant?” she wondered aloud.
---
The next day, Carly made three decisions. The first decision was that she wouldn't call the health insurance people and if they called her, which they wouldn't, she would ignore them. She figured she would let the issue sit and then once it had, get someone else on the line. “I think there may have been a misunderstanding about what's happening,” she would open next time around.
The second decision Carly made was that she would let nothing get between her and her cleaning. Every grease spot in the kitchen and all of the dirt on the carpets, she would blast it all to kingdom-come, to a world where people could hop a plane and forget about these things. House-cleaning seemed more urgent than health insurance, even if she couldn't explain why.
Vacuuming the front room, Carly thought This is nice, her second decision making her first decision easy for her. She wiped the windows and the TV, she swept around the front door, and she lint-rolled the couch and her mother's chair, leading her mother from the latter into the former and back again.
The kitchen was in the roughest shape of all. Around the sink, the edges of the drain had rusted – inevitable, the tap water as hard as it was, but no less unsightly and frustrating. As Carly shined her keychain flashlight on the cans in her mother's pantry, she read the labels, thinking Half of this food is bad. That was frustrating for her too, but when she opened the fridge, it became unbearable. This can wait, she thought.
“That light!” her mother shouted.
Carly looked over at her mother, who turned to meet her eyes and looked back at her unknowingly.
Carly's third decision was the simplest of all: no more bad thoughts. Any thoughts about the lockdown, any thoughts about her ex-job, about her mother's health insurance, her mother's house, they could just go – no shirt, no shoes, no mask, and no loitering.
Her bedroom and her mother's bedroom went easiest. Make the beds, vacuum the carpets, wipe the windows. In her bedroom, she opened her high-school senior yearbook and coming upon a picture of herself and the rest of the yearbook committee, found it easy to tear herself away.
Back in the attic, Carly lined up her father's boxes, which she had left askew, and her mother's VHSs, which were the same as before. She reopened one box, the playing cards and the baseball cards, and she opened one of the cartons of baseball cards and thumbed through it. And not a single one of them signed.
Carly put away the baseball cards and looked around the attic once more. Her father's porcelain elephant, it seemed, had gotten up and sneaked off with nary a stomp, leaving behind only cartons of Topps and signed foul balls, the riches and treasures of gilded 80s-era little-leaguers' fantasies. Carly thought, I could find a Monopoly set and the funny money'd be worth more than all this garbage. The VHSs, she thought, were a loss, but one that her mother would never know. Carly had hated those home videos when she was growing up. A hand over her face or a scurry into her bedroom, she did her best to evade them. Carly's mother would have cried had she seen what had come of them, popping them into her VCR one-by-one only to get a blue screen every time. Carly, when she was growing up, would have thought that was funny, but it wasn't funny now.
In the kitchen, she opened the fridge and then, spotting mold inside tupperware in the back corner, opted to do the dusting first. She dusted on top of the cabinets and then in the corners of the walls, seeing how faded the paint had become – even after all those summers, every one it seemed, that her mother had put on a fresh coat of paint.
Next, Carly dusted behind her mother's kitchen table. There at the bottom of the wall, where the paneling gave way to unsightly plumbing, exposed nearly as long as Mr. Beeper had been passed, something caught her eye: a scrap of paper. She shined her keychain flashlight onto it, its corner stuck into the paneling so that no summer breeze, only a big gust, would have ever moved it.
“The TV!” Carly's mother shouted.
“One minute, Mom,” Carly called back.
Carly picked up the scrap of paper and saw what it was.
It was a lottery ticket.
The ink was bright, and aside from the crease where the paneling had held it, it was crisp. It was new. She read the date: it was from this week's drawing. Reading off the numbers, she opened the browser on her phone and, typing over the address of the neurosurgery website she had been looking at, searched for lottery results. She read her phone and then read the numbers again. As she looked at one and then the other, her face went blank. Her legs went numb. On her cheeks, warm, so warm, she felt a tingle.
“The TV!” Carly's mother shouted again. But Carly didn't hear her.
These were them, the numbers. The ticket, this was it. Carly was holding the winning ticket – for the biggest jackpot in ten years. Realizing that she was holding the ticket by the date, she moved her fingers to the edges and then placed it gingerly on her mother's kitchen table. She inspected for smudges, but there weren't any. It was a smudge-free, jackpot-winning ticket for a 45-state lottery, and it was, it seemed, in Carly's possession.
