Jackpot Summer, page 2
The Star-Ledger
LONG BEACH ISLAND SIBLINGS AND A RUMSON GRANDMOTHER OF 12 WIN BIG SLICE OF POWERBALL PIE
Drama Surrounds Sibling Win
By Jeanette Espinosa
It’s time for people to stop thumbing their noses at the Garden State. Making lottery history, two of the four winning tickets of a $261 million Powerball were claimed by New Jersey residents who purchased their winning tickets over July Fourth weekend. The chances of winning the Powerball jackpot are 1 in 292,201,338, so having two winners from New Jersey is quite the reason to celebrate. Sources in Governor Phil Murphy’s office are saying a ticker-tape parade is under consideration.
Mabel Collins of Rumson, an eighty-two-year-old retired elementary school bus driver, took home over $30 million before taxes. She said she plans to use the money to help her local church and shower her twelve grandchildren with gifts.
“I’m at Target every day now buying gifts for my babies,” Ms. Collins said. “It’s constant Christmas over here.”
The other New Jersey winner is a set of siblings with a family home in Beach Haven on the south end of Long Beach Island. The three siblings, whose last name is Jacobson, were quickly dubbed the Jackpot Jacobsons. The nickname has been adopted by the local summer community where the family has owned a home for more than three decades.
Unlike Ms. Collins, each of the Jacobson siblings declined to comment on the win. Public records show that Laura Jacobson is in contract to purchase a 7,000-square-foot home in upscale Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. Sister Sophie is listed on LinkedIn as a public school teacher in Brooklyn, but calls to the school indicate she is no longer employed there. The third sibling, Noah Jacobson, works as a private tech-support specialist but appears to have no official business or property registered to his name. One Beach Haven resident who wished to remain anonymous but described herself as a close family friend was not optimistic about the Jacobsons.
“Drama, drama, drama,” she said. “That’s all that winning the lottery has done for that poor family. Well, maybe poor isn’t the right word.”
1
Sophie
“Well that was depressing,” Sophie said. “I’m surprisingly hungry considering we were at Mom’s grave less than ten minutes ago.” She tilted the syrup dispenser and let it ooze over her pancake stack.
“I am too,” Noah said, lifting a forkful of scrambled eggs. “But these eggs are awful compared to the ones at Chegg.”
“You think everything is better at Chegg,” Sophie said, referencing the Chicken or the Egg, one of the famous eateries on Long Beach Island.
“It is,” the rest of the table responded, a chorus of voices that included Noah, Matthew, Laura, Laura’s husband Doug and the patriarch of the Jacobson clan, Leo.
“For the hundredth time, you did not get food poisoning from Chegg,” Laura said to Sophie, lowering the gigantic Kenilworth Diner menu she’d been using to hide her tear-streaked face. “You were puking because you drank too much of Dad’s Chivas Regal. I saw you.”
Leo raised an eyebrow at what apparently was coming as news to him.
Sophie considered Laura’s claim. Maybe she had been conflating memories. The night of her alleged food poisoning was nearly twenty years ago.
“I thought the gravestone was very nice,” Matthew, the oldest Jacobson sibling, said. His comment brought them back to why they were gathered in northern New Jersey on a sunny afternoon in June. It was for the unveiling of the gravestone marking the place their mother was buried. “I think Mom would have approved.”
“She more than approved,” Leo said, wiping Tabasco sauce from his mouth with a paper napkin. “She designed it.”
The siblings’ gasps quickly gave way to wry chuckling. They shouldn’t have expected anything less from Sylvia Jacobson. Sophie considered the tombstone inscription with renewed appreciation, especially the line about canasta, the card game that was their mother’s addiction.
SYLVIA ROSE JACOBSON
FEBRUARY 6, 1947–JUNE 30, 2023
DEVOTED WIFE, BELOVED MOTHER TO THE FANTASTIC FOURSOME, BOOK LOVER, VOLUNTEER, JERSEY GIRL
“AWAITING SPECIAL HANDS IN HEAVEN”
“Did I ever tell you that Mom emailed me a detailed description of what the girls and I should wear to her funeral, including accessories?” Laura said. “Oh, and that Doug shouldn’t wear a navy tie.”
