Everything You Want

by Barbara Shoup

  “Cowboy country,” Dad says.

  We’re standing in a gas station in Arizona where there’s a bunch of silver and turquoise stuff for sale. “Look,” I say, holding up a hideous bolo tie. “Would Gramps love this, or what?”

  “Yep,” Dad says. “It would be right up his alley.” He takes it from me, holds it in the palm of his hand, and looks at it as if it actually had belonged to Gramps, as if it were something he’d come across going through his stuff. Setting it back on the counter, he says, “You know, it’s little things that get me—like dead-on knowing that Dutch would buy that damn bolo tie. I wonder why that is. The funeral, the will—even cleaning out the garage, I could handle. You’d think it would be the other way around.” He shrugs, pays for our gas.

  Then, walking back to the bikes, he laughs. “A while ago, back in the mountains, I was feeling kind of low, thinking about what a kick Dutch would be getting out of those narrow, winding roads. Then I thought, shit, if I were with Dutch, we’d probably be stuck somewhere in Kansas working on his bike. We never went anywhere together that it didn’t break down at least once, and I’d find out he’d done some dumb thing to it that he hadn’t told me about—

  “He was the world’s worst mechanic,” Dad continues. “He knew it, too. I’ll never forget the time we were in a Harley shop somewhere and a guy asked his advice on what to put in a tool kit for his Sportster. Dutch thought a minute, then he said, ‘Just need one. Your Gold Card.’”

  I can hear Gramps saying that and it makes me feel better. Still, back on the road, I miss him something awful, and as miles pass and the desert morphs into a dusty, barren landscape dotted with nothing but ugly cactus plants, it feels as if it’s happening in direct response to what I feel in my heart. If it’s possible, I miss Gramps even worse when we roar into Las Vegas early that evening. He’d be revving his engine all the way up the Strip, loving the whole tacky scene. The pyramid of Luxor, the medieval turrets of Excalibur just beyond. At the Flamingo Hilton, pink and white and orange light travels frantically up and down what looks like the blown petals of gargantuan flowers. Harrah’s is a steamboat made of light: the red neon spokes of the paddle wheel give the illusion of turning; strings of white lights loop from smokestack to smokestack like long strands of pearls.

  At Caesars Palace, where we’re going to stay, there are limos everywhere. A red Wells Fargo armored truck is parked at the entrance of the casino, the uniformed guards loading bags of money into it. We pull up behind it on our bikes, turn off the engines, and a bellman wearing a toga—a guy around Jules’ age—hurries over to us.

  “Checking in,” Dad says. “Okay to leave the bikes out here for a few minutes?”

  The guy grins. “We’d be glad to park those for you, sir.”

  “I’ll bet you would,” Dad says, and gives him a twenty-dollar bill to keep an eye on them instead.

  The frigid air of the casino is a shock after riding all day in the desert heat. The noise, too. Voices, laughter. Beeping, buzzing. Tinny, repeating patterns of high-pitched music emitting from the banks of slot machines and video poker machines, which are stretched as far as I can see. Neon loops like necklaces, bubbles like fountains. Dad segues over to a video poker machine, feeds it five quarters, and gets four aces the first hit.

  “Damn! Look at that!” he says.

  You’re not allowed to gamble until you’re twenty-one, but I give it a try anyway, hoping my biker garb makes me look old—or maybe dangerous—enough to get away with it. Nobody stops me when I sit down at the machine beside Dad—and damn if I don’t get four aces with my first hand, too!

  Well, that’s that. After we check in and park the bikes, we’re committed. I’m mesmerized by the plink-plink-plink-plink-plink of the five cards appearing on the video poker screen, the feel of my fingers tapping the keys to hold the cards I choose, then the delicious moment of suspense as the new cards turn over. The appearance of the right number or set of numbers, the face I was hoping for, the necessary heart or club, triggers a simple internal yes. If the wrong cards appear, I feel a kind of emotional shrug, immediately followed by the impulse to try again.

