Finders Keepers (2 page)

In her bedroom Kate picked up the envelope from UCLA, ragged from her excitement in tearing it open, and took out the single, neatly-folded sheet of white Bond. Opening it now, almost two weeks after plucking it from a stack of bills and flyers, she remembered the mix of emotions aroused by her first quick scan of those magic words: The School of Theater, Film and Television, UCLA, is pleased to inform you of your acceptance…. Joy, excitement, apprehension shading to fear…and an unexpected regret. Stepping into the future meant leaving behind the familiar comforts of the present, everything she trusted and loved. But she’d put it off as long as she could, hoping against hope that she might strike it rich, draft just the right script and, somehow, get it into just the right hands. She’d done her share of fantasizing, reading about guys like Quentin Tarantino, the ultimate Cinderella story, and the others coming down the pipeline all the time, unknowns breaking through with spec scripts, earning millions. But these guys were the exception, not the rule; and they all lived in L.A., a city with one of the highest costs of living in the United States. And until now, even with a full-time job and four years of socking away every spare penny, money had been so tight she hadn’t even been sure she could afford to finish out the first year, never mind the occasional trip home.

But now. God, now…

Kate squirmed out of her uniform, tossed it onto the unmade bed and pulled on a burgundy sweatshirt and a pair of faded Levis. She considered doing the litter of dishes in the kitchen and said to hell with it, leave it for the maid. The thought provoked an embarrassed chuckle. Thinking like a rich brat already.

She happened to be at the picture window overlooking the street when an all-white stretch limo pulled up to the curb in front of the house. The rear window powered open and her father’s head popped out. He spotted Kate in the window and waved her down, grinning from ear to ear.

“Jesus, Dad,” Kate said out loud, pulling on her ski jacket and boots. “What are you up to now?”

* * *

Bernie, the limo driver, turned out to be a jovial, speed-talking guy in his fifties with curly red hair and a bandit’s moustache. Bernie spent the ten minute drive to the downtown core giving the Whipples a tour guide’s spiel so enthusiastic, Keith didn’t have the heart to tell him they’d lived in Sudbury all their lives.

“As you folks might be aware,” Bernie told them, “Sudbury is a mining town. Nickel and copper mostly.” He pointed at the huge Inco smoke stack, visible from virtually every vantage in the city. “Right over there is your superstack, floats all that fallout down south where they don’t know any better. Ain’t she something? And over here is your Theater Center…”

The storm warnings continued on the limo radio, but the sky remained blue and clear. The only hint of foul weather was the wind, a gusting northerly that whipped up all of a sudden. When Bernie dropped them off in front of the City Center, Keith pulled up the hood on his parka and Kate tucked herself into his flank, using him as a windbreak.

“Give us ’til noon,” Keith told the driver. “We’ll meet you back here.”

Bernie gave them a smiling salute and merged into traffic.

Arm in arm with his daughter, Keith Whipple swept through the shopping center doors on a wave of sheer excitement. To his renewed eyes everything seemed freshly minted, and he felt like shouting his good fortune to the high cathedral ceiling. Since the death of his wife—God, eighteen years—he’d lived from paycheck to paycheck, investing what little was left with the noble intention of handing a nest egg to Kate one day, something extra to get her life started with. But through one minor disaster and another, the kind of things life had a way of throwing at you when you least expected them, he’d been forced to chip away at that nest egg, diminishing it to the point of near extinction, a fact which, until now, had caused him no end of frustration. As they entered the mall he kept stealing glances at Kate’s beaming face—so much like her mother’s, that smooth tan oval framed in fine blond hair—and thinking,
You’re set, my angel. Set for life
.

Keith spent twenty minutes at the Royal Bank, waiting while the teller cleaned out his savings account—six-thousand-eight-hundred dollars and change—and handed it to him in a neat stack of hundreds. With his credit card, always up to date, that gave him eleven-thousand-eight-hundred dollars’ worth of clout. And change. It felt strange stuffing his wallet with all that cash, but he’d never trusted those ATM machines, that whole technological shift where money was concerned. Even the credit card had taken him years to get around to and a couple more to actually use. Old-fashioned maybe, but he still preferred a human face to a machine spitting out money at him.

He caught up to Kate in Zellers, where she was busy choosing the fanciest Christmas tree baubles she could find.

“Okay sweetheart,” he said. “let’s tear this place
up
.”