“And I didn’t. I wore yellow,” Laura’s husband said proudly.
“When she could barely speak anymore, she managed to mime that pink lipstick washes me out,” Sophie said, puckering her burgundy-painted lips. “I listened too.”
“I added the ‘devoted’ and ‘beloved’ to the inscription,” Leo said. “She didn’t want it to be too schmaltzy. This may be the first argument I ever won.”
“I can definitely see her finding a regular canasta game in heaven,” Sophie said. “Where she will win many special hands.”
“Did anyone feel like they were waiting for directions from Mom today? Like where to stand, what to do,” Matthew asked. “It’s so weird to all be together and not have someone boss us around.”
Sophie knew exactly what her brother was saying. She’d been staring at the plot of earth under which her mother lay buried, expecting a wagging finger to poke through the dirt.
Their mother had been the protective force field surrounding them at all times, instructing their next moves, sharing her opinions whether they were welcome or not. Even Leo took direction from his wife as though he were a fifth child. Sylvia’s departure from this world one year earlier still gave Sophie the constant feeling that she was forgetting something, like leaving the house without her keys.
“At least we’ll all be at the house for July Fourth weekend,” Noah said. “Mom would like that.”
The Jacobson family celebrating the Fourth of July together was a tradition dating to Sophie’s childhood, when cousins and friends would gather at their summer house on Long Beach Island for the holiday weekend. Over the years, it grew to a full-blown daytime party with an overflowing buffet—almost all the dishes homemade by Sylvia—and concluded with the town fireworks. That Sylvia died just days before the holiday last year, forcing them to trade hot dogs, burgers and Sylvia’s famous coleslaw for shiva platters of deli meats and rugelach that barely anyone touched, was especially painful.
“Excuse me,” Beth said, waving a hand toward the diner’s counter. Sophie noted it was the first time Matthew’s wife had looked up from her phone since they’d sat down.
A waitress with a pencil behind her ear and a bored expression walked over with two steaming pots of coffee. “More joe? I got regular and decaf.”
Beth shielded the top of her mug. “Not for me. I was wondering if you could provide the Wi-Fi password. The service in here is terrible.”
The waitress wrinkled her nose. “Back in a minute.”
“Sorry, I’m just absolutely slammed at work,” Beth said. “I have to get a brief out within the hour.”
“Does she ever stop?” Laura muttered to Sophie, jutting her chin in the direction of their sister-in-law. Sophie rolled her eyes in return.
“I found the air mattresses,” Noah said, bringing the conversation back to the holiday weekend. “I’ll have them pumped up before you guys get there.”
“I call a real bed,” Sophie said. “I’ll have just finished teaching and need good sleep.”
“That’s fine. The girls and Austin will take the blowups,” Laura said, referencing her two daughters and Matthew and Beth’s son, the third-generation Jacobsons. “Doug too if his snoring keeps up.”
“I don’t snore,” Doug said.
“Oh yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Okay, I’ll record you.”
“Fine, I’ll try the damn nose strips again.”
“He needs a CPAP machine,” Laura said to her three siblings. Sophie shrugged. Luckily Ravi, her boyfriend of nearly two years, only snored when he drank too much. They spent just two nights together a week anyway.
“Miss! Miss!” Beth called out. Sophie followed Beth’s flailing arms to where the waitress was schmoozing with a line cook behind the counter. “The Wi-Fi, please?”
Matthew turned to Beth. “Can’t you finish up after lunch? We’ll be back in the city in an hour.”
Beth looked horrified. “Absolutely not. And don’t you have to turn around that offering memorandum by EOD?”
So there were people who actually said EOD out loud, Sophie mused. She pinched Laura’s knee at the same time Laura kicked Sophie’s ankle under the table.
Matthew’s expression shifted. “You’re right. Let me go speak to the waitress.” He left the table as Beth continued to jab at her phone, clearly frustrated to discover the Jersey diner wasn’t as technically equipped as her law firm.
“I can probably hook you up to a hotspot,” Noah said. The youngest Jacobson sibling had always been a technology whiz.
“Thanks. Tight deadline,” Beth said as she handed over her phone to Noah. “In fact, we’ve got to head out soon anyway. Austin’s in the last round of his chess tournament. He’s up a rook in game seven.”
