The Little Black Book

His hand wavered as he filled in the small bubbles, his pen jumping and dancing outside the bleeding ink rings, filling in those numbers. The ones that had kept him awake and thinking, ruminating, debating, and pretty much everything for the better part of a month. “4,” “32,” “19,” “11,” “40,” and finally, “6.” He surveyed, making sure everything was correct. It was, and when he finished, he felt an odd sense of relief, of ease.

The numbers had been pulsing through his mind since he’d first laid eyes on them, but now they seemed to have released him from their hold, taking place on the small gridded slip of card paper before him that he then flipped and passed to the cashier, an old acquaintance named Bob who’d worked the small bodega for the past 15 years, often offering unsolicited advice and steep discounts on cigarettes to those who would listen. Bob squinted up at him in skepticism. “You don’t often play the numbers, do yah?” He shook his head, hoping to stave off further questions, and passed two crinkled bills self-consciously across the Formica countertop. He delicately grasped the thin, thermal paper between two sweaty thumbs, backed away from the counter, and nodded in Bob’s direction while simultaneously avoiding his gaze. He leaned against the metal door guard until it swung open, and the attached bell tinkled wildly, signaling his departure into the dusty, sunny haze of an atypical Tuesday.

***

A month prior, it had been an ordinary day until it wasn’t. Soft strips of sunlight rippled across the dusty floorboards, and the click of the stove rang out, waking the dog from his morning nap and making him twitch. Soft flames licked the bottom of the worn tin kettle, and he waited for the familiar whistle and burble of hot water. It was a tea day, and he’d woken up with a tight chest. Coffee never seemed to untangle the knot under his ribcage, only tighten it and cause him panic. His mind wandered to the events of the day — his schedule was empty, as per usual, but he always hoped for spontaneous plans that would break up the monotony that stretched out like the dry grasses that billowed out before him through the cracked glass window.

Breakfast was a sad bowl of cardboard-colored O’s, floating in slightly dodgy two percent. The tea, twice sipped, and abandoned, sat vacant and slightly steamy with a slick of oily cream across the still top. He stood by the window, fingers laced through belt loops, staring out at the leaf-less horizon, ruminating — mostly on Maggie, but of all things life and loss.

Maggie had left about three months ago, quickly and quietly, not in the cover of night but in the dawn of a new day, which had hurt almost more. With her had gone Bennie, the watchful-eyed cat, his best cast iron skillet, and most of the savings from the under-the-bed lockbox, a compilation of nearly ten years of savings on which he’d been increasingly reliant as the rheumatic joints and labored breathing slowed him down and kept him from the shop as often as he’d like. Plus, her leaving — and everyone had loved her — had cast suspicions and doubts on him, making customer visits to his store less frequent. A once full-flowing hose had slowed to a trickle of change, and it was a pattern he was trying very hard not to think about.

There were a lot of things he tried to put out of his mind — the long-due mortgage bill, the ache in his hips that made it hard to straighten and stretch, the fast-approaching long, cold nights, and the relative emptiness of the wood filler. With little else to do, he decided to purge the living room of a few battered and water-stained cardboard boxes, the remnants of Maggie’s things, and his father’s few possessions. He paused as he remembered the discarded remnants of people’s lives that they’d entrusted to the living room. The living room had been treated like a glorified recycling center purely because he had felt obligated to oblige them by holding onto their memories, even though they never decided to make new ones with him.

First up was a box from his father’s youth — about a century ago, the old man would have joked. But he was long gone, and his boxes represented a heaviness that his son could no longer experience when there was so little other light. So, he pulled out his pocket knife, flipped open the rusty blade, and slit the yellowing tape that bound two flaps destined to spring far apart. They did. Dust erupted and swirled into the room’s sky — a mediocre and quiet firework show for a poor man — and then he found the photos. There were heaps of them — originally black and white, but now as yellowed and crackling as the box itself. They displayed familiar faces and some unfamiliar, smiling, washed out, and unaware of how quickly their earthly glow would fade, leaving only smiling countenances in a box to mark their time on earth. His father had lived in the past while maintaining obsession with the future; he sought out glimpses of what life might be in the generations after he turned to ash.