Over the three days that followed, Carly and her mother watched TV together, agreeing on nothing. A video would play, and if Carly wanted to leave it on, her mother halfway-through would look at her as if to say “You know I want you to change this.” Any video that Carly wanted to change, it was her mother's newest favorite, and Carly changed it at her own risk – the silent, fiery glare locked and loaded. Carly let the videos load as they would, mostly, neither changing the ones she wanted to change nor honoring her mother's commanding glances.
“Look, there's a swing like that one I fell off of when I was nine,” Carly said about one of the videos that came on during lunch one day.
Her mother looked at her without any expression.
“Don't you remember that? I broke my arm. You took me to get the cast. It still hurt once in a while when I was a teenager. It doesn't ever hurt anymore,” Carly trailed off.
Carly's parents were poor when she was born. That changed as she was entering school. Her father started making money, enough to dine out twice a week and to visit Disney World once a summer, and no one seemed to know how, least of all her father. He was almost always at home, reading a newspaper in the chair where Carly's mother had since taken up residence. The way that he read the newspaper, was the same way that Carly did, hopping backward and forward among the articles, from page 4 to page 11 to page 2 to page 8 and so on.
Shortly after turning eighteen, Carly asked her mother “Where does Daddy's money come from?” and her mother said “Ask your father” in a tone that said “Don't ask your father.” It was a secret that they let hang in the air, more like cookies in the oven (chocolate chip or sugar?) than a burnt roast (pork or duck?).
When Carly's father died broke, that seemed, though more like a burnt roast than the sweetness of his unexplained money had been, no more mysterious to anyone. Easy come, easy go, Carly later thought. She never asked her mother about the money: it seemed to her that if she was supposed to know and if it would have done any good to know, then she would have known. It seemed like settled business from all of the years that no one had said anything about it.
Carly had assumed, before the conservatorship, that her mother had stashed away something, if only for the bills later on. If she didn't, Carly thought, we should've stayed in cheaper hotels down in Orlando.
Carly's mother, for her part, had assumed that Carly would cover her bills, if there were any that went beyond what she had stashed – too much a pittance for anyone to call it something. It was more like “a little something” without any irony, enough to let the half-and-half go sour but not enough to let the half-and-half go sour during an annual jaunt to the Caribbean.
The first place that Carly put the lottery ticket was her pocket. That lasted five minutes: she worried that she would spill something on herself. Next, she put it in front of the TV, where she could keep an eye on it. That lasted longer, nearly ten minutes: she couldn't stop watching it. Whatever was on the TV, she didn't know, the ticket's waters too warm for her not to keep swimming in them. Pruned, she finally put the lottery ticket in one of her mother's kitchen cabinets.
When Carly's mother's tongue was sharp, years ago, she said to Carly, “If you could figure out how to pay attention to one thing at a time, you'd never need to worry about forgetting the other thing.” Carly thought wryly to herself, Clever. It still hurt, though. She knew that her mother meant what she said, especially if what she said was somewhat caustic.
When she was twelve, Carly made peace with what her mother called her “spaghetti brain,” deciding that she liked the uncertainty of it. She stopped trying to keep her mind from wandering, and she stopped trying to change the way she read the newspaper. It's all right how it is, she resolved.
Seated on the couch in her mother's front room, Carly crossed her legs and shook her foot nervously, waiting for a gale-force wind to blow open a window in the kitchen and then riffle through the cabinets and pick out the lottery ticket for itself. She waited for that, but it didn't happen. She also waited for her mother to tell her to stop shaking her foot, the way she used to, but that didn't happen either. Instead, the lottery ticket remained where it was, laying heavy in the cabinet where it could taunt her. It was all agonizing for her, and as much as she would have liked to talk to someone about it, that there was no one to talk to about it also seemed like a blessing. Her mother, whatever she would have told Carly to do, would have seen the tapping and the indecision and said something awful, and then where would Carly be? Wouldn't help any if she saw me stressing about it, Carly thought. When she asked herself what she was going to do, it was the same answer every time: Oh I don't know.
