Julie and Romeo Get Lucky by Jeanne Ray Page A

side as if she was trying to screw it off her shoulders. It was a funny little thing she did when she got frustrated with herself. Even as a little girl, she would manually work her head back and forth when she did something stupid.
    The doorbell rang again.
    â€œGo upstairs with Romeo. I’ll answer it,” she said.
    I felt like I should be able to be some sort of comfort to Sandy, but on the other hand I wanted to comfort Romeo, too. What I needed was some as-yet-uninvented product: a pressurized canister with which I could spray foamy comfort from room to room. Trying to comfort an entire house full of people manually was getting to be too much of a job. Sandy looked at me and pointed up the stairs. “Go,” she said.
    Romeo was sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor. He smiled at me.
    â€œLook at you!” I said.
    â€œIt’s progress. I’m almost ready to get out of here.”
    I sat down beside him and took his hand. “It’s not as bad as all that.”
    He smiled. “Oh, Julie, if I were going to be held prisoner in anybody’s bedroom, I’d want it to be yours.” He did a small movement that was at once a turn and a lean forward. He was moving in to kiss me, but when his mouth came within two inches of mine, he screamed.
    â€œWhat!”
    Every muscle in his face tightened up. “Back down,” he gasped. “Back down.”
    And so I helped him lie back and picked up his feet and very carefully stretched them out in front of him. I got him a pain pill and a glass of water with the bendy-neck straw. Someday, when he was ready, Romeo would go, but it wasn’t going to be anytime soon.
    When Dr. Dominic and Father Al showed up in a stream of cowboys and swamis and fifties girls in poodle skirts, I just pointed them up. They came back down five minutes later shaking their heads.
    â€œI didn’t think I’d have to spell this out for you, but stay away from all amorous activity,” Dominic said. “No kissing.”
    After they left Sandy gave me a mildly horrified look. “What have you done now, Mother?”
    But I had other things on my mind. Sarah and the two Tonys came back with their loot, and still there was no Nora, no Alex. I called them at home and on Nora’s cell phone, but I didn’t get an answer.
    â€œShe’s going to miss the drawing.” Sarah had taken off her blueberry husk and was now wearing only the blue tights, turtleneck, hat, and gloves. Every shade of blue was slightly mismatched. She looked like a little blue worm.
    â€œThe same numbers will come up if she’s here or if she’s home,” Big Tony said logically. “Nothing’s going to change.”
    But Sarah was a gambler and gamblers, especially the eight-year-old variety, are impervious to logic. “You don’t know that,” she said darkly.
    Little Tony was going through the stash of candy in his pockets. He ultimately wound up with so much that at one point in the evening he had tightened up his belt and started dropping candy down the front of his shirt, so that now he wore a little potbelly of undigested sweets. “I got almost as much as Sarah did, and I didn’t have to dress up like a blueberry.”
    Sarah switched the television on and sat back to peel a Star-burst fruit chew. “Feeling very lucky,” she said.
    â€œI don’t like this one bit,” Sandy whispered to Big Tony.
    I wondered if she didn’t like it for the same reason that I didn’t like it. It felt too scary to get caught up in the possibilities of Sarah’s hope. With that kind of money, I could pay off the mortgage on the house and the one I should never have taken out on the store. Sandy could pay off her credit cards, and Big Tony could go to medical school, and they could all have a house of their own and go to private schools and take cello lessons and go to the Cape for two weeks in the