Next was a collection of old books, mostly poetry, that his father considered as sacred as the family bible. And as the man flipped through the old pages, he could almost hear his father’s thin, reedy voice reading out Wadsworth into the late hours of the night with only candlelight and the flickering wooden walls. He pressed on — through layers of nostalgic detritus — until he reached the sad, soggy bottom. He sighed and started to sort through the piles of paper and photos, fingering the dulled edges and almost hoping for a paper cut to distract him from the task at hand.

He sorted the poetry anthology, the photos into neat blocks, the old papers, and formerly necessary documents: deeds, letters, notes. He sorted it all until he noticed a small and nondescript black leather book lurking in the corners of the cardboard box. He plucked it out and brushed off a layer of dust. Tiny gold brackets engulfed the corners, keeping it looking new, while a thin satin ribbon marked an undiscovered page. He opened it up to the first leaf, his father’s writing leaping out at him, bequeathing the small book to him. The older man had always known that his son was disorganized and figured that a notebook would keep him on track — or perhaps he’d wish that his son would become a poet, like the Wadsworth he so loved.

The intended recipient flipped through the book, nearly 30 years after the date of his father's addressed note until he got to the ribbon-marked page. The book was empty, save for the middle pages, on which was written a hyphenated, six-segment number: 04-32-19-11-40-06. No rhyme or reason why. The man figured it was a safe deposit box combination or a small lock combo. But it caught his attention. Those numbers seemed familiar and round and satisfying, and he felt an odd pull to them. But something also bothered him. His father was nothing, if not deliberate, intentional, and sometimes a bit cryptic, as contradictory as that seems. He was obsessed with luck and forward-thinking always, and to write a note in the smack-dab middle of the book could have only dictated one thing: it was a deliberate and pointed message. His son settled back on his heels, smooth leather book in hand, thinking carefully about the meaning of the numerical message.

***

Weeks passed, lock combinations tried, the code endlessly researched, and it had all yielded nothing. And yet, the more dead ends he encountered, the more motivated he had felt about figuring it all out. And so, his trip to Bob’s bodega and his singularly odd purchase of a lottery ticket had seemed out of place to the store’s cashier. He had watched the man shuffle in and out for nearly two decades, buying slim sticks of jerky or pints of milk near the expiration date, but never a cent on a gamble. But to the man, it was the last semblance of an action he could take to make these numbers — his father’s numbers — make sense. And so he gripped the ticket as he made his way home on that Tuesday and spent a lot of time trying not to think about the ticket drawing, to be held later that night at a time where he was usually asleep. He had not slept well in the past month, so he was hoping for a little closure, or at the very least some shut-eye, on this evening in particular.

By late afternoon, he could not help but expedite his evening routine. He fed the dog, giving him a little dollop of turkey fat from the roast bits he had made the night before. He opened a beer and tongued the bitter foam, which settled his nerves a touch, and he flipped on his television in anticipation of the numbers drawing. The sun seemed to set more slowly than usual, extending its warm rosy fingers over the horizon line like a slow-motion wave. Usually, he ached when the warm light turned blue in his living room, but today, he relished it.

As the seconds ticked on, time seemed to slow down, and he started to get sweaty behind the collar. The cold light of the tv spilled into the dimly lit living room, and finally, at 11 pm, he turned up the volume, modulated by soft static. Dressed in a suit with slicked-back hair, the lottery reader looked stern and earnest, as always. He would be announcing the $20,000 jackpot, he noted, the winning pool having gone down a bit since some lucky fool had happened to win last month. He cleared his throat, gazed right through the screen, and turned toward the ball picker that shot, alternately, five balls up a clear tube in quick succession with a blast of air.

“4,” “32,” “19,” “11,” “40,” and finally, “6.”

There was a deafening silence, and then all the man could hear was the blood rushing through his ears. He clutched the black notebook between his palms like a prayer book. The hairs stood up on the back of his neck, and he could almost hear his father’s thin, reedy laugh because he had known, somehow, the sequence of those magical numbers. And from somewhere north, a gust of wind blew — although there was not much to rustle and dislodge in that spare landscape — shaking the house to its bones as he sat in stunned, dumb silence. He knew that his luck had changed.