Get Lucky by Katherine Center

Author:Katherine Center [Center, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-51922-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Falling asleep so hopeful like that was wildly optimistic for me. Uncharacteristically optimistic. So optimistic that the next morning, when there were no missed calls on my phone, I worried that I’d jinxed myself somehow, just by daring to look forward to something.

Then, over the course of the day, as Everett continued to not call, I felt my optimism roll over into pessimism. Noon passed. Then one o’clock. Then two. Soon supper was done, and I was in bed again, just as I had been the night before, but this time there was no buzz of well-being. No pleasant anticipation. This time, I felt a thudding kind of hollow certainty that no call was coming. Possibly ever.

It would have been a perfect problem to discuss with Mackie, if Mackie were a person I discussed anything with anymore. I had just, for example, started getting a weird pain in my earlobe whenever I talked or chewed. But I didn’t even mention it to Mackie, because I could just hear her say, “What? You’ve got earlobe cancer now?”

Instead, I kept out of her line of sight. Mackie was in a busy patch with back-to-back clients, and Clive had gone out of town until Saturday. I had the place to myself, and I did all the things I imagined people who felt bad did to feel better: I took a bubble bath. I made gazpacho. I played Earth, Wind & Fire at top volume on the stereo, read a novel about a French spy cover to cover in an afternoon, and took a stab at a Pilates pregnancy video. All to little effect. I did not feel better. I felt worse. I circled some want ads in the paper, but the end of the week came and went, and I was too depressed to even make the calls.

By Saturday, the day Clive was returning home, I refused to even look at my cell phone. And I wasn’t sleeping. I’d stayed up all night for days—truly, until five in the morning—watching TV. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to. I didn’t even want to try. Instead, I watched reruns of All in the Family and Eight Is Enough. I watched extreme cooking shows where the hosts ate spiders and eyeballs and poisonous fish. I watched televised gospel churches and infomercials for the Monkees’ greatest hits. My eyes would get puffy as the night wore on, and I’d press them with cold washrags. My legs would get crampy from sitting so long, and I’d do deep knee bends. When morning came, I’d go to sleep and stay that way until two in the afternoon, or three, or even, sometimes, four.

Mackie didn’t like it. She’d try to serve me plates of fresh fruit and whole wheat toast. Sometimes I’d run the shower and hide in the bathroom with a book. “Come and eat something,” she’d say through the door. “This isn’t good for you!” She didn’t add “or the babies,” but she didn’t have to. Then she’d set the tray down in the hallway and add, “People are not nocturnal.

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