Kate’s smile filled his heart. He’d often heard it said that money didn’t bring happiness, but goddamn, he sure felt fine today.

* * *

Bernie was waiting for them when they came out of the mall at noon, the limo idling next to him at the curb, Bernie hunched against the cold in his navy blue chauffeur’s coat and thin leather gloves.

When he spotted them he hustled over and took Kate’s load of parcels, the trunk of the big Lincoln popping open behind him as if by magic. Kate liked the little guy: that moustache, hinting at a shady past, the quick, mischievous smile it framed, the way the street slipped into his way of talking when he relaxed. When they were underway again Kate suggested lunch and invited Bernie to join them. They agreed on a nearby Italian spot,
Pasta e Vino
, ordering salads and pasta from a pared-down lunch menu. The waiter was a plump, cheerful guy in a frilly white shirt and black dress pants who scribbled their selections onto a note pad.

When he was gone Bernie said, “Now that’s what I like to see, a waiter who writes down your order,” and Kate thought,
Uh-oh
.

“Exactly,” Keith said. “I don’t eat out often, but when I do I like to get what I ask for.”

Bernie said, “And so you should. Irritates the hell out of me, the way some of ’em come up to you, standing there with their hands dangling like, okay shoot, nothing escapes this iron-trap mind.”

“I’ll give you a classic example,” Keith said. “The other day I’m in Jimmy’s, I order a cheeseburger, lettuce and ketchup only, and a glass of ice water. The girl nods then goes to a table of six and does the same thing, nodding her head and not writing anything down. Twenty minutes later, by now I’m half starved, she comes back with a glass of Sprite and a burger—no cheese, no lettuce, the whole thing dripping with mustard—plunks it down in front of me and walks away. I hate mustard.”

Bernie said, “And I bet you’re too polite to say anything.”

Keith mumbled something and blushed, the sight of him sitting there red-faced making Kate laugh out loud. The waiter rescued him, bringing their drinks, a Sleeman in the bottle for Keith, white wine for Kate and a diet soft drink for Bernie. The food came a few minutes later, steamy hot and delicious looking. Bernie dug right in.

“So, if you don’t mind me asking,” he said around a mouthful of penne a la vodka, “what’s up with you folks? You from out of town or what?”

“No,” Keith said, “we’ve lived in Sudbury all our lives.”

Bernie rolled his eyes. “Shoot, and I gave you my whole out-of-towner spiel there this morning. Sorry about that. I don’t know why I thought you was from out of town.”

“That’s okay,” Kate said. “It was entertaining.”

“We’ve…come into some money,” Keith said.

“Say, that’s great. What happened, a rich aunt kick it or something?”

Keith said, “No, nothing like that,” and glanced at Kate, giving her a mildly dazed look. “We won the lottery.”

Bernie clacked his fork against his plate. “Not the six-four-nine.”

“The very one.”

“Ten million dollars?”

Keith chuckled. “Ain’t that a caution?”

“
Je
-sus Christ on a crutch…if you’ll pardon my French, ma’am, but that’s
phenomenal
. I feel like gettin’ your autograph or something. Ten million, goddam. I had a ticket on that baby myself.”

Keith said, “When those numbers matched up I thought I was gonna bust a blood vessel and die. I must’ve checked ’em a hundred times.” He looked at Kate. “Honey, did I check ’em a hundred times?”

“Two hundred,” Kate said, recalling their dizzy morning in the mall, Keith stopping every few minutes to compare his numbers to the winners, shaking his head each time. “You made
me
check them a hundred times.”

“I was gonna ask you how it feels,” Bernie said. “Dumb question.”

“Feels great.”

“So what’s the plan? You’re gonna need me a couple days, right? Motor you around in style? I got nothing booked now ’til Christmas. That’s five days.” Bernie’s eyes widened and Kate could almost see the idea crystallizing behind them. He said, “You gotta go to Toronto, right? To cash in your ticket?”

Keith said, “Yep. If the weather holds we thought we’d drive down later this afternoon. We usually spend Christmas at my sister’s place in Toronto anyway. Lee’s the only one with grandkids, nine of ’em, and we all like to be there for the kids. We thought we’d get some more gifts bought, you know, special things, then stay with them the few extra days.”

“You’re not gonna fly?”

Kate said, “Dad’s got this…thing about flying.”

