Mrs. Million
Authors: Pete Hautman
A Novel
Pete Hautman
For MaryLouise
1Dear Mr. King,
I recently read your book MISERY and it changed my life.
Previous to reading MISERY I was deep in a Clinical Depression. My doctor prescribed Prozac but it made me sick. Also it was expensive. But the fact that I still have the use of my arms after the motorcycle accident where I ran off the road to avoid hitting a bus filled with innocent schoolchildren is a good thing. Life was very hard, for me after they amputated my legs, but all the innocent children survived!!!
After my accident I struggled hard to find a purpose in life to go on living. The Clinical Depression made me extremely suicidal so I decided to take an overdose of drugs. But then I read your excellent and profound book, MISERY. Once I read MISERY I knew that life was worth living if only to read your other books. You are not merely Talented, you are a Great Writer!!! Maybe you know that already. I am inspired to read your other books. Unfortunatly, I am on an extremely limited budget. No one will hire me as I am a cripple now and the amount of money I get from also getting wounded fighting Saddam in the Gulf War is very poor. I hardly get enough for food and rent.
Do you have any extra copies of any of your inspiring books? Preferably with your signature? I would be extremely grateful if you could spare some. Or if not, if you would send a donation in any amount, I could afford to buy them myself.
Admiringly,
Your biggest fan!!!
Jonathan James Morrow
W
HEN BARBARAANNETTE QUINN HEARD
the Powerball numbers come over the radio she was busy decorating a Cowboy Cake for her niece, spelling out “Brittany” in pink script beneath a peanut-butter-frosting rendering of a cowboy hat.
She was giving this cake her all because she could still remember her own seventh birthday party. Her mother had served Hostess chocolate cupcakes with the little corkscrew of icing on top. No candles. Her birthday present that year had been a
Star Trek
metal lunchbox. She still had it. According to
Schroeder’s Antiques Price Guide,
it was worth more than five hundred dollars, but what she remembered most was that she had not gotten a real birthday cake.
Barbaraannette did not know how her niece had become interested in cowboys. Possibly some old
Bonanza
rerun off the satellite dish. She hoped the girl would outgrow them. Cowboys were trouble.
But this year Britty would get her cake, a three-layer devil’s food covered with dark brown chocolate frosting and topped with a peanut butter cowboy hat and her name in pink frosting, all surrounded by a peanut butter frosting lasso. Barbaraannette would have drawn a horse, too, but she did not think her artistic skills were up to it.
When she heard the Powerball numbers coming over the radio—2, 4, 10, 19, 29, and 16—she stopped moving for several seconds, then took a breath and fitted a fluted nozzle onto her cake decorator and applied a pink scalloped ridge around the base of the cake. It wasn’t an authentic cowboy touch, but she had a lot of frosting left and besides, in addition to cowboys, Brittany adored all things pink.
The lottery numbers were interesting because 10-29, 2-19, and 4-16 were the birthdays of relatives, specifically, those of her sister Toagie, their mother, Hilde, and Toagie’s daughter, Brittany. They were
especially
interesting because Barbaraannette always based her weekly Powerball numbers on family birthdays. But with two sisters, two nieces, and a nephew, she could not for the life of her remember whose birthdays she had chosen for her most recent ticket.
Barbaraannette set aside the cake decorator and regarded her work. Using the handle of a teaspoon, she touched up a stray glob of pink frosting. Brittany probably would not have noticed the tiny flaw, but there was no point in doing half a job.
The Powerball ticket she had purchased last Sunday at the Pump-n-Munch waited in the purse hanging from the knob on the kitchen door, not six feet from her elbow. Barbaraannette was powerfully curious to have a look at that ticket, but she took a few more minutes to press seventeen tiny cinnamon hearts into the band of the peanut butter cowboy hat. She knew that if she looked at that ticket now, and it was a winner, her hands would be shaking so hard she would never be able to finish decorating that cake. She placed the hearts carefully, spreading them out nice and even. Britty loved little cinnamon hearts.
After positioning the final heart, Barbaraannette washed her hands, then placed a clear plastic cake protector over her creation. She lifted her purse from the doorknob and fished the lottery ticket from the inside pocket. Before reading the numbers, she took one last look at the Cowboy Cake. Britty was going to love it.
T
OAGIE CARLSON STOOD
in her sister’s kitchen staring wordlessly at the Cowboy Cake beneath the sparkling plastic dome. Barbaraannette had outdone herself.
