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The memorial service for Beth, Harry Crane’s wife of four­teen years, was held in the Leiper Friends Meeting House in Waverly, just outside Philadelphia. The large, unadorned room was packed with relatives, friends, neighbors and coworkers.

A woman’s whisper rose from their midst. “Oh, look at him. Poor Harry.” Grief-haunted and pale in his rumpled blue suit, Harry sat in the front row propped between his imposing older brother, Wolf, and Beth’s father, Stan.

A deep quiet fell over the gathering. In a Quaker memorial service, the mourners sit in ungoverned silence until someone is moved to say a few words, recite poetry or even sing. A long minute passed. The cold March wind clicked a tree branch against the window at the end of Harry’s row. A baby fussed. An old man coughed. Kleenex white as dove wings fluttered into view about the room.

Sandy Maynard was the first to rise. Sandy played tennis with Beth every other Tuesday evening at the Healthplex. “Beth,” she said. She gripped the back of the pew in front of her. “Beth, I want to tell you something. You were a wonderful friend.” Tears streamed down Sandy’s cheeks. “You were a wonderful friend, and I will miss you every day of my life.” Sandy’s husband slid another Kleenex into her hand and helped her sit back down.

Harry stared straight ahead.

Carl Bachman, owner of Bachman’s Deli Cafe, lumbered to his feet. “So,” he said. He paused to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief and clear his throat. Carl was not a man accus­tomed to oratory. “So, I just want to say Beth was a great cus­tomer. And Harry, I know you were a great husband. And this—this is a great tragedy. Obviously. So. So, God who also is pretty great, well, He works in mysterious ways. Thank you.” Carl looked around in a panic as if suddenly thinking, Are you allowed to say God in a Quaker service, what are the darn rules? He ducked back down into his seat.

The mourners turned their gaze back to Harry. Outside, a heavy truck pulled down a side street. The deep engine throb filled the meeting house. Harry shifted and blinked. The room tensed, but he went still again.

A woman to Harry’s left popped up like a meerkat and raised a silver flute into view. “I’d like to play a song for you, Beth. I tried to compose something original but I was too sad to think, so I’m going to play a Beatles song because the Beatles cover every single emotion there could possibly be. I’m going to play ‘Hello, Goodbye.’” She lifted the flute to her lips and gave it a nervous off-key toot. “Um, hold on, I have to adjust. Some­thing.” She fiddled with the tuning slide, gave things a twist, pressed the flute to her lips again. She closed her eyes and played the first note, this time perfectly. The simple pop melody hit the mourners with the emotional wallop of a Bach cello suite. Loud sobs detonated around the room.

But not a sound from the front pew, where Harry sat.

Someone in the back of the room stood and began to speak in a steady, elderly voice. “Well, my name is Bill Belson and I live over on Guernsey Road, and I want to speak a moment about Beth and my Jack Russell terrier, Bud. Every morning, I tie Bud to the cherry tree in my front yard so he can watch what’s going on. And Beth, on her way to the train, would al­ways stop to give him a head scratch or a belly rub. When she’d step into the yard, she’d say, ‘Hello, Bud.’ And when she’d leave, she’d say, ‘Goodbye, Bud.’”

Bill Belson paused. “I’d hear Beth’s voice from an open win­dow or maybe I’d be out back raking leaves, and it brought me pleasure, this little thing between the two of them. This little ‘Hello, Goodbye.’” Bill’s deep sigh filled the room. “I’m sure going to miss that moment. Because that’s why we’re here on this planet. You know? To speak to dogs. To be alive in the world. That’s what Beth was. Alive in the world.”

For the first time since Stan and Wolf had led him into the room, Harry moved. He slowly turned to look at this man, Bill Belson. But Bill had taken his seat.

Harry’s eyes cut to a teenager rising to his feet. Jason Luder. Nice kid, lived next door, mowed their lawn when they went on vacation. “Yeah, well,” Jason began, “kinda followin’ up on what Mr. Belson said, and the lady with the flute. We just read Slaughterhouse-Five in class and there’s, like, this phrase that Billy Pilgrim uses, ‘Farewell, hello, farewell, hello,’ because he’s, like, unstuck in time. So maybe in a way Mrs. Crane’s still kind of here, okay? In a way, she’s just unstuck in time.” Jason sat down.

