Nobody is paying attention to him. Katherine is still staring at Teddy, her face now a grayish color. She looks utterly gobsmacked, which is almost as weird a sight as anything else that’s happened today.
“You’re serious,” she says, but it isn’t a question.
He nods. “I am.”
“This isn’t a joke? Because I’m exhausted, and if this is one of your—”
“Mom,” he says, putting a hand over hers. “This isn’t a joke. I swear. We won the lottery. Alice picked the winning numbers. She won usmillions.”
It’s strange to watch it happen, to see her face move from wariness to incredulity to shock, then finally slip into something I haven’t seen from her in a long time: joy.
“Millions?” she repeats, shaking her head, and Leo passes over his phone, where the numbers from the lottery website match the ones on the ticket in her hand. Katherine opens her mouth as if to say something more, then seems to change her mind; instead she stands up, moving straight past Teddy and over to me. She’s a few inches shorter than I am, but she grips my shoulders so that I have to bend a little, and there’s something steady in her eyes, something almost fierce in the way she’s looking at me.
“Alice,” she whispers.“Thank you.”
“It was nothing,” I say automatically, because this is the truth. It was five minutes in a convenience store. It was as easy as picking up a pack of gum or a tube of toothpaste. It was a gag gift, a token, an afterthought. It was just a birthday present, and a pretty lame one at that.
But still she folds me into a hug so tight it’s almost hard to breathe.
“It was everything,” she says.
When the intercom buzzes, Leo hurries over to answer the door.
“Password is ‘jackpot,’ ” he says into the speaker, and there’s a pause—filled by a crackle of static—before Aunt Sofia’s voice emerges.
“Leo?”
“Hi, Mom,” he says, punching the button. “Come on up.”
Teddy turns to Katherine, who is still looking kind of dazed. “We thought we might need a lawyer,” he explains. “So we asked Sofia to come over.”
“And Uncle Jake,” I add with a grin. “Just in case we needed an office-supply salesman. You never know.”
Katherine laughs. “Stranger things have happened today.”
While they climb the stairs, Leo and I stand waiting near the open door of the apartment. “No rush,” he shouts when we hear their footsteps. “Take your time.”
“Hey,” Uncle Jake calls back. “We’re not all eighteen here, okay?”
At the top he slumps against the banister in mock exhaustion, mopping his forehead with the sleeve of his flannel shirt. “Okay, I’m here,” he says with a grin I still think of as my dad’s, even after all these years. The similarities between them are startling: the reddish hair, the round blue eyes, the same booming laugh. Uncle Jake was older by a few years, and it flattens me still on each of his birthdays, knowing my dad will never reach that same age.
“I’ve now climbed approximately six million stairs,” he says. “And I’m missing the Bulls game. And I had to drive three miles through ice and snow with the biggest scaredy-cat on the planet. So if you guys want to fill us in at any point, that would be fantastic.”
“I heard that,” Aunt Sofia says, finally making it up too. She walks straight over to Leo and me, pulling us both into a hug. I can almost feel the relief radiating off her. “You two could be a little more selective with your use of the wordemergency.”
“I told you everything was okay,” Leo says, holding up his phone as proof, but Aunt Sofia only shakes her head. She’s wearing jeans and an oversized Northwestern sweatshirt, her long dark hair pulled back into a low ponytail so that she looks much younger than usual, her face still full of worry.
“Well, a bit more information would’ve been nice,” she says, but the sternness is melting away now that she’s clapped eyes on us. “It still would.”
“Sorry,” I begin, ready to explain, but then Teddy pokes his head out the door.
“Actually it’s my fault,” he says, smiling broadly at them. “Turns out I could use some legal advice.”
“It was only a matter of time,” Uncle Jake stage-whispers to me, and I laugh, because he’s not totally wrong. But suddenly I can’t wait for them to hear the real reason that they’re here, the incredible, impossible news.
Aunt Sofia is frowning at Teddy. “What happened?”
“Let’s talk inside,” he says, ushering us in and closing the door.
