Beginner's Luck

by Kate Clayborn

  I swallow back that damned lump in my throat, look down, check my watch again. “Me too,” I manage.

  The door slams downstairs, a little titter of applause that I’m guessing is from Zoe and Greer. “So, she made it,” Dad says, shoving me away playfully. I give him one final pat on the back, tell him to be downstairs in ten, and call through a timing update to Sharon too.

  Kit’s at the bottom of the steps, handing off bags to Zoe and Greer, running a hand through her hair, jet-black with moisture from the rain. Her face is flushed, her brow furrowed. She’s complaining about the flight, the taxi service that took too long to get her here—and then she looks up and sees me, and for a minute, everything stressed and flustered disappears from her face, and it’s only the two of us in this house, smiling at each other in relief for her being home and excitement for the day and happiness for being back together. I kiss her behind her ear when I get to the bottom step, tell her she’s got ten minutes to change, and watch as she bounds up the stairs, laughing at the way this day has turned insane already.

  * * * *

  Later, after we’ve watched my dad and Sharon exchange vows they wrote themselves—including a surprisingly lengthy diversion from them both regarding promises having to do with my father’s work hours—and after we’ve eaten piles of catered food and made toasts and drank too much, the rain stops, late afternoon sun peeking out from the clouds that make their way out of town. While we’d only invited a few to the ceremony itself, the after-party has grown considerably, and so we’ve spilled out into the house’s outdoor spaces too. Some have taken off their shoes and squelch happily around the muddy backyard, others drink and talk on the front porch, still others, including my mom and Richard, reluctant about the damp, stay inside, where River’s date has turned herself into something of a DJ for the event, though I have not recognized a single song she’s played through her tinny portable speakers. Sharon and my dad danced together, right there in the living room, as if they’d done it a hundred times, and as it turned out, they had—my dad sheepishly admitted they’d taken classes together for the last ten years.

  When I see Kit duck into the kitchen, carrying a few discarded champagne glasses, I follow her in, wrapping my arms around her from behind, pressing my nose into the join of her neck and shoulder. “You smell so good,” I tell her.

  “I smell like an airplane,” she laughs.

  “Nope. You smell like yourself, right here. Right on this skin here.” I kiss her there, open my mouth and take a small, surreptitious bite. Her nipples peak beneath the fabric of her dress, and I can’t help but press myself against her, loving the small sound she makes in the back of her throat as she arches her back a little, pressing into me.

  “Too crowded in here,” she says, but her voice is low, husky. She turns in the circle of my arms, wraps her arms around my neck, and kisses me, damn the crowd. She tastes like champagne, sugar from the cake we ate. Like Kit and like home. “Missed you,” she says, and I murmur it back.

  It’s getting too heated in here between us, not suitable for public consumption, so I pull back, reaching up to trace my hands down her bare arms while I do, clasping her hands in mine when I get to her wrists.

  “I can’t believe we had a wedding here,” she says, smiling up at me, those brown-black eyes lit up from behind. “In this house!”

  “Nothing broke, either,” I say, and I’m only half kidding. We’d done so much to this place since Kit had moved in all those months ago, and since old houses were full of unexpected challenges, some of that had been unplanned, inconvenient, supremely ill-timed. All of it, though, every single thing about it, had been fun, had been Kit’s and my way of making this place belong to the two of us, of making it our home. When she’d made the offer to Dad and Sharon, I’d been a little surprised, actually—we’d been working so much on renovations, on various repairs, that we’d not even managed a housewarming of our own, and I’d worried the wedding would steal some of her thunder about the house. “You’re really all right,” I say, tugging her toward me a little, “that we did this here?”

  “Of course,” she says, a little line of concern wrinkling her brow. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  I shrug, noncommittal. “You don’t feel…I don’t know. That you’re having your space invaded?”

  She tips her head back, laughs a little—the sound is half-relief, half-happiness. “No,” she says, looking back at me, stretching her arms out wide, my hands still clasped to hers. It’s as if she’s giving a hug to the entire house. “This is people I love. This is family. So no, I don’t feel that way at all.”

