“How long?” I asked.
“Less than a minute,” she said. I thought she was probably minimizing, but I knew it hadn’t been very long.
“I won’t be able to do it,” I said again.
“You will,” Bethany told me. “We’ll work on it, okay?”
I just shook my head.
“We will,” she insisted. “Now come on—you’ve earned some cake.”
As always, the cake was what I figured heaven must taste like. I didn’t even mind that the cake hadn’t cooled completely before Bethany frosted it. I ate the first piece in about twelve seconds and then polished off a second before I remembered it was Thursday. I needed to get the trash collected and out to the curb. Bethany waited in the kitchen while I hauled the trash outside. Once I was done, I sat across from her at the table and looked at the rest of the cake.
I swear it was calling to me.
“It’s late,” Bethany said. “I need to get home to Travis, but we’re not done talking. You got it?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t eat all of that cake tonight, either,” she said. “I’ll be back tomorrow, and you can earn another piece.”
“Can I have one more?”
“All right,” she said, “but no more after that!”
Bethany smiled, and I watched her bouncy hair swing around her shoulders as she stood up and headed to the door. She had just picked up her purse and her keys and started to leave when I suddenly remembered something.
“I thought we were going to talk about sex.”
“Oh, Matthew, honey,” Beth said as she walked through the door and onto the front porch. She shook her head slowly and reached out to tap my nose with the end of her finger. “We have been.”
She turned her back to me and sauntered down the walkway to her car. I watched her get inside, wave, and then back out of the driveway.
I was left confused, so I went back to the kitchen for more cake.
No matter what else happened, cake days were always a win.
Chapter 6—It’s a Family Thing
A slight jerk whips my head forward, and I feel a sense of dread and panic come over me as I realize I’ve been hit. I take ten deep breaths before opening the car door and stepping around to see the damage to the car’s bumper…
Shortly after five in the morning, I sat straight up in bed.
My heart was pounding, and in the wake of the dream, a variety of recent memories rushed through my head like a flash flood: the guy who rear-ended my car; the scrap of paper he shoved at my chest as he took off; the crumpled edge of the lottery ticket as I tossed it into the trash; the voice on the television saying a ticket bought in Millville was the winning ticket.
&nbs
p; There was no way.
People were more likely to be hit by lightning twice.
The trash was at the curb, and the garbage trucks usually rolled into the neighborhood before six. I glanced at the clock and saw that it was only a quarter after five. I stared at the red numbers until they changed to twenty after, just trying to figure out what to do.
I thought about the garbage from the kitchen and how near the bottom of the bag was a folded lottery ticket, the same ticket my hit-and-run driver had shoved at me. It was now in the larger can outside, sitting at the curb and waiting for the collection truck to come around and add it to the landfill north of town. Retrieving it was ridiculous. There was no way the numbers on the lottery ticket would be the winning ones even though the license plate of the car had been registered in Butler County, which meant the guy was local.
There was just no way.
Besides, the ticket was at the bottom of the trash bag. Duck sauce and fortune cookie wrappers and greasy napkins surrounded it. Searching through the garbage would be completely disgusting, and there was no way I would ever touch it. If I did manage to find and pick up the presumably filthy ticket, the act would be pointless.