Early the morning of the fifth day since the big find, as she was by then thinking of it, Carly got the ticket out of the cabinet. She walked past her mother, into her bedroom, and the ticket in her hand, she sat down on her bed. A gust of wind shook the bush outside her bedroom window. Carly gasped as she looked up and caught the branches scratching on the glass. It was a big gust, but it wasn't big enough – not for that.
Carly looked down at the ticket in her hand, and she dialed the phone number on the back.
“Hello,” she said to the voice that answered her call. “My name is Carly Beeper. I have the winning ticket for that big jackpot.”
---
Five days she had waited to make that call, and it had seemed like more than that. Hesitation had shivered in her fingertips and guilt had blushed on her neck when she pictured herself pulling up a nine-digit bank account, viewing it from different angles and through brighter lenses to make it feel okay. She had thought about burning the ticket, first imagining herself in her mother's backyard. But what would her neighbors say if they saw me outside burning a lottery ticket? she thought. Next she imagined herself at the stove. Light the ticket at its corner and then just drop it on the floor in there. I need to mop all of that again anyway. Most of those five days, she thought about holding the ticket indefinitely. She would let it sit in her mother's kitchen until it had become a relic. Whoever lived in her mother's house next could find it in ten, twenty years, past its expiration, and toss it straight it into a trashcan or look up the date and the numbers and daydream torturous daydreams about what could have been.
But she didn't burn it and didn't hold it. She didn't do either of those things.
The night the money showed up in her bank account, Carly slept in her childhood bedroom. She thought, just in passing, about getting her mother and herself a hotel room, a nice one – a presidential suite. Afraid of using the money, she decided against that.
The following week, Carly spent three hours opening and closing a browser window for a cashmere sweater that she wanted. She wondered if this behavior was compulsive and decided that if it were, then she would need to buy the sweater to put a stop to it. If I buy it I can just leave it in the box too, she reasoned with herself. In the end, she did that, buying the sweater and leaving it in the box, which she tucked into a corner in her mother's front room.
For a month, Carly would catch herself glancing at the unopened box, but there was nothing she could do to quit it. It was only when, having turned the AC down as low as it would go, she saw goosebumps on her arms and gave herself permission to take the sweater out of the box and put it on, for the warmth of it.
Carly realized that she needed to get comfortable with her newfound wealth. She didn't know how, though. Nine months from the day, she told herself, from the day the money had dropped and not the day she had found the ticket, she would start looking at houses for herself. Nothing too much. Just a cozy place. Maybe one of those giant tubs in the bathroom.
Eight months and three weeks from the day the money had dropped, Carly received a text message: it was Melinda, her mother's home aide. She ignored the message, turning off her phone until mid-evening.
“I can't imagine what she wants,” Carly said to her mother, who Carly knew would say nothing back.
Instead of texting Carly again, Melinda called. Carly hesitated three rings but, ultimately, picked up. She was wearing her new cashmere sweater at the time.
“Hello, Carly?” Melinda said.
“Yes,” Carly said.
“It's Melinda. I don't know if you have my number saved. I hope you and your mother are doing all right.”
“Yes, we're good. Thank you. How are you?”
“I'm good too. You know. It's all right,” said Melinda, maybe a little too cheerful. “There was actually a question I wanted to ask you.”
“Oh?” Carly replied. “This place was disgusting you know.”
“Yes, you mean your mother's house.
“Yes.”
“I'm sorry about that. I was in such a hurry that day. I didn't get a chance to clean it. I hope you don't think that's how I left it in normal times,” Melinda explained.
“This place was just very disgusting, this house,” Carly said. She was as abrupt as the first time she said it.
“Yes, I am sorry about that,” Melinda said, meaning it. “Very sorry. It's not okay. I do apologize.”
“Well, all right,” said Carly “Thank you.”
Melinda cut in, sounding only slightly more frantic. “There was actually a reason that I was calling. I'm sure that you've been all around that house these last six months.”
“Not many places to go elsewhere,” Carly said.
“Right. The reason I'm calling, you see, it's this lottery. The girls at the agency and I, we go in on tickets. Anyway, I know it's a long time out now, but one of the girls has the craziest idea that – well, that we won. That she won.”
“Yes?” Carly said. Then she added. “That's wonderful.”
