Jackpot Summer, page 9
“I bet you will.” Sophie pantomimed a kiss and Laura giggled.
“Alright,” Matthew said, trudging back across the living room to rejoin Beth, Austin and the pile of incomprehensible textbooks.
“You guys want in on the tickets?” Noah asked, turning back. “Matthew? Beth?”
“No thanks,” Beth said. “We’re good.”
“Can’t we buy just one?” Austin pleaded with well-executed puppy-dog eyes.
Matthew might have thrown in with his siblings, to appease his son, but he was feeling annoyed by them. First, Noah rejects his company, then his sisters make it seem like his money just miraculously appears in his bank account.
Beth whispered to Austin, “The chances of winning the lottery are lower than the chances of an asteroid hitting the Earth. And I know my smart boy knows how likely that is.”
Austin didn’t appear cheered. Matthew leaned in to add, “What your mother means is that we are very lucky people and already have everything we want and need.”
“Suit yourselves.” Noah waved goodbye. “We could be millionaires by the end of the weekend.”
We could be millionaires by the end of the weekend. He and Beth were already millionaires. Just barely, but still. Was his kid brother so out of touch that he didn’t have a clue what a partner in a law firm made in a year? The naivete saddened Matthew. He didn’t wish for Noah to work at a place like Meyer, Packer & Driscoll, with its endless rows of offices and matching corporate furniture surrounding a bullpen of cubicles. Noah wasn’t cut out for that kind of life. Matthew wasn’t even sure he himself was. He just didn’t like thinking of his kid brother roaming LBI like a lost puppy, earning a few measly bucks fixing laptops.
“More money for us,” Sophie said and she fist-bumped Laura.
“Buena suerte, tio,” Austin called after Noah.
“He’s studying Spanish, French and Mandarin,” Beth explained.
Normally Matthew’s chest puffed when Austin flexed his linguistic muscle. Today, in front of his family, he felt embarrassment that made his skin itch. His siblings did little to hide their judgment about how he and Beth were raising their son. Beth—she was the main driver—wanted to harness their son’s talents in a way that nobody had done for her. Austin was a precocious, brilliant boy and she wanted him to reach his potential. Nobody could understand the pressure cauldron of raising a child in New York City unless you were doing it yourself. Austin was thriving, so why did Matthew feel embarrassed when his family was around? Maybe because a part of him knew they were right. Gathered together in their summer home, where all they did was frolic on the beach and play sports and get ice cream as kids, it was hard to deny that Austin was missing out on pure, unadulterated, childhood fun.
But the world is way more competitive today than when we were kids, Beth echoed in his ear. You only get to be a kid once, his siblings whispered into his other ear. It was like having the devil and an angel perched on his shoulders.
“Did Noah actually go to buy lottery tickets?” Leo asked, putting down the newspaper again.
“Yep,” Sophie said. “And ice cream.”
Leo waved a hand with enough liver spots to give him de facto authority. Their father detested frivolity and any reward that came too easily. A win by default was no different than a loss. He had chastised a ten-year-old Matthew for celebrating when the opposing Little League team didn’t show and his team got the win.
Accountants were apparently not held to the same confidentiality standards as doctors. While he didn’t use names, Leo shared stories around the dinner table about the ways his clients were irresponsible with money, the silly things they bought, the risks they took investing, the disorganized accounts that led to late fees and ruined credit scores. It was no surprise that he took on the role of allowance tsar in the Jacobson household, one of the few areas in which their mother played only a supporting role. Leo insisted his children each keep a ledger to track their expenditures. If the ledger wasn’t up to date, he would dock the next week’s allowance. Sylvia was gentler. She would sneak them money for little things here and there, like bottles of Sun-In for his sisters and a deck of trick cards for him. She had an uncanny way of convincing their father that the extravagances were necessities.
