CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER SEVEN
M ad was shocked to see fields of alfalfa as they drove through Nevada, huge swaths of green. It always made her happy to see something growing, land that wasn’t obscured by buildings. But it made sense, with all the cattle in-Nevada, but alfalfa was not something she saw much of in Tennessee. It was always clover, and her mother, when she was sixteen, had been selected as the Queen of Crimson Clover for the annual Crimson Clover Festival. There was a framed news photo of her mother, eyes wide, holding a bouquet of clover, a crown awkwardly tilting atop her hair. She asked Tom to use his camera to record the swaying alfalfa, hoping she could show it to her mother when this was all over. They were so close to the end, weren’t they?
They stopped at a gas station outside of Reno, where they’d spend the night, and Mad watched as Tom stepped out of the car, stretched his arms to the sky, his giant T-shirt reaching above his knees, and then he sighed. “Can I have anything I want in there?” he asked, pointing to the convenience store.
“Yeah,” Pep replied as she jogged past them, avoiding a car that was pulling into an adjacent pump. “Yes!” Tom said, but Mad told him that there was a limit to what they could spend on gas station snacks.
“But what’s the limit?” he asked, genuinely curious. Trista had given Mad an envelope with five hundred dollars to pay for any expenses that Tom accrued during the trip, but the money seemed so arbitrary. How much did it cost to take a kid from Utah to California? What was the right percentage for his share of the hotel room? And would they get a single room, still, or would Pep and Tom get their own now? Or would Rube and Tom share one room and Pep and Mad the other? Then Mad added up what she’d spent so far on this trip across the country and was sheepishly reminded of how much Rube was paying for all of them. She had not paid for a single hotel room, and, especially after that awkward moment after the car wreck when Rube had yelled about the money, Mad felt like she needed to instill some kind of financial responsibility in Tom, so she told him, “You can spend ten dollars total.”
Tom frowned, as if he was adding up an imaginary bill in his mind, but finally nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Do you want to give me the ten dollars?” Mad told him to just come to her with the food and she’d pay for it. And so Tom waddled across the parking lot, his video camera strap slung across his shoulder, and into the store.
Rube pumped the gas and regarded her. “We’re getting close,” he said. “Did you think we’d get this close?” She shook her head.
“It’s Woodside, California. That’s the last address I have for him.”
“And we’re all together now?” Mad asked him. “It’s only the four of us?” She had not told Rube that Tom wasn’t their biological half sibling. She felt bad for not telling him, but she worried that Rube might treat Tom differently, or that he wouldn’t let Tom see their father when they found him. She’d tell him later. And Pep. Or maybe their father would tell them.
“Yes, as far as we know, there are four of us. No more. I mean, well, maybe more in California.”
“If we show up and he’s got septuplets or something … ,” Mad said, trailing off.
Rube turned his attention back to the pump, now that the car was topped up. They walked into the store to look for their two youngest siblings. Pep was drinking a slushie, electric red and already staining her lips, and holding a packet of Big League Chew and some peanuts. “Where’s Tom?” Mad asked.
“He went to use the restroom,” she said. She looked around and then continued, “Oh, yeah, he’s over there.”
Mad walked over to Tom, who was standing on the precipice of a separate room, which was flashing with all manner of lights, a kind of arcade, and Mad steeled herself to negotiate the cost of video games in his allowance. She stared at the back of his giant shirt, which was on backward, showing a cartoon character named Johnny Test, playing an electric guitar with lightning bolts coming out of it, the catchphrase “Say wha?” in huge letters. He was filming the room but turned off the camera when he saw her.
“Hey there,” she said, and Tom immediately turned to her, pulled on the pocket of her jeans, and said, “Go put ten dollars in that machine.”
“Wait, what?” she said. “What machine?”
“The Diamond Doves machine,” he said, gesturing to a glowing slot machine with different fruits in the manner of cathedral stained-glass windows, with the phrase five times pay in bright letters, which Mad could not understand. She had never gambled in her life.
