The Lucky Winner (The Lucky Series Book 1) Page 3

  “Why?” asked Dad, simply wondering.

  “Because I would like some privacy.”

  “Ella. What did I tell you?” Mom inquired.

  “You have those curtains.” Dad stated in a matter-of-fact way.

  “Yes, those curtains! Exactly!”

  The look on his face told me he didn’t get the point of my sarcasm. So I explained. “You can’t knock on the curtains, can you?”

  “But we always call your name before we open them.”

  “They are curtains! You touch them, and you can see inside. Without me ever noticing.”

  “Are you hiding something from us?” Mom asked with a look of worry on her face.

  “No, and that’s not the point. I’m only requesting something very normal. Everybody my age has their own bedroom. It’s not rocket science! Except I don’t!”

  “You do have a bedroom.”

  “It’s called a den. With curtains!”

  “Ethan was doing drugs in his room right after installing a lock on his door,” Mom said as she cut her precious meatball into tiny pieces.

  “Huh? Who’s Ethan?”

  “Ethan Sheen. From fifth grade.”

  What? I raised my eyebrows and scrunched my nose at the same time. “I’m not planning to do drugs. If that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Ethan said the same exact thing. I heard it from his mom.”

  “Forget Ethan Sheen! I’m not him! Besides, I’m not requesting a lock. I just want a set of doors!”

  “The lock will come next. Besides, the entry is too wide to install any doors.”

  “What about sliding doors? Or French doors? That’s why I referred to it in the plural,” then I rushed to add, “not clear glass ones though, of course.”

  “It’s too expensive, honey. But it’s good that we talked about it. Now we move on.” Mom smiled as if she were on a peacekeeping mission that she successfully completed.

  I sighed. I hated hearing her use the word, expensive. I couldn’t wish harder for us to be wealthy. If we only had money, things could be so different.

  So very different…

  CHAPTER 7

  The sky looked deeper than usual. Somehow.

  I walked back from school, looking up at the sky, wondering about the secrets of the universe. I sat in astronomy class earlier and that made me think about the enigmatic mystery of space.

  How could anyone have thought what might exist beyond the blueness of the daylight sky? A Renaissance scientist, Nicholaus Copernicus, was the first one to say Earth might not be the center of the universe. That was back in the 1500s. And, back then, it was one crazy idea. It challenged the long-held view that Earth was stationary and located precisely at the center of the universe, so all the other planets, including the sun, could orbit it.

  How did such a then-crazy thought ever enter his mind?

  I pondered that idea as my feet propelled me forward on autopilot.

  There was something so much bigger and beyond our meager existence. Your existence, your life, and everything about you appeared to be at the center of the universe. For you. But it wasn’t. You just had to look at things from different angles. Just as Nicholaus Copernicus did.

  By the time I realized it, I was already at the door to my house. I guess I got a little too carried away with my thoughts about the universe. I saw Mom’s car. I didn’t hang out with Sophia and Zoe today, so I got home early. I supposed Mom came home earlier than usual—which was not a big deal, except for Mom. She never changed her shifts unless it was an emergency or other dire circumstances.

  I entered the house and found Mom sitting at the kitchen table silently. She was still dressed in her Nancy’s Diner’s uniform. She didn’t move at all but kept herself planted in the chair like a lifeless statue.

  I walked around the table to face her. She looked as if she’d just seen a ghost. Her eyes stared at me but they weren’t actually seeing me.

  Did she get fired?

  It wouldn’t be the end of the world to get fired from a diner, but considering how long she’d worked at that place and how loyal she’d been, I supposed it could have affected her negatively in some respects.

  “Are you okay, Mom? Did something happen at work?” I asked as I put down my bag.

  She just kept her gaze on me.

  “Mom. You’re scaring me. Say something.”

  There was a long pause.

  She finally opened her mouth. “I… I took off early. Maggie covered for me, so… it was fine.”

  “Oh, okay. I thought you got fired. Are you sick?”

  “I just… couldn’t function at work this afternoon.”