  I lean down to kiss her forehead, her cheeks, another hard press to her mouth. It is family. But I can’t wait to be alone with her again. “Besides,” she says quietly, right against my lips. “I’m thinking of this wedding as practice.”

  “Practice?” I ask, and that ring is burning a hole in my pocket.

  She gives me a crooked smile, all mischief, a smacking kiss on my chin before pulling away. “Practice, Ben. For whatever comes.” Then she winks at me, twirling away, calling to Zoe and Greer for a dance, and I stare after her, stupid and stunned and more settled in my own skin than I’ve ever felt in my life.

  I tuck a hand in my pocket, trace my finger over the ring, feeling the same way I’ve felt since the first time Kit said yes to me.

  Like the luckiest guy in the world.

  Luck of the Draw

  Keep reading for a sneak peek at more lucky chances!

  Coming soon from Kate Clayborn and Lyrical Press

  Prologue

  Zoe

  Like most of my dumb ideas, this one came from the internet.

  Okay, the internet and insomnia.

  Fine. The internet, insomnia, and wine.

  I’d been lonely that night, stuck inside in deference to the miserable end-of-August heat and humidity: almost every day culminating in rolling thunder, heat lightning, flashes of pouring rain that did nothing to cool the air. My two best friends, Kit and Greer, were both unavailable for my proposed let’s-get-drunk-and-do-a-puzzle night. Kit was with her boyfriend Ben, all newly reunited and too cute by half, and Greer had just left for a week-long Hawthorne family vacation—and I was still unwilling, over eight months since I’d quit in a blaze of jackpot-winning glory, to call up any of my friends from my former firm. Or maybe I was realizing, finally, that they hadn’t really been friends at all.

  Lonely, a little drunk, and only a laptop for company? Truly, it was a recipe for disaster—or I guess for watching pornography, but instead I’d decided to try, once again, to get something going with my long-promised lottery-win project. An adventure, I’d told my friends on that night we’d bought the ticket, staking my claim for what I’d do with the cash. I’d imagined an around-the-world trip, something to take me away from everything familiar, something that would be different enough that I’d come out a whole new Zoe—more perspective, more peace, more something. But every time I’d tried to make a decision, every time I said to myself, today, you plan your trip, I’d been paralyzed.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I’d said to Greer one night as we’d strolled through the travel section of the bookstore, a place—along with the gym, the park nearest my house, and my friend Betty’s restaurant—where I’d spent an embarrassing number of hours since leaving my job. “You’re in school. Kit’s bought the house. You’re doing it, doing what you said you’d do, and I’m just—stuck.” Utterly and completely stuck.

  “It’s a big change,” Greer had said. “Your whole life was your work. It takes time to recalibrate, right?” She paused, narrowed her eyes at the shelf in front of her. “Recalibrate is definitely a word Kit would use. I think I’ve been having dreams about her microscope. Let’s buy a bunch of these books and see if we get any ideas.”

  But the books hadn’t helped. Greer’s gentle encouragement hadn
’t helped. Kit and Betty sticking labels to the dartboard at the bar with various place names on it hadn’t helped (especially because I have superb aim). I was in a rut. I’d only ever felt this way once before in my life, and back then I’d dealt with it by doing something so insane and reckless that I knew I had to tread carefully, lest I fuck up my life or someone else’s again.

  Maybe I’d been approaching it wrong, I told myself as I opened my laptop, smooshing myself into the corner of the couch, a sad, furniture-assisted cuddle that was the best I could get in my single state. Maybe I needed to stop thinking about a schedule, a set-in-stone path for this trip, and instead think about—inspiration. Pictures of places I wanted to see. Travel vibes, not travel plans.