And Harry stood up. The assembly held its collective breath. Harry was going to speak. He said two words, but in a voice so quiet no one could make them out. He looked at the floor, then at the ceiling, and said them again. “Wait here.”

Two hundred people exchanged furtive, puzzled looks.

Harry stepped past Wolf. Wolf gripped Harry’s coat sleeve. Harry shook free, stood for a teetering moment, then took off down the center of the aisle. He banged open the meeting house doors, ran down the stone steps and out onto the lawn, acceler­ating toward some unreachable escape. Wolf, large as a locomo­tive and huffing steam in the cold air, caught him from behind. They crashed to the frozen ground.

Crushed beneath his brother, Harry felt the relief of oblitera­tion. But he heard himself groan—there would be no escape—and his left eye opened. He blinked and stared at his hand, pinned inches in front of his face. The fingers slowly uncurled and revealed, crumpled and sweaty after five days of clutching it in his fist, a lottery ticket.

“Wait here,” he whispered, and saw Beth standing before him, Beth five days ago, standing on Market Street.

Wait here.

They’d been hurrying along Market Street in Philadelphia, hand in hand, late for a movie. Waiting for the light on Sixth Street, he turned and looked at her. Exquisite wifely details pierced him. The smile lines at the sides of her mouth. The lock of hair above her right ear set aglow by the late-afternoon light. The pleasure of her hand secure in his. Harry was always most alive when Beth was beside him. He drew her close and kissed her. A good solid kiss.

She leaned back from him and smiled. “Hello?”

“Heads up,” he said. “That could happen again.” He took in the faded Sixth Street sign. “It’ll definitely happen again. Every even-numbered street.”

“Yeah? Like, an OCD thing? Compulsive spousal kissing?”

“Compulsive even-numbered spousal kissing.”

“You’re a very odd man,” she said.

“No, a very even man.” He planted another kiss.

Beth laughed and pushed him away. “You know, you could use a little OCD. I was just thinking about your sock drawer.” They were in front of Old Navy. There were rows of men’s socks in the window display.

Harry shook his head. “Wow. You’re thinking socks while I’m thinking of your amazingness.”

“Your sock drawer’s amazing, Harry.”

“I don’t have a sock drawer.”

“Right. You throw your socks into your underwear drawer.”

“I have an underwear drawer?” He pointed at the street sign again. “Seriously, you’ve been warned.”

Numbers were very much on his mind. Why? He took in street signs, the distant clock on City Hall, the route numbers on the front of the city buses roaring by.

Wait here.

Beth nudged him. “We really do need to hurry. You hate to be late for a movie.”

“Right. Let’s go.”

They went another block. He kissed her.

Her laughter, bright as the sun. “Seventh Street,” she said. “Odd-numbered! You cheated.”

They turned in unison, drawn by a sudden noise two blocks up. Mammoth machines, louder than battling dinosaurs, were tearing down an old brick warehouse. The roar and push of the city—when they stepped off the curb, Harry stumbled. Beth steadied him. “I’m all right,” he said. We’re on our way to a movie, he thought, that’s all. The sidewalk is crowded. It’s cold. They’re tearing down a warehouse.

Averting his eyes as another section of wall tumbled to the ground—the impermanence of all things—he focused again on the miraculous constant at his side. Blue eyes, brown hair, honey scent, white teeth, bright laughter, strong hand. Look at her, in her red wool coat. “The coat,” he said. It was new. She’d gotten it yesterday.

“Too red?”

“No, it’s just—you look so great in it.”

She studied him. “You’re in an interesting mood, Harry. Kinda here, there and everywhere.”

And then his eyes found it. He fixed on the green neon Penn­sylvania Lottery sign above the door of a convenience store across the street. It winked at him. Numbers.

“Oh, hey,” he said.

Beth followed his gaze to the neon lottery sign. “Okay, that’s what’s going on.” She tugged his arm. “No, come on. The movie starts in five minutes.”

Harry let her lead him forward. He glanced back at the con­venience store. Stopped abruptly in front of the plywood barrier along the demolition site like a stubborn dog jerking its leash. “Just wait here a minute. All right?” he said. He had to raise his voice above the diesel chug of the machines. “All I want is a Snickers. Really. You can never get a Snickers at the movies.”

Beth reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a couple of mini Snickers. They had bought too many bags last Halloween. The golden wrappers glittered in the sunlight.