Sophie gave Beth a thumbs-up, assuming “up a rook” was a good thing.
“Us too,” Laura said. “Hannah bought six prom dresses, and if I don’t get home soon, she’ll rip the tags off and we’ll be stuck keeping all of them.”
“Did we give her a budget?” Doug asked.
“Of course. But you know Hannah. She’ll have some reason why she needs to spend more.” Laura scoffed lovingly.
“I’ll help her choose,” Sophie said. “FaceTime me when you get home. This falls under the cool-aunt umbrella.”
As the siblings started to collect their things, Leo held up his hand. “Hang on, everyone. I have something I need to tell you kids.” The widower glanced at his lap, took a visibly deep breath, and righted his head. Looking at no one in particular, he said, “I sold the beach house.”
“You what?” Sophie and Laura managed to sputter. Noah went white as a sheet and dropped Beth’s phone into the puddle of ketchup on his plate. Beth let out a yelp.
“Got the password,” Matthew said cheerfully as he reappeared at the table. “It’s ‘joysey’—spelled J-O-Y-S…” He paused. “Sheesh, what did I miss?”
Noah looked at their older brother with tear-filled eyes. “Dad sold our happy place.”
* * *
—
The next day, across the river from where her mother lay to rest, Sophie watched an open container of glitter topple on its side, roll down the entire length of the long metal craft table, collide with the floor and deposit miniscule red sparkles on the checkered linoleum of her classroom. She did not get paid nearly enough to do this job.
“Awesome!” Harrison, a third grader, said as he removed a finger from his nose to applaud the mess.
“Look at my sneakers,” Lulu, another child in the class, said, shimmying a high-top in the air.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Jacobson,” said Owen, the klutziest child at P.S. 282 in Brooklyn’s Park Slope. Sophie, Ms. Jacobson between eight a.m. to three p.m., was one of two art teachers at the school and managed to get Owen Cullman-Romero assigned to her class every year. So far he had Krazy-Glued his fingers together, dropped crayons in the radiator and managed to get a paintbrush stuck in his ear canal. And now, glitter everywhere.
Glitter was the bane of Sophie Jacobson’s professional existence. Sparkles from the autumn leaves project in October would appear in tissues when she blew her nose during a December cold. Specks clung to her sweaters and eyelids for weeks. As much as she couldn’t stand it, the kids loved it, so at least once a month Sophie relented and let them glitter their papier-mâché birds, their self-portraits, their clay mugs. This incident though. A whole container. She would be sparkling for eternity.
“I can help clean up,” Owen said. Fat tears were clinging to his mile-long eyelashes. Sophie couldn’t stay mad at him. She couldn’t stay upset with any of the kids, even though she typically left work with the makings of a migraine and crepe paper trailing one of her shoes.
“It’s okay, Owen. Just means I owe Ronaldo another drink,” Sophie said, referring to the head custodian at P.S. 282.
“What kind of drink?” Owen asked. “I like grape, but my parents said I can’t have it because I’ll spill it and ruin the carpet.”
“Your parents are right,” Sophie said. “Why don’t you help Ella with her collage?”
Ella Cooper, eight going on eighteen, was the reliable kid who always got stuck with the annoying partner. I owe you one, Sophie mouthed to her, something she wouldn’t have dared if it wasn’t the second-to-last day of school.
“Fine,” Ella said and turned to Owen. “Hold my glue stick.”
Sophie made a note to email a note of praise to Ella’s father, known as Divorced Dad Dave or Triple D among the teachers. While she was committed to Ravi, she couldn’t help noticing how adorable Triple D looked with Ella’s American Girl backpack slung over the shoulder of his leather jacket.
The bell rang and the third graders shuffled out as the first graders charged in. Only thirty-six hours to go and it would officially be summer vacation. To celebrate the close of another year, the staff of P.S. 282 would celebrate at a bar the next night at a party affectionately nicknamed “Survivor.” That’s where she’d buy Ronaldo a well-deserved drink. The man was a whiz at whipping up concoctions to undo the remains of Mod Podge, oil paints and whatever else the kids left behind.
