This is the first short story I've written since March. I'm pretty conflicted about it: when I was writing it as a first draft, I didn't like the story, but since I started it, I decided to finish it. When I was re-writing it for the second draft, I liked it alot (maybe I just like the second draft better than the first draft). And when I typed it up in the third and final draft, I was back to not liking it.
I really don't know how to feel about this piece in terms of its quality. I guess I'll just leave that up to you, the reader. I'm not planning on submitting it anywhere, which is why I'm posting it here, but comments/criticisms are always welcome.
I really don't know how to feel about this piece in terms of its quality. I guess I'll just leave that up to you, the reader. I'm not planning on submitting it anywhere, which is why I'm posting it here, but comments/criticisms are always welcome.
Luck
By Jamil Ragland
493,394. Brian repeated the number I his head, breaking it down and adding its parts together to form a new whole. Something with a nice ring to it. He grabbed the receipt from his purchase of a burger and fries and scribbled the number on the back. 493,394. A palindrome. He couldn’t remember where he’d seen it, but it had seized his imagination. Big and symmetrical, perfect for mining lottery numbers. He added the three and the four together. Seven, July, the month Anna was born in, three months before her due date. He examined the numbers he’d formed out of the original. They didn’t have that intangible something he was looking for, but he knew he would coax it out eventually.
“Are you ready to go?” Charlotte asked, walking up beside him. Anna was strapped to her chest in the black carrier that Charlotte’s mother bought for them. I’ll be surprised if I ever see Brian wearing this, she’d remarked at the baby shower.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m ready,” he said, his eyes still fixed on the receipt. He jammed it into his pocket and took Charlotte’s hand. “Let’s go.” The mall was empty, save for a few bands of preteens that rumbled by. It was Tuesday, a predictably slow night. Charlotte needed invitations, and she didn’t want to contend with college boys looking for conquests and old people complaining that things were cheaper and better quality in their day.
“Wanna try the Hallmark store?” Brian asked.
“That’s upstairs. CVS is right here. They sell invitations too.”
“But Hallmark has better stuff.”
“Brian, I just want to get these invitations and go home. Anna needs her bath.”
“I don’t know why you brought her with us anyway,” he muttered.
“Because I don’t want to bother my mother to watch her, okay? She baby-sits her all day while we’re at work. She doesn’t need us to take her evenings away too.”
“Okay, you’re right, sorry,” Brian raised his hands defensively. His eyes dragged across the Hallmark store to the mall’s package store next door. Even the supposedly upscale whine sellers had lottery machines. Gambling and alcohol were eternally linked.
Charlotte was holding a handful of envelopes, mixing and matching them with three sets of invitations she couldn’t choose between. Anna was sleeping. In the stillness of the store, Brian could hear her breath whistling through her little nose. She was wearing a pink jump suit with matching cap, mittens and booties. She didn’t need a jacket in the unseasonably warm December they were having. The good weather was welcomed by Brian. It meant they didn’t have to be hunkered down in the house, and he could keep showing Anna the world she’d been missing in the hospital.
“Which one?” Charlotte asked, fanning out the three invitations in one hand and four different envelopes in the other.
“The one with the snowman on the front. And the red envelopes.”
“That’s kind of plain. I like the blue envelopes.”
“It’s a Christmas party. Green and red are the colors of the season,” he said.
“What do you think, Anna?” she asked. Anna’s scrunched up expression relaxed a little.
“See, she agrees with me,” he said. Charlotte relented, taking the cards and envelopes Brian chose to the counter. He gasped at the price on the register.
“Sixteen dollars won’t kill us,” she scolded him. “Besides, you chose them.”
Anna was still sleeping after they’d strapped her into her car seat. Brian kept the radio low, even though he knew nothing short of hunger could wake her. Charlotte was staring out of her window. Her obsessive compulsive disorder compelled her to count the streetlights as they passed. He could see her eyes lock on each pole as the orange light spilled into the car.
“How many so far?”
“Forty nine.”
The number rushed back into Brian’s mind. 493,394. It was no coincidence that Charlotte’s number had reminded him of his. Brian didn’t believe in coincidences. He glanced at the dashboard clock. 8:48. They wouldn’t reach home fast enough for him to play at his favorite spot, the gas station nearby. Screw it, the numbers are the same no matter where I play, he thought. “I’m getting off at this next exit.”
“For what?” Charlotte asked in the darkness between street lights.
Brian hesitated. “I need something.”
“I bet you do.”
He hated when she said that. It was the phrase she used to dismiss him, and she’d mastered the sarcastic delivery of it. She only used it when he spoke about playing the lottery. If we hit this, we’ll be cruising baby, he’d say. I bet we will. This is the number, I can feel it. I bet it is. Their lack of money was an ironic joke they made to each other before Anna was born. Now, it seeped into their conversations, their lovemaking. Anna had a twin named debt, and it grew faster than she did.
“This is the one, Charlotte. I know I’ve said that before. You gotta believe me, just this one more time.”
She sighed. “You’re making me lose count.”
“But baby-“
“Don’t ‘baby’ me! I’m sick of it!” she yelled suddenly. “We live in my mother’s house, your daughter sleeps in the same crib I did when I was a baby, and you’re building castles in your mind with imaginary money. When I ask you what we’re going to do, how we’re going to make it, and you say, ‘Don’t worry’, is this your plan? Is it?”
“What about you?” Brian snapped. “You’re always *****ing about how poor we are, how we rely on your family for everything, and then you go and spend twenty ****ing dollars on invitations. And one dollar for the lottery is too much? It’s your mother’s god**** party, let her buy this ****!”
Charlotte laughed. “So it’s my fault, right? It’s always my fault. It’s not that your ideas are stupid. It’s not that you need to be a ****ing man and take care of your family. No, I spend too much money. Okay, fine. When you move us into our own place, I’ll take what you have to say seriously.”