  So I’d navigated to some feel-good lifestyle site, the kind that shows you a bunch of food you should be cooking and crafts you should be doing to make your life fuller and happier and also more suitable for display on your Instagram. Never mind that my cooking is rudimentary and my last craft project was a noodle-jewelry box I made in third grade. Never mind that I don’t even have an Instagram. Something about the possibility of such a lifestyle soothed me. So there I was, clicking through a bunch of filter-heavy photos of artisanal kale and hand-woven hammocks and fingerless-glove clad hands wrapped around huge, latte-filled mugs, forgetting, once again, all about my longed-for travel vibes.

  Looking back, I wonder if I’d not only been drunk, but also perhaps stunned into some kind of nectarous, curated-lifestyle coma. Because why in God’s name would I, Zoe No-Time-for-Bullshit Ferris, click on a picture of a “gratitude jar”? But there it was: a rustic-looking Ball jar, weathered pastel slips of paper with rough-hewn edges folded and tucked inside, and, so far as I could tell, several strands of completely useless pieces of jute twine wound around the outside. The idea was, each day, you’d record a good memory on a small slip of paper, fold it up and put it in the jar. Then, when you’re feeling low, you just extract one of those little shabby-chic scraps of joy from your jam jar and get on with feeling grateful about what life has handed to you.

  Well. I certainly have well over a million reasons to be grateful, don’t I? So why don’t I feel any joy? Why can’t I just get on? Maybe, drunk-lonely Zoe had thought, I need the jar.

  Of course, I didn’t have a jar, or twine, or antique-looking paper. I had a Baccarat Tornado vase and a stack of Smythson stationery. And somewhere between me cutting my cardstock into squares (not rough-hewn, are you kidding, I wasn’t that drunk) and actually putting pen to paper, the real idea—the dumb idea—had hit me.

  What I need is a guilt jar.

  It suddenly seemed so clear. It was the guilt that was keeping me from doing the trip, or from doing anything, really, since I’d taken home my share of the winnings. It was the guilt that was always there, ever since I was nineteen years old, piling on year after year. But now that I wasn’t working seventy hours a week, now that I wasn’t scheduling my free time down to the second, now that I’d been the beneficiary of the kind of luck I knew I didn’t deserve—I actually had time to really wallow in it. Sure, the wine wasn’t helping, but that night, I was brutally honest with myself: you’ve done wrong. And you need to fix it to move on.

  After that, it’d been easy. On those little scraps of cardstock, I’d recorded my failures, starting with the comparatively minute.

  The time I made Dan cry at work.

  When I snapped at the Starbucks barista for not knowing my regular order.

  When I parked in one of those “For New Moms Only” spots at the grocery because I had menstrual cramps and it felt close enough.

  Forgetting my assistant’s birthday (2x).

  Avoiding eye contact with the homeless man who always sits outside Betty’s, even when I give him money.

  On and on, until it’d gotten trickier, until I’d had to get to the truly painful ones. The ones I just confined to names. First—names from the cases I was having such trouble forgetting. Then—names I wouldn’t ever forget:

  Dad.

  Mom.

  Christopher.

  At first I wasn’t exactly sure how the guilt jar would work. The gratitude jar was for contemplation’s sake, but the problem with my guilt was that I contemplated it pretty much every fucking night of my life, and so if I was going to get any joy out of this thing, I was going to have to do something other than just look at my recordings. I was going to have to fix what I’d broken, or at least I was going to have to try.

  Thanks to the lottery, I had means.

  Thanks to my unemployment, I had time.

  And that jar, it was going to give me the will.

  Chapter 1

  Zoe

  I choose a Wednesday morning to draw my first guilt slip.

  That’s far enough away from the night I came up with the idea to give me perspective, but not so far that I seem as if I’m avoiding it. I try not to be weird about it, but the slip-drawing does take on this ritualistic quality, even though I’m wearing monkey pajamas and an anti-aging face mask. The worst thing about leaving my job since the lottery win has been what’s happened to my days—or, I guess, what’s not happened to them. Before, when I was working, my days were so regimented that they were almost comical. Once I asked my assistant to set a timer every time I went to pee, just to see how many minutes my bladder was costing me (too many, so I cut back on coffee). Now I spend a lot of time drifting around, wondering what to make of my time, wondering whether I’ll ever go back to some kind of work, wondering how I managed to become the kind of person who isn’t working at all, who hasn’t worked in well over half a year.