  I began to worry. “Well then, you should go to bed. What are you doing in the kitchen? Here—” I approached her, trying to help her get up.

  “Ella,” said Mom as she grabbed my arm. Her hand was shaking. Her eyes tried to tell me something as if the house were bugged or something.

  “Mom. What?” I began to feel extremely uneasy. I noticed my voice came out an octave higher than usual.

  “I won.” Her voice was almost a whisper.

  I paused for a second and said, “Won what…?”

  As I watched her face transform with an overwhelming awe that I’d never seen, I began to seriously wonder what she might have been referring to. What could it be…?

  There was a small casino thirty miles away, where a lot of people lost the money they didn’t have in the first place. There was less than zero chance that she’d driven thirty miles and gambled.

  Then what was it?

  Every month, a sweepstakes was drawn for the employees at Nancy’s Diner. But even the top prize was no more than a twenty-five dollar gift certificate to Olive Garden. That would have made Mom’s day but would she be so shocked at winning that? Actually, it was possible, considering she never won anything.

  Mom took a couple of deep breaths, which lasted nearly two minutes, or so it seemed. Surprisingly, I waited patiently while she performed her yoga-style breathing.

  “Ella,” she said, “Don’t panic, okay?”

  “Do I ever panic?” That was a total lie, but I felt it was appropriate for me to say at that moment.

  “It’s the… it’s the lottery.” she whispered with her eyes wider open.

  “Huh…? But you don’t even play the lottery.”

  “I have been. Since you were born.”

  “What?”

  Mom told me that she had been buying Powerball tickets at Tesoro Gas Station adjacent to Nancy’s Diner every other week ever since I was born. She’d been using the same exact numbers—Dad’s birthday, Kyle’s, and mine, 11-5-1-25-7-30. It had something to do with a dream she had on the night I was born. It was her own little superstitious pleasure and something she never shared with us. She received a superstitious message in the dream—that if she told anyone, we could no longer maintain our well-being or something. So it had to be kept secret.

  However, something didn’t fully click with me.

  She always accused me of being obsessed with money. Dream or not, why would she buy lottery tickets if she weren’t secretly hoping to win? And for sixteen years, for God’s sake. Honestly, I didn’t buy her dream story.

  I looked at her like she was a total hypocrite. She’d always told me and my brother (mostly me) not to waste money, and that spending money on anything we didn’t really need was a waste. She’d been telling us that while she was out buying lottery tickets for sixteen years?

  But, come on, she only played one ticket at a time, bi-weekly, which amounted to only four dollars a month. Okay, for four dollars a month, I really couldn’t call her a hypocrite. Besides, she said she was planning to use the money for our college tuitions if she won some money. Regardless, she’d never expected to win, not even the slightest bit. Just like her other routines that she followed every day, buying lottery tickets twice a month was simply part of it.

  My mind was occupied with those thoughts for a good minute or two, and I forgot to ask the most important question.

  “Wait. How much did you win?”

  I knew it had to be more than a few dollars because there must have been a good reason for her crazed expression. My guess was anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to even a thousand.

  Wow, that’d be nice.

  Mom took another deep breath and said in a quavering voice, “One hundred two million, one hundred fifty-eight thousand dollars.”

  I just stood there, absolutely motionless, as if I’d been shot in the neck by a blowgun with a poisoned dart.

  “Ella. We’re rich.”

  Now I was the paralyzed one, and Mom was ready to explode with excitement like Kīlauea Volcano on Hawaii’s big island. And with that, my brain finally processed the information.

  “One hundred two—w-w-what?!” I thought I heard her say million but I really wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure if such a number could be real. My heart raced as if I were about to have a heart attack.

  “T-T-That’s just… that’s just impossible… You’re joking, right? You know, the odds of winning an Oscar are better than winning the lottery? Or being crushed by a meteor? Or being killed by many other things that fall from the sky? Or dying from flesh-eating bacteria? They say being crushed by a vending machine is less likely though.” My words weren’t making much sense as I stammered on like I had a speech impediment.