Leo grumbled that “money doesn’t grow on trees” so often it became a family joke. It was Matthew who hatched the plan to attach dollar bills to the oak tree that held court in their front yard. Pooling bills from their allowance, the four Jacobson children used paper clips to attach the money to its leaves under the cover of darkness. Noah, the scrappiest among them, climbed up to reach the highest branches. Their mother had laughed hysterically when she discovered it the next morning. Their father, not so much. Leo went ballistic, appalled that they hadn’t considered what would have happened if it rained or someone stole the money.
Matthew looked at the oak tree now, illuminated by automatic bistro lights strung from branch to branch, every other bulb burned out. He would love to climb it with Austin. That and about a million other things he’d love to do with his son but had no time for.
“On that note, I’m going to hit the hay.” Leo gave a great yawn and, as he did so, his bottom dentures fell out. Sophie scrambled to pick them up as Leo mumbled something about needing better adhesive.
“Where’s Doug when you need him?” Matthew quipped.
“Good question,” Laura said sharply.
Their father slowly dragged himself out of his recliner. There was no denying old age had come for him. How long until Matthew’s own body moved like that, muscles dragging through molasses? Would he spend the next thirty years stuck behind the dual monitors in his office until his body caved?
One step at a time. Matthew needed to get through the weekend. He needed to help with the packing. Look up astrophysics on Wikipedia. Sneak a cigarette with Laura.
“Night all,” Leo called out when he reached the top of the stairs.
Florida would be good for his old man. Matthew would have difficulty carving out time to get down there, but maybe Austin was old enough to fly alone. Boca Breezes had three swimming pools, a full arcade and a screening room to entice grandchildren who would rather be anywhere but silver-hair city.
“Good night, Dad,” Matthew called, holding his breath as Leo’s footfall sounded on the warped floorboards. “I love you.”
* * *
—
The next morning, Matthew discovered Beth humming in the kitchen in between sips of coffee. Matthew quietly watched her from the living room. The rental house had an open plan that made it feel even bigger than it was. He absorbed the rhythm of her body as she moved around the kitchen, sorting groceries and cooking tools. It was rare to find Beth in domestic mode—he sometimes forgot she had that setting.
“Morning,” he said, coming up behind her and kissing the dip in her neck just below her earlobe.
“Hey, you scared me.” She held up a paring knife in mock threat. “Want coffee? The built-in machine is incredible. I had three Americanos. Feel like I could run a marathon.” There wasn’t enough coffee in the universe to enable Matthew to run 26.2 miles. Their law firm did a charity 5K last year and he’d faked a stomach bug to get out of it. Beth came in first place.
Matthew approached the stainless-steel appliance that supposedly dispensed caffeine. It was built flush into a wall of light oak cabinetry, flanked by open shelves holding gleaming white porcelain mugs. Beth, anticipating his confusion as he studied the options on the touchscreen, was instantly beside him to explain how it worked.
“I love this house,” she said, pressing the necessary buttons to prepare Matthew’s drink. Her green eyes looked iridescent in the sunlight. She ran her fingers through her pale blond hair, which she was wearing loose for a change. He hadn’t even remembered that her hair went past her shoulders because it was always clamped into a bun. She caught him staring. “These are beach waves. From the actual beach.” She pointed enthusiastically to the shoreline, visible through the floor-to-ceiling glass that made up one entire wall of the kitchen. His family’s Beach Haven house was also on the ocean, but it had much smaller windows and tall dunes that often blocked the view. “We should make an offer on it at the end of the summer.”
“It’s very nice,” Matthew conceded. “But I can’t even imagine how much they’d ask for this place.” His family home, a tear-down on an inferior plot of land, was in contract for two million. To think his parents had scooped up the coastal home for $150,000 in the nineties. He estimated what the mortgage on a place like this would be and got light-headed. If the number was anywhere in the ballpark, buying this house meant he could retire, well, never. No, he could not allow Beth to entertain buying a second residence this extravagant. “Anyway, it’s too big for just the three of us. Speaking of, where’s Austin?”