“I heard that,” Bernie said. “I watch those
Life Against Death
videos,
Caught on Camera
, you seen those?” The Whipples nodded in unison. “I’d sooner walk than get on a plane. Spam in a can.” He looked at Keith. “What kind of car you got?”

“I don’t drive, but Katie’s got a nice little Honda Civic.”

“And you think you’re gonna get all that gear you bought to Toronto in a Civic? Listen, let me take you. On dry pavement it’s a four hour drive, why not do it in comfort? It’ll be fun. Roll up to that lottery office in style. I’ll even cut you a deal.” Bernie grinned. “Heck, you guys don’t need a deal. I’ll do it for twice my usual fee. How’s that sound?”

Kate looked at her dad and smiled. “Why not?”

Keith raised his Sleeman. “My friend, you’ve got yourself a deal.”

* * *

They shopped some more after lunch, mostly for the kids, Keith zipping up and down the aisles at Wal-Mart with a push cart, picking out dolls, Transformers, laser guns and noise makers of every description. By the time they got back to the limo the sky had darkened to an ominous gray, especially in the south. Keith barely noticed, but the sight of it struck a chord of alarm in Kate.

Her father’s behavior since lunch had begun to concern her, too. His simple joy at winning had begun to shade over into a kind of low grade mania, a nervous energy that left Kate’s face feeling cramped from the continual smile that no longer felt genuine. It was like something was winding him up from the inside, propelling him at a rate completely foreign to his character. Added to this was a growing paranoia about the ticket, about having it on his person. Suddenly, getting to Toronto was priority one. That’s where the lottery office was and he was by-God determined to be standing on their doorstep when they opened for business the next morning at nine. With the frequent weather warnings—and now this threatening sky—Kate thought they should wait. But Keith was beside himself, convinced that if they didn’t cash the damned thing in as soon as possible it would spontaneously combust or he’d have a stroke worrying about it or the earth would open up and swallow him whole. Kate had never seen him so keyed-up.

By four-thirty they were set to go, but at the last minute Keith remembered something his older brother Don had wanted since they were kids and re-routed Bernie back downtown. “Rodale’s,” he told him. “That fancy restaurant supplier. You know it?” Bernie said he did, and they wound up spending an hour there choosing an espresso machine.

It was dark before they finally got underway, the trunk stuffed with Christmas gifts—lavishly wrapped by a team of elderly women raising money for an MRI machine—the overflow, including a life-size Big Bird for Kate’s favorite niece, ending up stacked around them in the passenger compartment. Though they’d spent a bundle, the wallet inside Keith’s spanking new overcoat was still so thick with hundreds he could barely fold it closed. He told Kate at Rodale’s he felt like ole Saint Nick himself.

As predicted the storm hit hard, but for the better part of the trip it ran ahead of them, leaving the two-lane blacktop snow-packed and icy in places but otherwise passable. They ran into some weather about two hours out, an intermittent sleet carried on a flaring wind, and further on, an eerie crystalline frost that hung in the low spots like fog. It was the wind that concerned Kate most, bulldozing its way across the highway, side-swiping the limo; but the big Lincoln was sure-footed and solid and before long the tension she’d felt earlier had all but vanished.

To pass the time they played a movie trivia game they’d invented when Kate was in her teens, Kate throwing obscure bits of dialogue at Keith and, as always, failing to stump him. At one point she thought she had him: in a Chinese accent she said, “Boards…don’t hit back,” and Keith looked puzzled, fingering the cleft in his chin that never got properly shaved, repeating the quote a few times in a thoughtful whisper. Then he grinned that cocky grin of his, said, “Bruce Lee,
Enter The Dragon
, nineteen-seventy-three, Robert Clouse, director,” and denied being even remotely perplexed. “Just letting you think you had the hook in me,” he said and went back to fiddling with the limo phone.

Kate sipped champagne from the bottle she found in the limo fridge, the fizzy cool of it relaxing her. And in quiet moments, she pictured the future in ways she’d never imagined before. They could live together in California now, maybe even start their own production company. Her father knew more about the movie industry than anyone she’d ever met; it had been a life-long hobby of his, tying neatly into his job as a projectionist. He’d read almost everything written about the film business and still flipped through the trade magazines every morning before breakfast. Kate could even imagine him directing, he had such a good eye. She’d write ’em and he’d direct ’em. They could be partners. She still wanted to go to school, though, take advantage of that opportunity.