Harry stared, turned without taking one and peered through an observation hole in the plywood. He looked quickly away as the wrecking ball swung. He didn’t like to watch things fall, didn’t get that thrill you were supposed to get.

Beth reached out and raised the collar on his jacket. “You don’t need a hundred million dollars to open Harry’s Trees.”

You couldn’t hide anything from her. Why did he ever bother to try?

“I didn’t buy a ticket,” he said.

“Great. Let’s go to the movie.”

Harry’s cheeks flushed.

“If you go across the street, we’ll be late,” she said.

“The drawing’s at six. I’ll miss it.”

Beth looked into his eyes. “Skip the ticket. Just this once? Please?”

He felt ill. They cut down my eastern hemlock, Beth, he wanted to say. But he’d told her that already. Another chunk of the warehouse crashed down on the other side of the barrier. Harry heard his eastern hemlock fall. He began to stress, as he did too often, about his job at the USDA Forest Service. How the vi­brant trees of his youth had withered in his late thirties into green smudges on satellite maps and brain-numbing data graph­ics. How his cubicle smelled not of pine sap or oak leaves but the nothingness of plastic. How he’d devoted his life to forest preservation yet worked in a building utterly bereft of wood. Forest preservation? Harry tightened. Who was he kidding? He was unable to preserve even a single tree. Despite weeks of protest, and Harry was not a man to protest, they had cut down his eastern hemlock. Yesterday, in less than two hours, the only tree visible in the small window at the end of his row—the tree that got him through his day—had been chopped, chipped and hauled away in a black dump truck. More spaces were needed in parking lot A-3. Harry sat in his cubicle all morning, a tree­less forestry bureaucrat.

“You don’t need the lottery,” Beth said.

Harry tried not to look at the neon lottery sign, flashing so brightly at him now it made him squint. He shook his head.

“Nobody quits their job, not these days. They just don’t. It’s a crazy idea.”

She looked into his eyes. “Not crazy if you’re miserable.”

“No, hey, I’m not miserable,” he said quickly. “The job’s mis­erable…but me, I’m, you know, happy.” Except when the job was on his mind. Which was too often these days.

He looked at her looking at him. No, not at him—for him. Beth searching for her Harry. He’d done the same thing this morning, shaving. There he was in the mirror, but only sort of. He touched at the shaving cream on his face, as if it were a thing obscuring the true Harry. He quickly rinsed his face and looked again, but he was still not…himself. Your good looks, Beth would say to him. It’s all about your eyes. They smile, she said. They light your face. The first time they kissed, long ago, she kissed his mouth, and then she kissed the corner of each eye and drew back from him.

Your eyes, she whispered, bring the whole thing together.

Thing? Harry had said.

The Harry thing, she said. You’re a very nice-looking guy—that dark hair with those wavy swoops, that good square chin, those eyebrows like bird wings—but when your eyes smile. Wow. She kissed him again. His whole body smiled.

But this morning in the mirror: lightless eyes, defeated chin, short and swoopless hair—unhappy Harry, the slumped man who dreaded going to work. The Harry Beth saw now, as they stood on Market Street.

“Really, I’m not miserable,” he said miserably. Blinking and squinting, he tried to make his eyes smile.

Now she was really staring at him. Her eyes reflecting his undeniable misery.

“It’s just the job,” he said. When he leaned in to kiss her cheek, he glanced past her to the neon sign.

She turned away.

“Oh come on. It’ll take one second.” He was speaking loudly to make himself heard over the machines. “It’s such a small thing, Beth.”

She spun around. “Small? Hanging everything on a lottery ticket? No, that’s a big thing, Harry. Sweetheart, just quit the For­est Service. We don’t have kids, our mortgage is doable, I’ll work more hours.” Beth was a grant-writing consultant for several city nonprofits, a professional optimist undaunted by long odds.

“You’re not working more hours,” Harry said.

“You’ll work a lot more hours, too.” She smiled at him. “At your new job.”

“At Harry’s Trees,” he said, a hint of a smile in his eyes. Such a great name. So unfussy. So unbureaucratic. In desperate mo­ments at the office he’d lean back in his chair, close his eyes and see the website logo—a big H shaded by the wide canopy of an American beech.

“No,” Beth said. “At Baylor Arboretum. They love you there. And in a few years, with the money we save up, you’ll start Harry’s Trees.”

“Come on. What could they even pay me? Ten bucks an hour? Eight?”

