Free Galveston by Paul Quarrington Page A

leathery wrinkles in a fuzzy housecoat. Her nervous system was faulty, the wiring frayed, allowing her no moments of respite. News of this magnitude might well cause an overload, make her fizzle, spark, rattle, and come to a dead stop. Plus, Caldwell just plain didn’t get along with her. He tried to avoid the subject, addressing the first of Jaime’s questions, even though it had not been completed. “I have to go down to the lottery office.”
    “Check.”
    “Oh, but …” Caldwell laughed lightly. “There’s a newscrew coming over here. They want to film me, you know, leaving to go down to the place.”
    “Why?”
    “Well, you know …”
    Jaime thought about it briefly, decided she didn’t care, shrugged her shoulders and advanced on Caldwell. Caldwell braced, unsure of his wife’s intentions. Jaime reached out and took the telephone receiver from its cradle beside his head, started poking out numbers on the touchpad. “I’m calling your mother,” she said.
    Jaime got along well with Caldwell’s mother. She’d got along well with Caldwell’s father too, had been able to converse with him when he was dying of lung cancer and all Caldwell saw was a shrivelled, nicotine-stained creature with no interest in anything.
    “Mrs. Caldwell, please,” Jaime said into the phone. As they went to seek the ancient woman, she turned and asked, “Where’s the lottery office?”
    “Right down on Simcoe. In the bank building.” Caldwell was surprised at his sure knowledge. He supposed he’d noticed the logo on one of the dark windows of the town’s one true skyscraper. Or he might more properly have
noted
it, in some clairvoyant expectation of this day.
    “Hi, Mom,” said Jaime. “Here’s your bouncing baby boy.” Jaime held out the receiver toward Caldwell, who accepted it, but only after a long moment. “Mom?”
    “Has there been an accident?” Mrs. Caldwell demanded. That had been her reaction to the unusual all her life. If a relative should appear unexpectedly at the doorstep, even duringa festive season, even bearing gifts and bottles of liquor, Mrs. Caldwell would demand, “Has there been an accident?” The irony being, of course, that there never had been an accident, a calamitous event, not in all her many years, just a slow, steady decline.
    Caldwell said, “I won the lottery!”
    “My husband Fred won the lottery once,” she replied. “He won ten thousand dollars. He took me on my dream vacation.” None of this had happened. Caldwell’s father had once won a
thousand
dollars, had been so excited that he’d called his son and indeed announced plans for a dream vacation, but in the end, Caldwell suspected, the money just went into the cigarette fund.
    Caldwell pretended he could have a normal conversation with his mother. “Yeah, well, hey, I won just a
little
bit more than that.” His mother fell silent, and he rushed to fill the quiet. “I won about sixteen million dollars.”
    Jaime began to cough like Lou Costello, pounding on her chest with a fist, trying to force out the first syllable in the phrase “sixteen million dollars.”
    “Oh,” said Mrs. Caldwell. “Yes, that is more than ten thousand. Are you taking me on a dream vacation?”
    “I sure as hell am,” Caldwell said enthusiastically. He wondered where his mother might want to go, but was afraid to ask.
    Jaime grabbed the receiver away and started making plans. “Okay. I’m coming to pick you up. Caldwell’s got to wait here for a cameraman or something. So me and Andy will come get you, and we’ll meet him downtown at the lottery office and then we’ll have the biggest breakfast in the history of breakfast. Are you in?”
    Jaime nodded at some reply Caldwell’s mother made, although Caldwell couldn’t imagine it being more elaborate than a grunt. She replaced the receiver, gave her husband a kiss and started regathering her things. “Come, young Andrew,” she said grandly, “we must go claim