“Is this a real slot machine?” she asked. Was gambling legal in a gas station?
“Ten dollars,” he said. “Go do it.”
“Why do you want me to do that?” she asked.
“’Cause I can’t go in there!” he said, in the loudest whisper she’d ever heard. “It’s illegal for me to go in there. But you’re over twenty-one, right?”
Mad nodded. “Yeah, by a lot of years,” she replied.
“Just, okay, just go in there, okay? Put ten dollars in the little tray there and pull the lever. Look, you can win a ton of money.”
“No, you can’t, sweetie,” she said. “The odds are crazy.”
Pep appeared beside them, which made Mad jump. “Hey, what’s the holdup?” Pep asked. She had, Mad noted, already refilled the slushee cup.
“Tom wants me to gamble,” Mad said, “but I told him we shouldn’t.”
“How much?” Pep asked.
“Ten dollars,” Tom replied.
“Here, give it to me,” Pep said, “I’ll do it.”
“Hey, now, no,” Mad said.
“Don’t think,” Tom advised. “Just go do it.”
Mad wondered where Rube was, probably using the restroom, but then she decided the quickest way to move on was to drop ten dollars, a lesson learned, so she finally nodded, saying, “Okay, ten dollars.”
“Go!” Tom said, turning his camera back on, framing the scene.
It took Mad a second to get the machine to accept the ten-dollar bill, which kept spitting it back at her, like a sign, but then the machine got louder, started to whirr and whistle. She looked at the buttons, but she couldn’t quite figure out what to do. She saw a button that said, “Play Max Credits” and hit it, which made the reels spin, though this was a video display and not like the slot machines Mad remembered from movies. And it seemed like the lines of possibility were greater, with strange zigzags on the glass screen, but she watched as the reels lined up and she couldn’t decipher that anything had happened, certainly no matches, and she turned, holding up her hands, but then Tom shout-whispered, “It’s saying you get a bonus ! It’s another spin.”
Mad turned to the machine and pressed the button and the machine spun again, but this time there were three symbols that all had the diamond dove symbol, sea-green cartoon diamonds with wings, and the machine went ding-ding-ding and Pep was now beside Mad, who turned around to see Tom, his face wild with happiness, and he pulled his T-shirt down to cover his legs and he crouched there, rocking a little, still filming her.
“I think you won!” Pep said. A light atop the machine went off, and the screen showed birds wildly flapping their wings. “Holy shit!” Pep continued, “You did win!”
“I won,” Mad said, keeping her emotions in check. “I won. I won four thousand dollars.” She turned back to Tom, his face obscured now by the camera, still filming her. She gave a thumbs-up, smiled. The machine spit out a slip of paper, and she took it. She and Pep jogged out of the arcade, the machine still making a racket, and she showed the slip to Tom, who returned the camera to his side.
“Four hundred thousand dollars!” he shouted, which made the only other person in the gas station turn to look at them. It was an old lady, and her eyes widened in shock.
“No, Tom, look, it’s not four hundred thousand dollars. It’s just—I mean, not just , but—it’s four thousand dollars.”
“What is happening?” Rube said, finally walking up to them. “I couldn’t find you. I went back to the car. I thought you guys ran off.”
“We gambled,” Mad admitted. “We played the slots.”
“In a gas station?” Rube asked, confused.
“Mad won four thousand dollars!” Pep told him.
“Well, I mean, Tom won it, but he’s not twenty-one, so I was kind of like his proxy or something.”
“That’s a thousand for each of us!” Tom said. “And I still have the money that Mom gave you.”
“You’re gonna share it with us?” Pep asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Of course. You would, right?”
“I mean, yeah,” Pep admitted, “but you’re a kid. I didn’t know if you’d share.”
“Of course,” he said, smiling. “We all get a thousand dollars. So where’s the money?” he asked.