  It’s nearly midnight when we surface, starving. Walking over to a Denny’s, we pass through a gauntlet of down-and-outs holding out plastic casino cups, hoping to benefit from someone’s good luck. There are also guys handing out business cards with pictures of sleazy women on the front, and advertisements for shows and various—services. Dad takes the cards, grinning. He plunks coins from his own full Caesars cup into the cups of the needy.

  Just outside Harrah’s, an old woman approaches us. Her heavy makeup is smeared, her scalp visible beneath her bleached, ratted hair. “Sir, I’ve had some trouble,” she says. “I lost my coin purse at the Hacienda with more than thirty-seven dollars in it, and I really feel the need to have some Chinese food.”

  Dad takes out his wallet, hands her a fifty-dollar bill, and for a moment she stands there looking at him almost suspiciously. Then, like a squirrel, she tucks the bill away and scurries off into the nearest casino. Dad watches her go. “I like to see someone with a little imagination,” he says.

  I’m tired suddenly, battered by the excess of this place. Money everywhere, and all these pathetic people begging for some small share of it—which they’ll probably gamble or drink away. There are slot machines in the lobby of Denny’s. I watch a man hold up his tiny daughter so she can feed a quarter into one of them.

  Dad eats eggs, bacon, pancakes, drinks about a gallon of coffee, and is ready to go at it again. But I go up to our room to sleep. At seven the next morning I find him at a bank of dollar machines, still going strong.

  “I can’t lose,” he says. “Fucking aces out the wazoo—and two royal flushes within twenty minutes of each other. No shit. I’m up fifteen thousand bucks. So I came over here to play this progressive for a while.” He nods to the computer readout above our heads. It says $8,676. Then $8,677… 78… 79… 80… It’s up to $8,690 by the time I look back at him.

  “Want to go eat breakfast?” I ask. “I’m starving.”

  “I ate a chili cheese dog a while ago, but sure I’ll go with you. Just a minute. Let me play down to five hundred or up to … holy shit!” Red lights all around the poker machine start flashing, and a siren goes off. “Will you look at this?” Dad says. “Can you believe it?”

  The cards present themselves perfectly on the screen. A royal flush: hearts. They’re even in the correct order. Ten, Jack, Queen, King, Ace. $8,740 blinks above the bank of machines. Within seconds a motley group gathers around, most of them clutching Bloody Marys. A casino cashier stops with her money cart and phones for someone to come make the payout. A couple of security guards gravitate to the scene, and pretty soon the casino representative, a big guy in a business suit, appears with tax forms for Dad to sign. Then he counts the money into Dad’s hand. Eighty hundred-dollar bills, and twenties to make up the “small change.” Dad turns and hands all of it to the woman with the cash cart. She’s a small Hispanic woman, her sleek black hair pulled back from her face with a red rubber band, the same kind that binds the stacks of bills in her cart. She’s at the end of an all-night shift, her brown eyes dull with fatigue, and she stares at the bills in her hand as if they just dropped right out of the sky.

  Dad looks at her name tag. “Consuela,” he says. “The money is for you. For your family.”

  “Sir,” the casino representative says. “Perhaps you—”

  Dad waves him away. “You enjoy it,” he tells Consuela. “Have some fun. Get something you need.”

  The woman’s fist closes over the bills, her knuckles whitening. She gazes upward, murmuring fervently in Spanish. Then she throws her arms around Dad and bursts into tears.

  My own eyes burn at the kindness of his gesture, but mainly because I know how it would please Mom. She loves his impulsive, almost reckless generosity.
His large, kind heart, which shows itself at the unlikeliest moments and delights her in the way it unnerves people who think they know him. I want her to be here now. I want her to have seen what Dad just did, to help her remember why she and Dad are meant to be together. But she’d hate this place. I know that, too. Being here would only make her more confused.

  For some reason, that makes me mad. Why does she have to be so—I can’t even say what she is, and that just makes me madder. I leave Dad and his circle of well-wishers and walk through the casino, trying not to notice the desperate, frenzied expression on the fat man feeding the five-dollar slot machine, or the fragile, gray-haired lady playing beside him, who wears thin white gloves to keep her hands clean. Trying not to hear the slap of cards, the rattle of dice, the whir of roulette wheels nearby.