“Barbaraannette?” Toagie called. Her thin, ragged voice echoed through the house. No response. Strange. Toagie lifted the pack of Salems from the elastic waistband of her purple sweatpants and shook out a cigarette.
Barbaraannette, the cake, and Britty’s birthday present from her mom and dad—this year a two-foot-tall barn Bill had built to house her plastic horse collection—were due at Britty’s party in less than ten minutes. The toy horse barn was in Barbaraannette’s garage, wrapped and ready to go, and so was the cake—but where was Barbaraannette? It wasn’t like her to be anywhere other than where she was supposed to be. Toagie walked down the hall to her sister’s bedroom and called out, “Barbaraannette? You in there?”
No reply. Very strange indeed, and a little frightening. Toagie fixed the unlit cigarette between her lips, stabbed her long fingers into her sprawling mop and clawed at her scalp. Her hair this week was the exact color of a not-quite-ripe banana, right down to the faint green highlights. Had Barbaraannette forgotten Britty’s party? Not likely, what with that cake sitting so pretty on her kitchen counter. Had she forgotten that Toagie had planned to stop by and help her carry the cake and the toy barn to her house, one and one half blocks up the street, where Britty and her friends were waiting? Not Barbaraannette. Toagie returned to the kitchen, turned on one of the gas burners, lit her Salem, took a huge calming lungful of smoke. She raised her voice loud enough to penetrate every wall of the house.
“Barbaraannette!”
She listened, then heard a sound something like the peeping of a baby robin. But it was too early in the season for baby robins. Piles of dirty snow still dotted the street corners and the earth too frozen for worm-picking. Also, the sound seemed to be coming from the basement door, which she now noticed was cocked open. Toagie gripped her necklace, a collection of brightly colored exotic seeds strung on a nylon cord. Leaning into the stairwell she called out, “Barbaraannette, is that you down there?”
“I’m here,” came Barbaraannette’s quiet voice.
Toagie clomped down the stairs, necklace rattling, Salem clenched in her teeth. She found her sister sitting on an upended five-gallon bucket that had once contained Amway laundry detergent, her posture excellent as usual, blinking her eyes, staring at the chest freezer.
“Are you okay?” Toagie demanded.
Barbaraannette nodded, then said, “No.”
Toagie knelt and looked up into her sister’s face. Where Toagie’s features were large, mobile, asymmetrical, and rather out of her control, Barbaraannette’s were neatly arrayed and centered on her broad, Irish-looking face. Her mouth was small, but perfectly shaped. Her slightly upturned, almond-shaped eyes were an unusually deep shade of blue—they reminded Toagie of Tidy-Bowl. During the summer Barbaraannette would display a galaxy of freckles, but now, after a long winter, her ivory skin was smooth and unmarked but for a single lozenge-shaped mole high on her left cheek. Toagie thought her sister to be quite beautiful.
“B.A.? What’s a matter, hon?” She felt scared. Barbaraannette was one of the cornerstones of Toagie’s universe.
“What are you doing here?” asked Barbaraannette, blinking at the cloud of mentholated smoke that had accompanied Toagie down the steps.
“I came to help you carry the cake and horse barn, hon.”
“Oh.” Barbaraannette looked at Toagie and smiled. “Toag, I think I won it. Will you look and see if I really won it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think I won the Powerball, Toag. I think I won it. I think I won the thing.”
Toagie’s mouth went slack and the cigarette dropped to the floor. She stood up and staggered back, catching herself on the freezer.
Barbaraannette’s right foot ground out the burning cigarette. She said, “Look at the ticket for me, would you, Toag?”
Toagie said, “Ticket?” Numbness descended upon her.
“Just take one good look at it and tell me if the numbers are your birthday, Mama’s, and Britty’s.”
Toagie blanked for a moment, then recalled her sister’s custom of basing her lottery picks on family birthdays. “Where is it?” Toagie asked.
“I put it in the freezer.”
“You froze it?” She turned and looked down at the white top of the chest freezer.
“After I looked at and saw the numbers I got scared. I didn’t know what else to do, Toag. It’s in a Tupperware marked ‘hot dish.’”
“You put it in Tupperware? You
froze
it? Criminentlies, Barbaraannette, why’d you go and do that?”
Barbaraannette shook her head and smiled, her usually small mouth stretching across a third of her face. “I kept thinking, what if the house burns down? Then it came in my head to put it in the freezer to keep it safe, so that’s what I did.”
Toagie put her hand on the freezer handle. She looked back at her sister and said, “You know I think you’re out of your fleeping mind, doncha?”