“It’s just this slip of paper. They don’t do the coins anymore, I guess. I just … okay, I take it to the front counter.” Mad walked up to the teenager at the register, who saw the slip of paper and instantly seemed nervous. “You win something?” he asked Mad, who nodded sheepishly. “I never gamble,” she said, as if this guy would judge her. “Beginner’s luck, I guess.”
She handed him the slip and his eyes widened even more. “Oh, holy shit. Um, I gotta … let me … we don’t have that kind of money.”
“Oh,” Mad said. “So what do we do?”
“Trade it in for lottery tickets,” Tom offered. “Look, these ones say you can win five hundred thousand dollars.”
“Oh, no, it doesn’t work like that, little dude,” the cashier said to Tom. “But, honestly, it’s an outside company who handles the gambling machines. We can do, like, up to three hundred or something like that, but I’ve never seen anybody win this much.”
“How do we get our money?” Pep said.
“You might have to come back in a few days,” he told them, and Pep leaned over the counter. “We’re traveling through, okay? We are not going to be here in a few days.”
The force of Pep’s insistence, plus the wildness of Tom’s excitement, his T-shirt swaying as he spun around the store, made the cashier reconsider his options. He picked up the phone, looked through a little folder under the counter, and then made a call. He turned away from them, walking as far as he could get for privacy, but they could make out some of it. “Yeah,” he said, “four grand, dude … well, yeah, the ticket is right here…. No, this chick is adamant that they want the money now … okay … yeah … four grand, dude.”
When he hung up the phone, he turned to them, nervously smiling. “Okay, so somebody is coming with the money right now.”
“Wait, like, someone is bringing the cash here?”
“That’s correct. He has some tax forms or something and then he’ll give you the money, in cash, and then you and your kids can get back on the road.”
“I’m going to get another slushee,” Pep said. “The cola one, this time.”
“He thinks we’re the parents,” Mad said to Rube.
“We are,” Rube said. “For now, we are.”
A battered Honda Civic pulled up twenty-five minutes later, and a man stepped out with a bank pouch. “You the lucky lady?” he asked Mad, who nodded. He had a sunny disposition for someone who was about to fork over thousands of dollars, but she imagined that this happened once a year, if even that, and he must be making so much more off of people who had been forced by their newly discovered half sibling to bet ten dollars on a slot machine and subsequently lost and then poured nine hundred and ninety more dollars into the machine without success. It was interesting to Mad, that they could both be happy over the outcome, such a rare thing. She filled out the forms, and the entire family circled around the man, Tom’s camera trained on the scene, as he counted out hundred-dollar bills into Mad’s waiting palm. Even the cashier huddled with them as they counted—“Three thousand eight hundred, three thousand nine hundred, four thousand!”—and Mad held the stack of cash with both hands and backed out of the convenience store, running to the car like they’d just pulled a robbery, Pep and Tom, still filming, and Rube chasing after her. They were all laughing, and then Tom said, “I think this is the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to me!” and who would disagree? It was maybe the most she had ever felt like she belonged to a family, the happiest she’d ever been that she had people related to her there to witness the event. It was such a great sensation, and she knew it was magical and improbable and that most families don’t win four thousand dollars on a gas station slot machine. But that absolutely did not matter to her at this moment. She had a family, a large family, and they were all filthy rich. As they drove to Reno, she handed each family member a thousand dollars, and she let Tom hold on to his portion, which he fanned out in his lap over and over.
She stared out at the fields of alfalfa, marveling at the fact that she was riding in a Chevy HHR with her three siblings, farther from home than she had ever been in her life, somehow wealthier than she’d been before she started the trip. If they turned around right now, if they just put the car in reverse, dodging the oncoming traffic, all the way back to Tennessee, it would honestly have been enough for her. Everything in this moment was lovely, no harm done, but she knew it wouldn’t last. What else could they do? They had to push their luck.