  I go out by the pool, where it’s so quiet I can hear the spitting of sprinklers beyond the wall and the sound of water lapping against the edges of the swimming pool. The yellow-and-white-striped cabanas are empty, except for one in which a couple of women are drinking their breakfasts and another in which a man talks on a cell phone, his laptop propped, lid up, on his lap. I find a chaise lounge under a palm tree and lie back, let the sun filter through the leaves and soak into my air-conditioned skin, and try to calm myself by imagining Consuela going home at the end of her shift, bearing the news of her good fortune. I see a boxy little house, shabby but clean inside, cluttered with the evidence of children. Probably too many of them, I think, despite knowing it’s politically incorrect to assume such a thing. A husband would be there, maybe. Tired and hard-working like herself, or maybe a ne’er do well. Maybe there’s no husband at all. Maybe a boyfriend. Maybe she lives all alone.

  There’s no question that the sudden windfall of nearly nine thousand dollars will mean nothing but good fortune to her, in any case. It would mean nothing but good fortune for anyone. If you were rich, and always had been, it would be icing on the cake, maybe even proof to yourself that, indeed, you deserved everything the world had given you so far. If you were comfortable, as we were before Dad won LOTTO CASH, it would mean splurging on stuff you wanted but couldn’t quite afford: an expensive pair of skis, a special trip, new carpet. Jewelry, if that’s what you liked. If you were poor, as Consuela most likely is, it would translate to bills paid, maybe a new couch to replace an old, battered one, a new dress for yourself, a bicycle for one of your children. The thing is, it’s definable. Nine thousand dollars would affect anyone’s life for the better—but temporarily, and with limits. But winning millions of dollars demands that you change your whole life to accommodate it. It’s a kind of cosmic dare.

  Dad would think that was ridiculous. I think about how he looked, beaming at Consuela, completely absorbed in their mutual moment of pleasure. If I had asked him how he felt, why he gave her the money, he’d look at me the same way he did when I asked him about the essence of Emma. If he said anything at all, he’d say, “I got a kick out of it,” or “She looked like she could use it.” Or he’d make a joke. “I figured I’d better ditch it. Another nine thousand bucks could tip your mom right over the edge.” By now, he’s probably walked away from the whole scene. He’s probably found some other poker machine and is winning on it.

  How can he and Mom be so different and so alike, I wonder? He gave the money to the Hispanic lady; she gave Christmas money to those kids at the mall. Dad would say it was the same thing: You help people when you can. But I knew that Mom believed she did what she did from some mix of guilt and confusion, maybe even a kind of atonement for or charm against her own good luck. Generosity, of course—though she didn’t give herself much credit for that, since what she gave them was not something she needed or wanted herself.

  Now, suddenly, I see that she had given it from love, too—a kind of love that’s different from the love you feel for your family or friends or anyone you know. An abstract, amorphous kind of love, disturbing in its refusal to fit anywhere in your real life and in the way it spills beyond familiar boundaries. That’s what Mom meant when she tried, now and then, to explain to me where paintings came from. Art was a place to put that kind of love, a way to be unburdened of it.

  I feel that love, too. I’ve always felt it. I just never knew what it was. The night in Kansas, standing in the pink neon light of the bar, trying to memorize the moment: it was love that overwhelmed me. Now dozens of images clutter my brain. The mosquito on the snowy log, the snowballs tumbling in the scoop of the Lake Michigan shoreline. I see myself driving my brand new Jeep with the stereo turned up loud, sitting in the empty Sunday school room after Gramps’ funeral, taking the gates on a race course with snow flying in my wake. It was all love, all of it—and more. Zooming around inside me with no purpose or resting place, like Harp zooms around the yard.

  Maybe that’s what is so large about me, I think. Maybe that’s what doesn’t fit in the real world. Not my body, but my heart—metaphorically speaking, as Mom might say. Whatever. Money or no money, I’m going to have to find something to do about it. And it strikes me that this is the first thing I know for sure about who I will eventually turn out to be.