  “Ella, I’m not joking. It’s real. It really happened.” Mom set her unblinking eyes on me. She seemed to have been expecting that type of reaction from me. I mean, who could react calmly to news like that?

  One hundred and two million, one hundred fifty-eight thousand dollars. Even though the government taxed it thirty percent, it was still seventy-one million-something. This wasn’t real.
The sun must have begun orbiting Earth.

  I took a deep breath as reality began to sink in. “So, what are we going to do? Buy a new house? Convertible cars? Go on a vacation in the Caribbean? Oh, my God. Oh, my Gawd!” I gasped for air, fanning my face with both of my hands like I’d just swallowed a spoonful of wasabi.

  I had absolutely no idea what we could or would do with such a large amount of money. I’d never even thought about it. Of course, I always wished we were wealthy, but I was thinking, realistically, like our best bet was to rise from lower class to middle class. I was certainly not thinking one hundred and two million dollars!

  “Try not to think about it too much right now,” said Mom to calm me down. “We’ll discuss it when Daddy gets home. He’s coming home tonight.” She said and her shaky fingers played with her name tag on her Nancy’s Diner’s uniform, as if she didn’t know how to relax otherwise.

  CHAPTER 8

  The four of us sat at the kitchen table, all frozen in stunned silence as if we’d forgotten how to speak.

  Finally, Mom broke the ice.

  “We should definitely not reveal our true name. We should not tell anyone.” Mom looked at each one of us, making sure everybody followed her line of thinking.

  “I agree. We’ll remain anonymous,” said Dad. “The thought of people knowing anything about this scares me.”

  Mom nodded like a bobble-head doll, emphatically expressing she couldn’t agree more.

  Kyle was already on his laptop. Typing something so fast, the sound of his fingers on the keyboard almost made me dizzy. I glanced over at his laptop and saw a bunch of sites about winning the lottery.

  Mom replied to Dad’s comment. “I’ve read articles about winners who got bombarded with personal requests. As soon as people know you have money, they ask you for all kinds of things. Your friends, your family… and relationships get ruined because of that.” Mom looked more horrified than anything else, instead of jumping up on the roof for becoming a millionaire that she’d never, in a trillion years, imagined. “Gosh, people even get killed…” she continued as her frightened thoughts flashed in her mind.

  I had to admit that it was true. Especially in a small town like this where everybody knew almost everything about everyone, you had to take any privacy matters very seriously. Rumors were tricky animals, like anglerfish—they could be fun but also extremely dangerous.

  “Luckily, North Dakota is one of the few states that allows the winners to remain anonymous. I think it’s safer to create a family trust though. Just to be doubly cautious.” Kyle mumbled as his eyes moved rapidly, reading the articles. “And you can name the trust whatever you want. You can even name it Pug, so people don’t ever suspect it’s you.”

  Pug. Out of all the names he could think of, he’d choose that. It was so Kyle.

  “We should probably consult a financial adviser,” Dad said calmly.

  “I’ll look for one and make an appointment tomorrow,” said Mom. “We should have an annuity, shouldn't we?”

  “There are cons that steal annuity payments,” Kyle’s hands and eyes kept moving like a skilled teen hacker.

  I’d never seen him talk so much. Not since kindergarten when he wouldn’t shut up about what each Pokemon card meant. I supposed he was secretly super excited about the whole winning and his mind was floating somewhere up in space. After all, who didn’t like being rich?

  Kyle continued, “Let’s say something bad happened to both of you, a car accident, a plane crash, or whatever. You die after getting treated in the ICU. Then Ella and I would be left with massive hospital bills, without the ability to pay them. We couldn’t pay for your funerals, either.”

  Mom shot a frightful look at him, You’re thinking of us dying?

  Kyle sensed Mom’s stink eye. He looked up from his laptop, meeting her stare. “I’m just being practical here. All I’m saying is, what if…”

  Mom kept her silence.

  “He has a point,” agreed Dad, however. “We’re responsible people. Getting the funds in a lump sum is only bad if you can’t manage money. We can certainly keep the money untouched, and safely invested in the bank.”

