Extreme Vinyl Café (25 page)

Then he would gesture toward the ticket, or maybe get up and walk over to the mantel where he kept it in a box. He might pick it up and wave it in the air.

Lewis believed having the dream was better than having the pile of money. Money? Well, money could cause no end of problems.

“It’s far better to stick with dreams,” he said.

T
ommy said, “It used to drive my uncle nuts. My uncle thought he was crazy.”

Stephanie pushed her hair away from her face and said, “What do you think?”

Tommy plopped onto the couch beside her and stretched out his legs. “I don’t know,” he said. “
He
was so sure. He was certain. I mean. It
could
be the winner. You can’t deny that. It
could
be.

“Neighbours used to come to the house just to see it. Just to look at the winning ticket.”

Steph said, “Do you think you should scratch it?”

Tommy said, “Do you think so?”

Steph said, “That way you’d know.”

Tommy started to stand up and then sat down again.

“Because he is gone? Don’t you think we should check the will?”

She hadn’t thought of that. She hadn’t thought of what he would want.

“H
e didn’t mention it,” said Tommy’s father, holding his cellphone against his chest.

“Don’t you think that’s odd?” said Tommy’s mother.

“What?” said Tommy’s father. “That it wasn’t mentioned? Or that I am phoning a lawyer to ask him to re-check my father’s will to make certain that he didn’t mention an unscratched lottery ticket that he had on his mantelpiece for over a decade. Yes. Now that you ask, I think it’s odd.”

“W
hat would happen,” said Stephanie, “if you scratched it, and it was a winner?”

“I would feel bad for not trusting him,” said Tommy. “For not believing.”

“And if it wasn’t a winner?”

“I would just feel bad.”

T
he funeral was scheduled for Monday. Tommy went home on Thursday. By the time he got there, the whole neighbourhood was buzzing. No one had a say, but everyone had an opinion.

Wherever Tommy went, they were talking about it. And they all wanted to tell him what they thought. They were talking about it at the funeral parlour.

“Tommy, the reason he didn’t mention it in the will is
because he knew it wasn’t a winner. He knew it was worthless. You should just scratch it and be done with it.”

They were talking about it at the corner store.

“Ahmed, if you are so sure it is
not
a winning ticket, why are you in a such a hurry for the boy to scratch it? If you are so sure, you should tell him to throw it out.”

And they were talking about it at the barbershop—the very place where Lewis had had his stroke.

“Tommy, I went to your grandpa’s house once, so he could show it to me. I have a picture. In the picture I am holding the ticket.”

“Maybe we could scratch the picture.”

Some were believers. “It made him happy,” they’d say. “And no harm was done. Everyone should have such a thing.”

Others thought the whole thing was foolish.

“It is not the original ticket,” claimed one. “He scratched the original ticket years ago. He won five bucks. That’s all. I know a guy who was there when he did it. It was only five bucks. The guy told me.”

The whole neighbourhood was divided into two camps, the scratchers and the non-scratchers. The believers and the ones who didn’t believe.

T
he night before the funeral, Tommy’s family gathered at Tommy’s house. After dinner Tommy, Tommy’s father and Tommy’s great-uncle, Lawrence, were sitting at the dining-room table. The ticket was lying on the table.

Lewis used to torment Uncle Lawrence with the ticket. He would bring the ticket out at family dinners and lay it front of him and watch him squirm.

“Watch him squirm,” he would say.

And oh, he would squirm. “Lewis,” he would start, “it is arrogant to say that money doesn’t matter.”

“Arrogant?” Tommy’s grandfather didn’t have to say much. He would poke his brother Lawrence now and again if he was running out of steam. “Arrogant?”

“It is irresponsible. If
you
don’t want the money, you should use it for something else. Send the grandchildren to university.”

He said that at Christmas this year. And when he did, Lewis twinkled. He winked at Tommy and said, “But the grandchildren are
already
at university.”

Uncle Lawrence said, “Bah! Give it to charity then.”

And that’s when Lewis pounced. Lewis said, “Ah ... now we’re talking. Tell me exactly which charity. Come on. What would you do if you had
a million dollars
?”

Uncle Lawrence knew he had been suckered again, and he slapped the table. And that was the end of that.

