And then Logan looks over at me with his just-for-me smile, and the corset is ripped off. Air fills my lungs, and my heart swells to three times its size.
I’m buoyant again. Just with a new realization. A couple of extra laughs popcorn out of me.
“There are fewer seagulls than you’d expect out here,” I say.
Logan huffs a laugh. “What?”
“Seagulls,” I repeat. There are a few birds in the distance flying lazy circles over the boats. “You’d think more of them would be hanging around trying to steal bites.”
“Maybe they’re more into French fries than chips,” he says, popping a salt and vinegar chip into his mouth.
I roll my head against the seat to look at him. “You really didn’t want your family to know either, did you?”
It takes a few seconds for Logan to nod in agreement. “My dad’s side of the family is well off,” he explains, smoothing the chip bag out between his fingers. “The Maine house was our summer home. My dad set aside money for my sisters and me for our inheritances, but after his affair, I didn’t want anything from him. In the divorce, my mom got money and the house. They broke up, he left, and my relationship with him hasn’t been the same.”
Logan squints out at the horizon. “It wasn’t just that, though. After my accident, my dad tried to pay off our neighbor, and not in a sorry-for-the-trouble kind of way. He wanted to pay him off, as if he was doing me this big favor by saving me. What that really would’ve meant, though, was that I’d have to follow through on what was expected of me, which was to work in the family business. He reminded me of the inheritance I stood to lose if I didn’t do what he wanted. All I wanted was to do right by my neighbor. If there wasgoing to be a debt to pay off, I would’ve rather it have been to him, not my dad. Anything he paid for came with a price.”
“You would’ve owed him.”
“I didn’t want to be anyone’s puppet,” he says, resting his elbows on his thighs. “I decided to cut myself off. My dad didn’t like that and used my sisters’ inheritances as a bargaining chip. It was a whole thing. It got figured out, but it only validated my decision. I transferred to a community college to stay local. I wanted to be there for my ex-girlfriend, and I said I was going to rebuild what I broke, which is exactly what I did. I kept my word, and no one can take that from me.”
Unlike money, he doesn’t say.
He says this like it was the only choice he had to be truly free. Like it’s plain and simple. But I know it couldn’t have been easy.
“It’s difficult to justify turning down a lot of money without looking like an asshole,” he says. “And then here I go winning millions.”
I draw figure-eights into the condensation on my bottle. “You made choices for your own reasons. Some things in life we’re allowed to do just for ourselves, right?”
Logan half smiles at my use of his words. “Yeah.”
My head spins with all this new information. The way Logan lived, his parents’ approach to money, his fiscal responsibility, the built-in security. His siblings didn’t even ask for money when they found out he won. They didn’t even think it was a lot. I try not to remember the years I had to steal cash from Dad to mail to the utility companies. “The way we grew up could not have been more different. Too different, do you think?”
“Money can be a sensitive and complicated topic no matter how you grew up,” he says. “If anything, I think that’s something we can both relate to.”
“I didn’t want to go around announcing that I had lotterymoney,” I say, processing everything. “So I get why you wouldn’t go around telling people that you come from money. Or that you turned it down.”
Suddenly, our night in the pizzeria becomes clear. Logan really would have walked away from the money. He’s done it before.
“You took the money for me,” I manage to get out. The thought sends a sharp pain shooting right through my center. I scoot closer to the edge of my seat so I can grab his hand.
Logan rocks forward, tilting his head to meet my eyes. “It wasn’t a hardship to accept it,” he says, his jaw flexing as he works through something in his head, “I just don’t want money to lay the path for me so easily, I guess. I like the life I’m creating for myself. I learned how to support myself my way. That means something to me.”
“I can understand that.” I think of all the times Dad believed the lottery was his answer to everything.
“We beat the odds, though,” Logan says, squinting at the view. “Sometimes there are things in life you can’t turn down. I’m realizing that the lottery winnings aren’t free of strings, but accepting that money was not the same as accepting my dad’s.”
That, I get, too. But for me, those strings feel a lot more like guilt.
Logan pulls his hat over his windblown hair. “I’m grateful to have had luck on my side,” he pushes on. “I just… I had no doubt that I was going to figure it out and be okay. That knowledge was comforting, for both me and my mom, when I moved away. Also, I was born a white man in America. I know that helps me.”
I nod, thinking about how my dad’s life might’ve been different if he were a white man instead of a Chinese one.
“You know you’re allowed to have made the decision you did and still have struggles, right?” I ask.
Logan doesn’t answer this, which gives me time to think.
I follow up with, “Expectations.”