“But it’s a job that would make you happy, Harry. Happy at work. For the first time in—”

The word leaped out of his mouth. “Forever.”

Beth moved close to him. “We can do it. We’ll figure out a way. We’ll do this thing. Together.”

They really would. It was so simple. He could see it. Plant­ing and tending real trees instead of moving them around on a computer screen. Working outdoors, the rich scent of soil and leaves. Tired at the end of the day instead of drained. No more cubicle, no more meetings. And Baylor Arboretum was looking for an arborist. Jim Massinger was about to retire. Harry bright­ened. Then frowned. No benefits, no government pension, no guarantees. “No,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

“Harry—”

“No. Just. Wait here!”

He didn’t mean to shout, but he did. Against the noise of the demolition, against Beth making impossible things seem pos­sible. He glanced over his shoulder as he crossed the street. She was pressed in her red coat against the plywood barrier, as if nailed there by his outburst.

Wait here.

He almost turned back. No, if he hurried, they could make the movie. And she wouldn’t stay mad at him, not for this dumb little thing. Besides. What if he won? Because wasn’t that the strange dreadful excitement he suddenly felt in his gut, the al­most physical premonition all lottery winners described? I knew I was going to win. This time I just knew it. And who hits these jackpots? The taxi driver from Bangladesh, the secretary in the auto parts store, the Forest Service bureaucrat in his cubicle. Yes, the bureaucrat—he wins the lottery this time and every­thing changes like magic.

Harry rushed into the cramped convenience store. A stroke of luck, only two other people in line, an old woman in a mot­tled fur coat and a construction worker.

The woman gathered up a fistful of tickets and turned to the construction worker and said in a sly cigarette wheeze, “Sorry pal, I got the winner right here.”

The construction worker laughed and replied in a thick Philly accent, “You know, that many tickets, you don’t seem so sure of your luck.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” she teased.

Harry swallowed. These people, so casual with millions at stake. The construction worker reached for his wallet and Harry, aping the move, reached for his own. The construction worker pulled out a five and slapped it down on the counter. Harry patted his back pockets. Empty. Oh shit. He’d left his wallet at home.

A flood of people came and got in line behind him. He shoved his hands deep into his coat pockets. Change clinked against his fingernails and he pulled out four quarters. The exact price of a ticket. A sign. His heart thumped.

“Next,” muttered the clerk.

Harry stepped forward. “One, please. One ticket.”

The bored clerk waited a beat and lifted his eyes. “You got some numbers for me or what?”

Harry froze. He felt the press of people behind him, as if there were thousands lined up now. His number, his all-important, make-or-break lucky number. But his mind was blank. His lucky number was a mix of Beth’s birthday, their wedding anniver­sary, his own birthday—but he couldn’t remember any of them.

“You want the computer should pick?” the clerk said.

Harry gripped his forehead and squinted.

“Yo pal,” the clerk said.

Harry looked out the window and saw Beth across the busy street where he’d planted her, going up and down on her toes in the cold. Behind her in the lot, the wrecking ball high up on the demolition crane swung back and forth like a pendulum on a great clock.

“The computer, sure, yes,” Harry breathed.

 The clerk hit a button.

A number came rushing back into Harry’s head. “May 23, 1980. Beth’s birthday is May 23!”

The ticket machine churned out his lottery ticket. The clerk caught it in his hand like a cop catching an abruptly birthed baby. Harry had a sudden, absolutely terrifying sensation as the clerk handed him the flimsy square of paper.

“Oh God,” said the woman behind them.

Clutching his ticket, Harry pivoted and looked at her. She was staring wide-eyed out the window facing Market Street. Every­one in line turned in unison, like startled cattle. Harry caught the last second of it, the warehouse wall tumbling down in slow motion, the shattered bricks scattering like pigeons, the demoli­tion crane buckling. A steel strut the length of a train rail snapped free from the collapsing center of the crane and sailed toward the street, turning end over end like a giant cheerleader’s baton.

What might Beth have seen in her final moments?

The woman with a phone to her ear pushing a stroller? Steam rising from the manhole cover in the middle of the street? Harry in the convenience store clutching his lottery ticket?

The immense rusty length of metal crashed through the ply­wood barrier behind her.

Stumbling out of the store, all Harry could see was rubble, a rising plume of ghostly white dust and, fluttering across the sidewalk, a large torn piece of Beth’s red wool coat.

 

Copyright 2018 by Jon Cohen

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