Lucky(10)

“Bonnie Skinner,” she said to the mirror. The name was from a byline she’d seen in Gambling Insider, one of the magazines that had been fanned across the bar when she and Cary had arrived in their suite the day before. “Bonnie,” she repeated, heading out to the bar to check the masthead. It was printed in Phoenix, which was where she was now from. Bonnie was a freelance writer, here on a thrilling business trip that was a far cry from her ordinary life as a mother of two.

She shoved her shorn curls into a pillowcase and applied the dye to her remaining locks. After she rinsed it, her now-brown hair dried in curls close to her head, like an older woman’s style. Perfect. She moved through the room, throwing clothes in a backpack and gathering other items: bills, change, the lottery ticket she had abandoned on the floor. She put those in her wallet, and searched the room for any more bills and change she could find. She put their passports and her phone into the pillowcase with her cut hair and tied it shut, then grabbed her backpack and headed for the door.

Never look back, her father used to say when they would leave a place behind. But she couldn’t help herself: she turned, she looked. It was a disaster. Dye-stained towels, a broken glass, empty bottles on the floor. She thought of the maid who was going to have to deal with this mess, maybe even lose wages while being interviewed by police. She took a few twentys out of her wallet and left them on top of a pillow. The door slammed behind her, and Lucky was gone.





October 1992





NORTH MAINE WOODS




“Haircut time,” Lucky’s father said, waking her in the middle of the night. He was holding the scissors from their sewing kit, the one that had belonged to his mother, he had told her, with its rattan exterior and the red and white roses woven over the surface.

“What?” Lucky mumbled, turning her face away from him and burying it in the musty-smelling pillow. They were staying in a rooming house, a ramshackle log cabin at the edge of the North Maine Woods.

“You’ve got to cut your hair off,” he said matter-of-factly. “And then we have to get out of here. Come on.” She sat up and faced him. She could smell whiskey and cigar smoke on him. Her heart plummeted.

“Why? I thought we were staying here for a while.”

“Yeah, well, we can’t. I faked a wire transfer to pay for this place and I have a feeling the jig is about to be up. And also… I played a game of blackjack tonight with the wrong people.”

“Dad.”

His hangdog expression was so familiar. “Lost the rest of the money, and then some,” he said, as if she didn’t already know that. “We have to leave before they come looking for what I owe.”

“I told you not to—”

“And I told you there was no other choice. I had to try to earn back some of what we lost after we were robbed. But I failed.”

This was the unfortunate reality for people like them: You had to carry cash, you couldn’t have a bank account; and when you traveled with cash, you had to decide whether to carry it all with you or leave it in your room. Sometimes you trusted the wrong person, or sometimes, someone figured you out and the next thing you knew, your money was gone. Or sometimes, it was just a fluke. They’d been robbed before, but never this much. Mostly because they’d never had this much.

“I don’t want to cut my hair. I just want to sleep!”

“Please don’t give me a hard time about this,” he said. “I’m just as upset as you are.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “No, you aren’t. No one is asking you to cut off your hair.”

“It’s just hair.”

A mother would understand that it was not just hair. A mother would understand that Lucky was getting to the age where she looked at herself a little longer in the mirror, where she saw the styles the other girls were putting their hair into and tried to do the same.

“Come on. You’re a little young still for preteen histrionics.”

She tossed the covers to the floor and glared at him. “Am I? Because you always tell me I’m basically a grown-up! Seems to me I should be able to act however the hell I want!”

He sighed and looked at her sadly, and this just made her angrier. “We simply have no choice. We have to go back in.”

“Back in” meant away from the border towns. Back to the major cities, where the money was a little easier to come by. They always got so close. “Once we get to Canada, we’ll lead an honest life,” he would tell her. But he didn’t know what honest meant.

Lucky wanted to scream; she wanted to cry. Lately she’d been feeling this way more and more. Like the world didn’t make sense—like her world didn’t make sense. No other kids lived like this. She knew it. And she was done.

She tried all her tricks to get the tears to stop threatening, but nothing worked. One trickled down her left cheek. And while she was distracted by that, her father grabbed a hank of her long, curly, waving flag of hair, and snip—it was lying there like a dead animal on the floor. “Was that so bad? Easy-peasy.”

She jumped from the bed. “How dare you?” she shouted, and he flinched.

“Keep it down, for heaven’s sake! I told you, we’re in trouble.”

“We’re always in trouble. Always, always, always!”