“That's the thing. It was her week to play way back when, and she said she let her daughter pick the numbers. Anyway, her daughter picked the numbers based on her friends' birthdays. One of those birthdays is coming up next week and she, who knows why, went and checked the old results. Sure enough, it was a winner. But we never claimed any prize, of course. We just can't figure it out. Like I said, I know it's a long time out now.”
“I don't understand. What are you asking?”
“I told her that I would ask. My girl friend. She filled in for me a day that week. Amanda?”
“Ah, I didn't know Amanda,” Carly said.
“No? She was there,” Melinda continued. “And she had the tickets there at some point.”
“You know, we're missing something too,” Carly redirected.
“Are you? What?”
“We're missing something. My dad's big porcelain elephant. It cost a lot of money.”
“I'm sorry. I have no idea. It could be up in that attic. I went up there once,” Melinda said.
It would have been in the attic, Carly thought. Meekly, pulling back, she said, “It wasn't there.”
“Oh,” Melinda said, making no more apologies. One beat and then another and she said, “I just thought I would ask about the ticket. I know it's silly.”
When they hung up, Carly blocked Melinda's phone number. She hugged her sweater firmly and sitting on the couch, saw herself wheeling her mother home, after the surgery. She would say "How did Daddy make his money?" and her mother would respond snappily, "Doing nothing too good, I can tell you that much." They would laugh together, about fortunes lost and won, laugh hard about all this, just like that.
---
A week before Carly was to move out of her childhood bedroom, there was a knock at her mother's door. Carly, wearing a different sweater, this one mohair, glided up from her seat on the couch. She was all lightness – until she opened the door and saw, who else but, Melinda.
“Hi, Carly,” Melinda said.
“Melinda,” Carly said. “Hi.”
“That's a nice sweater.” Melinda looked Carly up and down.
“Thank you. How have you been?”
“I've been good. I know this is going to sound a little out-there, but I told Amanda I would ask,” Melinda said, pointing to her Astro, Amanda riding shotgun. She waved to Carly, her eyes grinning, a mask over her mouth and nose.
“You know she doesn't have to wear that in the car,” Carly said.
Ignoring that, Melinda said, “She swears that the only place she was all day was on that couch. You know how your mom is. Anyway, could I give a look in the cushions?”
“The cushions?” Carly asked.
“Yes, I'm sorry. It won't take long, Carly. If I could just check under the couch cushions. That's all, and I'll be out of your hair.”
Carly agreed. Together, they pulled up the couch cushions, ran their hands under the couch back, and lifted the velcro seams. When they found nothing, Melinda thanked Carly.
“Thank you. I mean it,” Melinda said, to which Carly didn't reply.
“I'm sorry about this,” Carly said, walking Melinda out. “Maybe check your friend's house? I don't know. It's been quite a few months, though. Wasn't it?”
Melinda shook her head at Amanda, who had removed her mask and who waved to Carly once more. Carly waved back, and with that she closed her mother's door.
A month into her search, Carly settled on a new home for herself. It was palatial: five figures of square footage, not counting the attached townhouse for her mother. She hung a sixty-light chandelier, all crystal and gold, from the ceiling in the front room, her front room. A tall waterfall cascaded into the backyard pool, which made a crescent moon around the sunken patio, which was too wide for two people to chat from its opposite ends. Inside the home, one of the three living rooms was sunken too, and when someone would say so, use the word “sunken,” Carly would respond, “It's retro.” The kitchen was state-of-the-art, the walk-in fridge and the wine cellar empty, but not for long. On the walls, there were spots where Carly could hang art – if she chose to use her money that way.
In the beginning of March, she moved into her new home. She hired a home aide from a different agency, and her mother lived in the attached townhouse. In her mind's eye, Carly saw her father's pink porcelain elephant, which seemed smaller in her memory now, and whatever amount of money it cost, that seemed smaller too. It seemed not to matter that she couldn't find it.
On a weekday, Carly wandered idly from her mother's attached townhouse to her backyard pool, at one of the finest homes in Lake Forest, and she thought to herself, Really, quite a few months. Although the lawsuit would go on for years, the home aides crying in the judge's chambers and the plaintiff attorney trying and failing to depose one Mrs. Doreen Beeper, there was today nothing for Carly to do but relax.
Billy Gardner McIntyre