  Thirty–three

  The next thing I know, Dad’s standing over me holding a Dunkin’ Donuts bag and two Styrofoam cups. “I had a hell of a time finding you,” he says. “I wouldn’t have, except after I gave up looking for you and went up to our room, I looked out the window and saw you down here fast asleep by the pool.” He plunks the bag on the end of the chaise lounge. “What’s the deal? I thought you wanted to go get breakfast.”

  “Who gave up on who?” I sit up, get a donut with white icing and sprinkles on it. “I couldn’t drag you away from the machine to eat. Then you got a little distracted.”

  “Oh, that,” he says. “Want some coffee? I put some cream in it.”

  “Dad, I never drink coffee,” I say. “Mom’s the one who drinks coffee with cream.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  And he looks so pathetic, I take it from him and drink it anyway.

  He sits down next to the donut bag. His eyes are baggy and red-rimmed from lack of sleep. He’s still wearing the clothes he wore riding into town the day before. “Know what I feel like?” he asks.

  “Shit?” I say. “You look like shit. If you felt like shit too, there’d be a nice, as we former English majors say, confluence of form and function.”

  “Yeah, that. But—remember when I ran the Chicago marathon?”

  “Unfortunately,” I say, “yes. Not to mention remembering the entire year before the marathon, in which you were completely and totally obsessed with getting ready to run it and drove me and Mom and Jules crazy.”

  “I’ve been thinking about how I got nearly to the end,” he says. “Then sat down under the last shade tree before the Soldier Field parking lot because I thought I couldn’t go on. I’d gotten through the last two miles going shade tree to shade tree. I kept telling myself, ‘There’s the next one. You can go that far.’ Then there were no more shade trees. Just asphalt.”

  “So?” I ask, though I’m not at all sure I really want to know where he’s going with this.

  “That’s exactly how I feel now,” he says. “Like I’m at the last shade tree. The end of the line. When I won that progressive, I mean after the excitement of winning it, I thought, what the fuck am I doing? Eight, nine thousand dollars—whatever it was. Plus whatever I won playing all night. It doesn’t mean jack shit to me. That’s why I gave that woman the money. I just didn’t want to look at it. I’m tired of the sight of money—”

  “You finished the marathon,” I say. “Eventually.”

  He shrugs. “Yeah. But right then I didn’t know I could. Goddamn it,” he says, and his voice cracks. “I miss your mom, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

  I just sit there. I’m used to Mom dithering around, being traumatized and emotional about every little
thing. But Dad? He always knows what to do and how to go about doing it. Until this second, it’s never even occurred to me that he might doubt himself about anything.

  Which I suppose is a good explanation for why, surprising both of us, I say, “Dad, I think you ought to go to France.”

  He looks at me as if I just suggested he go to Zimbabwe. Or Mars.

  “Really,” I say. “Why not? Mom’s always wanted you to go, but you never had the time. And it was so expensive. Now—”

  “I’m not going to France,” he says. “Your mother went to France because—”

  “ … she wanted to be alone,” I interrupt. “I know. But—”

  “We give each other space,” he says. “She does her thing, I do mine. That’s how we’ve managed to stay married as long as we have.”

  “She went to Steamboat Springs with you,” I say. “She hates the mountains, but she went.”

  “And bitched the whole time,” he says.

  “Dad,” I say. “Let’s not even go there, okay? Mom tried, and it didn’t work out so well. But does that mean you can’t try something she likes? Plus, has it occurred to you that what worked for you guys before you won the money might not work now? I mean, you needed to give each other space before. Maybe that’s not what you need any more. Or maybe you don’t need it in the same way. Maybe you have to find some new ways of being together.”

  He just looks at me. Then he says, “Emma, what the hell are you talking about?”

  I don’t know, exactly. I just know what I said was true—like I know, absolutely, that he ought to go to France. In any case, he doesn’t give me the chance to attempt an explanation.

  He stands up. “Well, you let me know when you figure it out,” he says. “But forget France. I’m not going to fucking France. I’m going up to take a shower.”

  “Fine,” I call after him. “Be stubborn. Be miserable.”