  “Yeah, and who knows if you guys decided to, like, start your own business or something. You’ll need a stash of cash for that.”

  Kyle being talkative seriously frightened me. Although, I had to admit, I agreed with everything he said.

  There was a pause.

  Then Mom reopened her mouth. “Whatever we decide, we should keep everything as it is for a while. We’ll keep working at the same jobs.” She looked at Dad for reassurance—to see if he were on the same page with her. He nodded his agreement. Then Mom looked at my brother and me. “Keep the same attitude. Like nothing ever happened. Everything is going to be the same. Can you do that? Can we count on you two?”

  “Wait. So we aren’t even gonna buy a new house?” I finally asked, joining in the conversation.

  “No. Not for a while, at least. We’re going to avoid anything that might draw unsolicited attention.” Mom cast me a nervous look. “Please do not mention anything related to it to any of your friends. Or anyone else. Can you promise that? Can you promise? Ella?” She repeated the same sentence.

  I hated seeing Mom so nervous.

  However, I had to make my point. “If we can’t even get a new house, really, what’s the point of winning all that money?”

  “You can go to college. You can get a master’s degree even. Both of you. People will think you won scholarships.”

  “That’s not going to eat up one hundred and two million dollars! This is ridiculous!”

  “Ella!” She shushed me and surreptitiously looked out the window, as if people were listening to us with their ears to the wall. Then her nervous eyes returned to me. “We can build a new house. Sure, we can do that. But not for a while. That’s all we’re saying.” She continued to ensure I wouldn’t do anything reckless. “We have to be very very careful, Ella. If only one person finds out, that’s it. The whole town will know.”

  It stunk but it was true. God, I hated this town…

  “They say it’ll be very hard to know who’s trying to help you and who’s trying to use you when everyone knows you have money,” Mom persisted. “In any case, having the money doesn’t change us at all. We’re the same people. We’ve been always honest and humble, and that’s who we are and who we will always be. Be like-minded, sympathetic, loving toward one another, compassionate, humble…”

  Yeah, yeah, there she goes again…

  I knew more words were soon to come out of her mouth, but I was no longer capable of just quietly sitting and listening. There was a pause after she said humble, so I jumped on the opportunity, pretending as if I thought that was the end of her lecture. If I wanted to stop her, it was now or never.

  “Can we eat? I’m so hungry.”

  “I’ll have the Tuscan sirloin with mashed potatoes, please.” I said as I handed my menu to our waitress. “Oh, and a diet Coke and orange juice.”

  Mom was in no condition to cook—nor did she need to—so I’d suggested to go out and eat. Despite my request to go to Gabby’s Steakhouse, which was located inside a five-star hotel in the neighboring town and the most expensive restaurant in the area, we were sitting, once again, at Olive Garden.

  Mom freaked out when I mentioned Gabby’s. She opposed my suggestion adamantly, saying people would wonder how we could afford such an expensive restaurant so suddenly. As if we knew any customers who dined there! Gabby’s Steakhouse wasn’t even located in our town. However, considering that we only dined at Olive Garden for special occasions in the past, I didn’t have massive complaints to her counteroffer.

  However, she gave me the stink eye when I ordered the most expensive item on the menu at Olive Garden. I knew what she was thinking but she didn’t say anything. Thank, God. What did she expect? That the waitress would wonder how we could afford the most expensive item on the menu at Olive Garden and blab it to the whole town? Come on.

  It seemed she might have gotten an idea about it though when Dad and Kyle also ordered the higher end items on the menu.

  Good.

  The dinner was over and we waited for the bill to arrive. I looked at my parents from one to the other and smiled. For my entire life, I’d lived looking at my parents’ nervous faces while we waited for the restaurant bills to arrive. From that day forward, I didn’t have to look at those nervous faces any longer. They seemed as relaxed as two sloths. Especially Mom. Maybe the wine she had with her meal, which was suggested by Dad, contributed to her happy countenance too.