Julie and Romeo Get Lucky Read Free Page B

looked at me with her dark, searching eyes. “But what if you’re wrong? Wouldn’t it be better to keep watching, just to be sure?”
    You don’t really start making deals with God until the cards have turned against you, and in that split second of my eternity, I found myself wondering if I had disrupted the order of the universe by turning Sarah’s movie off. What if she was right, and I had unwittingly thrown a rock in the smooth waters of our good fortune? I’m not saying I believe this, but the idea, with a hundred of its neighbors, came rushing past me.
    But even if I had the chance to turn back the clock, I would still punch the TV’s OFF button. I would always turn it off because it drove me insane. It drove Sandy insane, and it drove her husband Tony so insane, he would sit out on the back steps to study rather than stay inside with Willie Wonka, even when it meant having to shovel out a place for himself in the snow. It drove Little Tony insane, because sometimes he would be walking past the living room when it was on and he’d get stuck watching it. It caught him like a piece of flypaper, no matter how much he hated it, and once he could pull himself away he hated himself for watching, like a drunk hates himself after a bender.
    In fact, the only person other than Sarah who could stand the movie at this point was my older daughter, Nora. If it was on when Nora came by, she would sit on the couch next to Sarah and stroke her hair and move her lips soundlessly to the words of the song. Nora, who had divided her days into perfectly scheduled ten-minute strips in her Palm Pilot, was never one for chitchat and hanging around—but somehow Gene Wilder worked on her like a neural-inhibitor. I didn’t understand it.
    â€œIt’s like I told you,” Sarah would explain to me. “She wants the luck.”
    Sarah’s sense of luck was certainly becoming more specific. She had gone from believing that the movie was her general talisman for a safe and successful eight-year-old life, to thinking that the movie showed a clear way to profit. She had so completely entered into the world of Wonka that now she wanted her own golden ticket. Charlie Bucket got his from a candy bar. Sarah, understanding that such things did not exist in Somerville, had her sights set slightly higher. She decided to win the Massachusetts state lottery instead.
    Oh, I suppose it started out innocently enough. One day, out of the blue, she asked if I would buy her a ticket when we were at the checkout line in the grocery store.
    â€œA scratch ticket?”
    She tilted up her chin and pursed her lips together, an interpretation of a child thinking that she had picked up from Shirley Temple movies. “No,” she said slowly. “I think I want the Mega Millions.”
    The girl at the checkout, who had until this point been so thoroughly disengaged I would have thought she had been swallowed up by the pod people, sputtered out a little laugh. She leveled her kohl-rimmed eyes at Sarah. “The other kids are angling for a Snickers,” she said. “Or a Colt .45.”
    I gave her a chilly glance, but she had a point. When up against a can of malt liquor, a single lottery ticket didn’t seem like much of a vice. “Do you want to pick your own numbers?” I asked.
    â€œMay I?” Sarah said brightly, still in Temple-mode, which accounted for the correct grammar. I pulled out a dollar bill and handed it over. There was no dithering over the numbers. Sarah knew exactly what she wanted.
    The kid was canny, I had to give her that. She’d hit up one adult and then another, always remembering to space us out so as to never look suspicious. She asked casually, as if it were the last thing in the world she really wanted but it had just crossed her mind. She never asked for more than a dollar at a time. Over and over again, we fell for it. Her secret plan was to win big. She