Five(45)

“In my bag, we’ll deal with it at home,” she says.

“No, now,” he pleads. “When the doors open, throw it out at the next stop.”

“Don’t make a scene,” she says, and pulls her bag closer to her.

Finally, at home, she runs into the kitchen, coat still on, she pulls the scissors out of the drawer, and—flit, flit, flit—she empties all the cards onto the counter. “C’mon, cut them up, you can do it,” she says, and hands him the scissors.

“Why are you being so dramatic, why didn’t you just throw them away?” he asks, confused.

“Do it!” she yells, and then, short of breath, “Show me, show me you’re past this.”

“What?”

“I saw how you looked at those cards when he gave them to you, I saw the sparkle in your eye, Sonny, you’re not over it, you’re not. Show me it’s over, that you want this life, we sell this flat, we travel, we move on, show me you love me more than this thing, show me.”

So he cuts each card into four pieces, one by one. And takes the pile and throws them in air like confetti, and grabs Valentina, and holds her. In her rush, in her fury, she didn’t think to count the cards before he cut them up.

“Of course I love you more,” he says. “The most.”

Later, when she finds a scratch card in his jeans pocket while doing the laundry, he will tell her that he kept it to prove to himself that he had beat it. “See,” he will plead, “it’s not scratched off, I didn’t do anything. I didn’t use it.”

But the card does not hurt as much as the bank statement she opens. One of the ones she’s noticed before, that he throws unopened into the bin. One that says he has a balance of ?50,000 he never told her about.

“I love you, but I can’t stay,” she says, when he gets home from work.

“Wait, what do you mean?” he asks, sitting down across from her, the table between them.

“I have to leave for a while, I’m not sure we’re good for each other, Sonny,” she says, holding out her hand across the table, which is holding a scratch card.

“That’s not mine, I swear,” he says, pushing back from the table, startled, that same trapped feeling he had when he was small, when he was scapegoated by other kids for something he didn’t do.

“No, it’s not,” Valentina says, sadly. “It’s mine. I hid one from you too.”

Valentina goes back to her parents’ house. She is supported and surrounded with love and understanding. She goes to meetings in a different church hall so she won’t run into Sonny. She gets therapy. She gets on track.

Sonny has no parents to go back to. He has something else instead, and he is ?32,000 in debt twenty-seven days after his birthday, one day for each year of his life, plus one for good luck. He is in debt after emptying the lonely stray account, after selling his grandfather’s watch, after maxing out the only credit card he still had, the one he managed to hide from Gabriela. He knows he will not get the last installment of his inheritance and he does not want it. It has cost him too much already. It is not like his mother said, it is not fixable, and when he broke her rules she didn’t come back to haunt him, in the end, although he waited for her. Luna wasn’t as strong as she thought. She can’t reach him from the afterlife after all.



* * *





He chooses the pin-striped burgundy suit. It reminds him of Dorothy on The Golden Girls. He watched every single episode with his mother the year after his father died, and even though he was so young, he has distinct memories of Dorothy and Sophia, probably because they made his mother laugh and that reassured him that she was still his mother, because nothing else made her laugh in those days.

He found the suit at his favorite vintage shop. The tag read, “Long Tall Sally,” and he liked that. It felt like a brand Dorothy would have endorsed. The trousers hit him well above the ankles and flared out, and the jacket was small for him, but the shrunken look of it suited him.

He buttons up his black shirt and ties his skinny satin black tie. He goes with the white patent wingtips, no socks, because they are unexpected on this cold winter morning in this season. But they make the stripes in the suit pop and they tie it together. Black shoes are too predictable, too safe, two things he is not.

He ties up his hair in a high topknot. He expertly arranges his long curls so that they spring, just so, over his brown eye. It’s cold, but he doesn’t want to wear a coat. Too restrictive in case he decides to run, or jump, or he’s not sure, but he wants to be able to move freely. While he still can.

So he puts on Valentina’s Bohemian claret and orange poncho that she left behind in her haste to leave him. But he wears it as a scarf. It smells of her perfume still.

He texts her: I miss you I love you everything that is mine is yours. He does not expect a reply. He does it so she’ll have evidence of his wishes when the time comes.

He could earn enough to pay it off in a year. His salary plus a few freelance gigs, as long as he was sensible about his spending. That is not the problem, that is not the point.

Sonny is not going to stop. Ever. He can pay off the debt, and put blocks on his phone and computer, and he can run, and he can love Valentina and immerse himself in his work. But something will happen and then he will do it again. And then again. He will have secrets, and tell lies, because he cannot stop. He is so tired of himself.