“Outside collecting shells. By the way, I gave him a talk about not extending invitations to houseguests without running it by us first. He understood.”
“You know, it wouldn’t be the worst thing for Noah to move in here and spend more time with Austin. He knows the area inside and out. I bet he’d take him stargazing.”
“Hm,” Beth said, and Matthew sensed her gears churning. He took a sip of his coffee, which really was outstanding. Matthew would love to help Austin sort his shells later. Shell sorting was something he used to do with his sisters, and he was curious how his identification skills had held up. Could he still tell a black bay scallop from a hungry moon snail?
“I found an online oceanography course run by the Jacques Cousteau Foundation that Austin can still sign up for,” Beth said.
Matthew’s heart sank. He should have known that shell collecting could never be just shell collecting.
“We don’t want to pigeonhole his interests too early with the space thing. It could be great for him,” she said.
Great for him or great for you? It was sometimes hard to tell where his son ended and his wife began. The last thing their twelve-year-old needed was more work, especially over the summer.
Beth, moving at turbo speed, had already moved on. She was thumbing through her emails on an open laptop while rinsing a cutting board with her free hand. “Want a smoothie? I bought a bunch of berries at Neptune earlier.”
He absentmindedly nodded yes, though he had little appetite.
Austin’s childhood was looking less and less like his own had. Austin attended Dalton, a rigorous and competitive private school, where doing only the work assigned in class meant you were falling behind. Austin belonged there. He was gifted, that much was obvious when he began speaking in complete sentences at fourteen months. At four years old, he was making change at the corner bodega before the cashier punched the numbers into the register.
Beth seized upon his promise, recognizing the brainpower she possessed as a young child but which nobody caring for her harnessed. Not her parents, who divorced when she was four and both drank too much. Not her grandparents, whom she barely knew, not the teachers at her shitty school on the wrong side of the tracks in a forgettable midwestern town. She attended Rutgers and paid in-state tuition by using the address of a relative in Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey.
Matthew attended an excellent public school with a deep bench of advanced placement classes, sports teams and clubs, but he lacked Austin’s natural ability. The fact that Matthew and Beth ended up at the same college—she in the honors program—spoke far more to her drive than his abilities. Everything had been teed up for him whereas Beth had to chart the course herself. And so when his sisters, particularly Laura, rolled their eyes at Beth’s brand of mothering, Matthew grew defensive. They ought to admire her, not judge.
“You know,” Beth said loudly over the sound of the blender, “I think something’s up with Laura and—”
Matthew waited for the blender to quiet before responding. The morning had a “chill vibe,” to borrow a phrase favored by the younger lawyers who reported to him, and he didn’t feel like shouting.
When the grinding ceased, Matthew said, “That’s just Laura. She probably feels guilty that she never motivated her girls the way you do Austin.” He was careful not to use the word “push.”
Beth whirled around. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t saying anything about Laura and me. I was saying that I think something is up with her and Doug. I’ve never known him to work on a holiday weekend. You can’t tell me this is the first time someone needed a root canal on July Fourth. I hope everything is okay.”
Matthew scratched his chin, marveling at the wonder of the female brain. It never occurred to him to question Laura’s explanation of Doug’s absence. Come to think of it, it had been Sophie who jumped in to explain. There was also Laura’s face when Noah joked about moving in with her.
Leave it to Beth to suss out an issue where his brain felt gummy and blocked. She was a wiz at multitasking, coordinating Austin’s Tetris-like schedule and, apparently, sensing where relationship problems might be lurking.
“It must be tough having both girls out of the house when she has no job.” Beth handed him a glass filled to the brim with a creamy purple liquid. “I’d go nuts.”
“I’m sure she’ll find a way to keep busy,” he said. More quietly, he added, “Not everyone needs to work eighty hours a week to be fulfilled.”
“What’d you say?” Beth was rinsing her glass and turned off the faucet.
“Nothing.”