  But the guilt jar, much as it contains my most painful flaws, is giving me a sense of purpose I haven’t felt in a while, and so I put it in the center of my dining room table and take a seat, setting my mug of tea in front of me. There’s a familiarity to this setup, sort of similar to the Sunday mornings I’d get up early and work on briefs before meeting Kit and Greer, and I try and let that familiarity blanket the contrasting feeling of unease. The steam rising out of my mug isn’t helping; the vase is starting to take on magic cauldron-like qualities. Maybe one of those slips is going to fly out and hit me in the face.

  I take a deep breath, cut the bullshit, and reach in.

  And…well. Not that a lottery winner is going to get a lot of sympathy here, but rotten luck that I couldn’t have drawn the Starbucks barista first. Instead, I’ve drawn a name—or, rather, two names: Robert and Kathleen O’Leary.

  Damn.

  I saw a lot of unhappy people in conference room four, to be honest, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget Robert and Kathleen O’Leary. Their settlement mediation was the last I’d sat in on, and I like to believe that even if I hadn’t won the jackpot that night, it still would’ve been my last day at Willis-Hanawalt. That I would have said to myself, no, enough is enough, and never gone back again. They’d been gray-haired and slight, Mrs. O’Leary barely over five feet, her husband only a couple of inches taller—though between the two of them, he’d been the more diminished, the more fragile. Mrs. O’Leary’s eyes had been puffy and red, but focused. She’d tracked the conversation with a sad, knowing acuity—well aware her lawyer was outmatched, well aware that whatever money she walked away with, she’d never get what she really wanted.

  An admission of guilt.

  But Mr. O’Leary—he’d barely been more than a bodily presence. At one point, I’d wondered if he’d had a stroke, or some other kind of catastrophic medical event that kept him from moving or speaking. I still don’t know. But I do know that he cried—silent tears that tracked down his cheeks, dripped off his jawline onto the conference table.

  What a performance, my boss had muttered, when the O’Learys had finally gone.

  I swallow thickly, rubbing the slip of paper between my fingers. It’s so uncomfortable thinking about those days when we were doing the settlements
; how clear I’d been that something was off; how many opportunities I’d had to say something. And yet I think about those days a lot, too much, when—as my guilt jar is reminding me—I should be doing something.

  And so I do. I grab my laptop, spend a few minutes getting the information I need. I take off the mask, I shower, I dress carefully. When I walk out to my car, I’m doing so with purpose. When I drive, I keep the radio off so I can focus, so I can keep that little slip of paper in my mind.

  The O’Leary house is a small, brick rambler, tidy at first glance, but there are signs of neglect—the two clay pots on the front porch are full of leafless, tangled twigs, the bushes that line the bed underneath the shutters are shaggy, a few aggressive limbs of growth reaching up past the windows. The left side of the iron railing leading up to the front porch is listing to the side, two newspapers still in their bags beneath it.

  I think, briefly and nonsensically, about whether I’ll pick up those papers when I knock on the door, whether I’ll have to start by saying, Oh, hey, I picked up these papers that were here, and it’s this stray, silly thought that finally gives me pause, pause that I should have had about ten thousand more times before I got here: if they aren’t picking up their papers, maybe they aren’t around, or maybe they don’t open the door for anyone. Maybe they don’t want to be bothered.

  And it hits me: they wouldn’t want to be bothered, not by me of all people. Even if they don’t remember me, I’ll have to explain in order to apologize. I’ll either be poking at a festering wound or reopening one that could only be, even under the best of circumstances, barely healed. I grip my steering wheel, so hard that it hurts my fingers, in plain, simple frustration at myself. The real me—the smart, sharp, ambitious me, the me who proofreads everything six times—that me would’ve thought of this. Instead, I’ve come over here thinking only of my own guilt, my stupid internet jar and my stupid, lazy sense of purposelessness.