Brian was quiet. Their arguments always ended the same way, with Charlotte shaming him into silence. He could feel his stomach knotting up into a hot ball of embarrassment. He wanted to shut her up, more than anything. Paying their bills was second to seeing the stunned look on her face when he presented that winning ticket to her. He wouldn’t have to work the register at Stop and Shop ever again. He wouldn’t have to kowtow to Charlotte’s mother anymore. He would tell them all to go to hell, and he and Anna would go anywhere. Charlotte could come if she wanted. He really didn’t care.
“I won’t go to the store then,” he said, merging back into the center lane of the highway. “You don’t like what I’m doing? You figure something out then. This whole thing, you can figure out how to fix it.”
Charlotte spun in her seat towards him. “What whole thing? This family? Our daughter? God, you’re such a ****ing child. You want money without the work. You wanted us to have sex, and now you can’t handle the consequences. No responsibility. None.”
“Like I said, you figure it out,” Brian repeated. The rest of the ride was silent, except for the faint whistling of Anna’s breath.
* * *
“Mmf, what time is it?”
“3:30.”
“Is that Anna crying?”
“Who else would it be?”
“Who’s turn is it to get up?”
“Yours.”
Brian stumbled around the darkened room to Anna’s bassinet. Her eyes, elongated ovals like her mother’s, were shut, but her hands were clenched into tight balls as she cried. She was hungry. Brian sighed. He’d read in one of Charlotte’s baby books that Anna should be sleeping through the night by now. He had to constantly remind himself that although Anna was five months old, she only had the physical development of a baby half her age.
He took her to the kitchen, finding the extra breast milk in the back of the refrigerator. Anna was awake now, screaming as the milk warmed in the microwave. After her bottle, her cries were quieter but just as constant. It was going to be one of those nights where she cried straight through to her next feeding, three hours away. He hoped that Anna didn’t awaken Charlotte’s mother. He could deal with the baby, but not with Charlotte’s mother being “helpful” by telling him that everything he did with his daughter was wrong.
Brian dressed himself and Anna and walked out to the garage. He’d decided to take Anna for a ride, to spare the rest of the house and to test if cars really put children to sleep. By the time he reached the stop sign at the end of the road, she was quiet. When he pulled onto Main Street, he glanced back to find her asleep. He laughed a little, not too surprised that it worked. He drove aimlessly, pleased at how serene it was to be in a car in the early morning hours. And without Charlotte in the passenger seat.
He’d wanted to hurt her earlier in the car. Not physically. He just wanted her to feel something other than contempt for him, to feel what it was like to constantly be second-guessed and doubted. Anna had been a mistake; a beautiful mistake that Brian loved. But she was Charlotte’s mistake, and she tried to pin it on him every chance she got. Brian knew better. He remembered the day that they’d found out she was pregnant. He’d only bought the test to shut her up. After it came back positive, he berated her for hours, accusing her of missing pills, theorizing that her OCD medication had messed with her hormones. By the time they went to sleep, she was in tears and he was hoarse. He regretted that night for months
He regretted it so much that he kept his allegations to himself when Anna was born in July instead of October. Charlotte had done something wrong again, he just knew it. She hadn’t taken her prenatal vitamins everyday. She shouldn’t have kept working. They owed thousands of dollars in medical bills and were essentially homeless because of her, yet she expected the moon and the stars from Brian. He could feel the anger from earlier in the evening returning. It was exhausting him.
The orange glow of a 7-11 sign caught his eye as he turned to go home. 493,394. The number was still in head, the hope. He pulled into the parking lot, past a gas tanker making a delivery. He looked into the back seat. Anna was still sleeping.
“Daddy will be right back.”
Inside the store, a television blared infomercials. A large man with blue eyes and a red baseball cap was standing in front of the lottery machine. The cashier stood behind the register, waiting for the man to make his selection.
“Can I get a play three, 1-2-9, one dollar backup. Play four, 1-2-0-9, one dollar backup,” the man said.
“Looking to retire early from trucking?” Brian asked, grabbing a sheet to fill out his numbers.
“Nah, just playing the daily numbers. I always play around my birthday. Lookin’ for some extra spendin’ money when I go to the casino with the fellas.”
“Happy birthday. Think you’ll win anything?”
The trucker shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s easier to say ‘maybe’, and leave it at that.”
Brian stared at the lottery sheet in front of him. His number morphed into six individual ones. His hand slid across the sheet, bubbling them in. This was it. The chance to fix everything. To prove Charlotte wrong.
“Good luck, pal,” the trucker said, slamming his large hand down on Brian’s shoulder as he walked out. Brian took one last look at his sheet. It felt good, felt right. The wait would be agonizing until that evening, when the drawing would happen. But the wait will be worth it, he assured himself as he handed the cashier his sheet.
As he left the store, he braced himself against the wave of negative thoughts that washed over him every time he played the lottery. More money wasted. Charlotte is right, this is stupid. She was right about everything, everything. She didn’t want to stop using condoms. She told me she wasn’t feeling well back in May. I am a failure, less than a man, less than my daughter deserves. Guilt swelled in his chest when he remembered that he’d told her they were more likely to hit the lottery than she was to get pregnant. He still loved her, no matter how much he’d grown to dislike her over the last year. The truth was, how could he like a woman that put up with a man like him?
It was 4:11 when they pulled back into the driveway. He crept upstairs with Anna and put her back in the bassinet. She would be awake again soon, but he needed those precious minutes of sleep. Charlotte was sprawled out across the bed, her arms on his pillow.
“Where have you been?” she asked without opening her eyes.
Brian sighed. “Nowhere.”