As she walked toward the school’s front doors after the final bell, thinking what the first summer without her family’s shore house would be like, Sophie nearly smacked into the principal, Evelyn Garcia.
“Grades, Ms. Jacobson,” Garcia snapped as Sophie mumbled “Excuse me.”
“I’ll have them for you next week,” Sophie said, stifling her irritation. Grades! For an elementary school art class. Billy is really improving his coloring-in-the-lines skills. Kate only cut herself once with the scissors this semester. It was a colossal waste of time.
“Good. You have glitter on your shirt,” Garcia said and brushed past her. Finally on the other side of the school building, Sophie spotted her closest friend on the faculty, Nora-Ann Crane, dressed in an orange neon vest, standing at her bus-duty post.
“One day more.” Sophie belted out the ballad from Les Miz as she joined Nora-Ann.
“Maybe forever,” Nora-Ann said.
“What are you talking about?”
Nora-Ann pulled Sophie in close. “I heard Garcia talking about budget cuts. Who do you think is going to be first on the chopping block? I teach yoga!”
Sophie was startled. She complained about her day job frequently, but she never imagined leaving it before she could support herself as a professional artist. If budget cuts were indeed coming, the arts programming would be slashed right along with yoga. The other art teacher, Winner Baker, had far more seniority than she did.
“Well that sucks,” Sophie said. “Did you hear anything else?”
“Garcia is meeting the superintendent over the summer to go over numbers. I’ll have to move back in with my mom. She just got her seventh cat.” Nora-Ann moaned. Sophie considered who she would move in with if she could no longer afford the rent for the fourth-floor walk-up she currently shared with three roommates. Ravi and she hadn’t broached the subject of moving in together yet. Laura and Doug’s house in Jersey was tiny and too far from her studio. Maybe Matthew and Beth’s antiseptic condo in the city? She couldn’t remember if they had an extra room.
“Stop. We don’t know anything for sure. Maybe we’ll get more scoop at Survivor. I have to get to the studio now. See you tomorrow,” Sophie said and headed toward the subway, suddenly feeling a hell of a lot more pressure to finish the painting she was working on.
She was ten paces from the subway steps when Ronaldo called out from behind the maintenance shed. “Glitter again?”
She threw up mea culpa hands. “Shots on me tomorrow night.”
“I’m bringing Rosa. She wants to meet the person responsible for the sparkles on our couch.”
“She’s a good woman, your wife.”
“Your man coming?”
“I’ll ask him tonight,” Sophie said.
“When’s he gonna put a ring on it? How long have you two been dating anyway? I had three kids by the time I was your age.” Sophie eyed the cartoonish five-person bumper sticker on his nearby pickup truck.
“First of all,” Sophie said, drawing her lips into a dramatic O, “you don’t know how old I am. And, second, you sound like my mother. When’s he gonna propose? You’re not getting any younger.”
“Your mother is a smart lady,” Ronaldo said.
Was. She was a smart lady, Sophie thought. “Thanks again for your help. No glitter until October next year. My solemn vow.”
“Anything for you, kiddo,” Ronaldo said with a salute. “Looking forward to meeting the lucky guy tomorrow.”
Her boyfriend, the “lucky guy,” was a sculptor. A home goods store in Williamsburg sold his pieces for triple digits. He also sold a number of works directly through his website. That income, plus the fact that he lived and worked rent-free on the top floor of his parents’ townhouse on the Upper West Side, allowed him to pursue his art full-time. She wished Ravi was more satisfied with his career, but he measured himself against the superstars. In contrast, it filled Sophie with childlike wonder—and a pang of longing—each time he told her about a sale.
Anytime he drank too much, Ravi was prone to wax on about their future as a power duo in the art world. Sophie happily indulged the fantasy of their works up for auction together at Sotheby’s. When the haze of alcohol cleared, Ravi would pull the plug. “I’m already over the hill in the art world,” he would mutter. Sophie refrained from pointing out that she was thirty-five to his thirty-two and routinely picking clumps of Elmer’s glue from under her fingernails. She chose to forgive his tone deafness. Two of her three siblings were married and, from observation (most recently at her mother’s unveiling), Sophie surmised it could be useful to be a bit deaf and a bit blind when it came to relationships.