“I
t’s not about the money,” said Uncle Lawrence, for the third or fourth time. “I don’t want the money—it’s the principle.”

“If it’s not about the money,” said Tommy’s father, “then what’s the hurry? How many years have we have gone without scratching? We can’t wait until he’s buried?”

And so it was decided. They would wait until after the funeral. And after the funeral, when everyone was together, they would scratch the ticket.

E
ven though the family had made their decision, the debate echoed in their minds. So although everyone agreed that the Rev. Simms spoke nicely at the service, it was hard not to think that he had weighed in on the subject.

“Lewis was a man of faith,” said the Reverend in his homily. “And faith is the ability to believe in something that cannot be proven.”

“What is he talking about?” said Uncle Lawrence under his breath. “We scratch it and we know. It’s as simple as that. There’s the proof.”

“Be quiet,” whispered Lawrence’s wife. “He isn’t talking about the ticket. Show some respect for your dead brother.”

“Hocus-pocus,” muttered Uncle Lawrence.

B
ack at the house after the service, there was a lot of discussion about what the Reverend Simms had meant.

“What he is saying,” said Tommy’s father, “is if you
believe
you know, then you know. That’s what faith is.”

Tommy’s head was spinning. If you were among the faithful, then, you believed that scratching the ticket would be a loss of faith. Lewis had had faith. He hadn’t needed to scratch the ticket.

Uncle Lawrence was sitting in Lewis’s favourite chair. He had a coffee cup perched precariously on the arm.

“Lawrence,” said Tommy’s father, “owning that ticket gave him hope. Maybe he needed hope more than he needed money.”

“Hope,” said Uncle Lawrence, “is false and foolish. All he had was
false
hope.”

“
Hope
,” said Tommy’s father, “keeps despair at bay.”

“Not mine,” said Uncle Lawrence. “I despair that I’m living in a family of idiots.”

T
here were seven people around the table on Tuesday night: Tommy, Tommy’s mother, Tommy’s father, Uncle Lawrence, Lawrence’s wife, Muriel, his aunt Edith and Edith’s son, Tony.

Tony was the youngest. When everyone was settled, Uncle Lawrence nodded at Tony and Tony got up from the dining-room table and walked to the mantel. He carried the wooden box carefully across the room and placed it in front of Uncle Lawrence, who was the oldest. Tommy was sitting opposite Uncle Lawrence. Tommy squeezed his eyes closed as Uncle Lawrence opened the box.

Uncle Lawrence looked into the box and then slowly around the table. Then he picked the box up and held it so everyone could see in. Lewis’s faded lottery ticket was gone. There were seven brand-new tickets in its place.

A
nd so a week passed.

And Tommy and Stephanie were back at her apartment.

Tommy said, “It was only a week ago.”

Tommy was sitting at the table where he had sat that night. He was holding a beer.

Stephanie said, “I wish I could have been there when you told them.”

Tommy said, “My father laughed. No one else said
anything
. What could they say? I put the ticket in Grandpa’s pocket. The ticket was
buried
. They weren’t going to dig him up.”

Tommy stumbled over the word
buried
. He started to cry.

“Whoa,” he said. “That took a while.”

“It is okay,” said Stephanie. “It’s about time.”

She waited. Then she said, “I wish I could have seen your uncle Lawrence. I wish you had a video.”

“Yeah,” said Tommy. “He surprised me. I thought he would have scratched
his
right away. To make a point. But no one did.”

Then she said, “Why did you do it?”

“Because,” said Tommy. “I trusted him.”

Stephanie said, “I think he would have liked you to have it.”

Tommy said, “The money?”

Stephanie said, “Not the money. The dream.”

And Tommy said, “I do.” And he reached into his pocket, and he pulled out
his
ticket.

“I bought seven,” he said.

Stephanie held out her hand, and he handed it to her.

Stephanie said, “Do you think it’s a winner?”

And Tommy said, “Oh I
know
it is. I am
sure
it’s a winner. You can tell.”

Stephanie said, “Are we going to scratch it?”

Tommy said, “No. We’re going to hold onto it. Just in case.”

Stephanie said, “Just in case what? We need the money?”

Tommy said, “No. We don’t need the money. We’ll never need money. In case we need him.”