He didn’t know how his sister intended to spend her free time. They hadn’t had a real catch-up in ages. Before their mother got sick, the entire Jacobson clan gathered at least three times a year. In September they would be together for Rosh Hashanah, taking up an entire row at B’nai Shalom in East Brunswick and then feasting on Sylvia’s melt-in-your-mouth oven-baked brisket (not to be confused with her BBQ summer brisket), sweet apple kugel and gooey carrot tzimmes.
In spring they got together again for Passover, alternating between Laura and Doug’s house in Westfield and his and Beth’s apartment. Beth called Zabar’s and had all the food delivered; Laura claimed to make the entire seder meal from scratch. Beth swore she spotted take-out containers in the trash bin in the Cohens’ driveway though. Why she was poking around in Laura’s trash Matthew didn’t need to ask. He would rather focus on jokes he could recite at the table: Where do you buy bran matzah? LetMyPeopleGo.com. How do you drive your mother crazy on Passover? It’s a piece of cake.
Then there was the famous July Fourth weekend at the shore. His mother invited anybody with a pulse to eat, schmooze and watch the fireworks. Each year the crowd grew larger, and when the police started to show up because of noise complaints and cars blocking traffic, Sylvia invited them too. All this while their father threw up his hands about the cost and the mess.
Matthew hadn’t considered the effect losing his mother would have on the holidays when she first got sick. He was hardly an observant Jew—his favorite meal was a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich, a guilty pleasure only on account of its unhealthiness, not because God was wagging a finger at him from above. Beth had converted to Judaism to appease his parents, but her transition from nonpracticing Christian to barely practicing Jew had a drive-thru quality. How his family would celebrate Jewish holidays was rarely top of mind for either of them. And yet, he missed the forced gatherings.
Not only was Sylvia too weak to tackle marinating a brisket for twenty-four hours and peeling over fifty carrots—her cancer struck during a concurrent worldwide pandemic. It was risky for any of them to be around her, and even in a post-vax world, nobody stepped up to host—probably because to do so while Sylvia stayed home felt blasphemous. And so Matthew had no idea what was going on with Laura, Sophie or Noah. Really going on, that is. They had their group chat but the chain was mostly jabs and jokes. The deeper conversations happened in person, usually after a heavy meal.
“Can you believe Noah waited in that line last night to buy lottery tickets?” Beth said, with a head shake that made Matthew notice she’d clipped up her hair again. “And Laura smokes even though Sylvia had lung cancer? And did you hear Sophie say she’s losing her lease?” She booped Matthew’s nose and kissed him firmly on the lips. “I’m so glad I found this Jacobson.”
It irked Matthew when Beth put down his siblings, even when she did so in a roundabout way. Shifting from taking offense on behalf of his siblings to taking offense on behalf of his wife felt like riding a seesaw, something he hadn’t enjoyed even as a kid.
Beth clucked her tongue. “I was up until three a.m. reviewing depositions. You were out cold when I came in.” Matthew almost apologized for being asleep, as if he should have been burning the midnight oil too. “I’m going to take a shower. Make sure Austin’s feet aren’t covered in sand when he comes back. It’s bad for the travertine.” Before he could blink, she was racing up the stairs, her footsteps hitting the carpeted steps like a brisk rainfall. “Let’s talk more about buying this place,” she called from the second floor.
Matthew threw up his hands. His father’s voice bounced around his head. Money doesn’t grow on trees…
A few minutes later, Austin came in through the sliding door with a dimpled smile and an overflowing bucket in hand.
“Dad, I found a sand dollar.” He lifted a delicate, creamy white shell with the five-point pattern of a starfish and handed it to Matthew, who held it up to the light to admire its intricate design.
“Good job, bud. This is very cool.”
“Belongs to the order Clypeasteroida,” Austin added, looking at Matthew in expectation of praise. Matthew deflated. To think he planned to help Austin classify shells. The kid was probably already developing a thesis on beach erosion based on his findings.
“What are you going to do with it?”