“B
ut Grandpa,” said Tommy.

This is a long time ago. He is remembering this part from a long time ago. To be honest he is not even sure this part happened. When he remembers it, it seems like a dream to
him. Maybe he had imagined it. But this is the way he remembers it.

“But Grandpa,” he says, “it’s just a dream of a dream.”

And his grandfather says, “Now you’ve got it. Now you understand. It’s just a dream. That is exactly what it is. It is nothing at all. And in the dream, I am still here. I am still with you. I may seem to be gone, but I have only gone on a little trip. Whatever I was once, I am still. When you see a penny, you must pick it up for me. Save all the ones that are ‘heads up’ in the little jar the way we do.

“And tonight, when you are falling asleep, I want you to think very hard, because tomorrow, when you wake up, I want you to tell me exactly what you would do if you had
a million dollars
. I want you to tell me your heart’s desire.”

Dear Stuart,

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been plagued by a vast assortment of irrational fears. You seem like a guy with more than a few irrational fears of your own, so I thought you might have a few suggestions about a recent dilemma in which I find myself. My new girlfriend is wild about rides and has said that as soon as the local amusement park opens in the spring, she wants me to take her on the new roller coaster. Now, I suffer from a fear of (1) amusement parks, (2) heights, (3) roller coasters and (4) commitment. Do you have any advice for me?

In anxious anticipation of your response,
Howard

Dear Howard,

Please see below.

T
he town of Big Narrows, in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the town where Dave grew up, was, when Dave was a boy, about as far away as you could get from anywhere.

Not that there weren’t plenty of places in town to keep a boy happy. There was the alley full of steam that ran alongside Art Gillespie’s Laundromat. Down by the river there was the chair factory, and you could always find scrap wood there. If you were lucky enough to have a little money, there was MacDonnell’s Post Office and General Store, which is where kids went for candy, pop and
Mad Magazine
; teens went for smokes; and parents picked up the big-city papers:
The Glace Bay Coastal Courier
,
The Antigonish Casket
.

Big Narrows was off the main road, no doubt about it. Still is. When Dave was a boy, he knew the summer slowness of dirt roads, and spent hours at the trouting pond on Macaulay’s mountain. Or at the jumping cliff in the hills.

It was Dave’s cousin Brenda who discovered the jumping cliff. Brenda who discovered you could leap off the cliff, and then, as you flew through the air, save yourself from smashing to the ground by grabbing onto the high branches of one of the maple saplings that grew at the cliff base. The saplings
would bend gracefully and lower you to the ground. It was like pole-vaulting in reverse. On a Saturday afternoon in May, you could go up the hill, and there would be kids flying through the forest like monkeys.

The kids were always up to something in the Narrows. The summer Dave was eleven, Billy Mitchell found an old grey and green Verchères rowboat at the dump. The next morning, he assembled nine boys. It took them all morning, and half the afternoon, but they lugged the boat, all leaky and rotten and done in, down the dam road. They got it to the pond in one piece, and they played pirates for the rest of that summer, dividing into teams—the English rowing the doomed boat along the shore, the French pirates swamping out from under the pine trees that hung low over the water, the boys’ yelps echoing over the hills for hours.

At night they would meet, the boys and the girls, in big packs of sparking energy, and they played hide-and-seek, and kick the can; and when they got tired of that, if it wasn’t time for them to go home, they drifted off to the schoolyard, where they took turns on the swings, arching back and forth under the cover of darkness, under skies as clear and starry as any sky anywhere.

It was, all in all, just about a perfect place to grow up, although you’d never convince any of the kids of that. When you do your growing up in a place like the Narrows, where you know everything about everyone, and everyone
thinks
they know everything about you, you spend a lot of time dreaming of the places you are going to go the day you can finally swing clear of the schoolyard and over the moon.

Dave dreamt of landing in Brooklyn, New York, home of the
most famous amusement park in the world, Coney Island. When he got there, he was going to ride the roller coaster. The world-famous Cyclone. He had read, in the
Reader’s Digest
, that it was the fastest roller coaster in the world—so fast it defied gravity. Billy Mitchell said the Mercury astronauts used to go to Coney Island and train at night.