Possibilities

Cardham House of Pizza was twenty minutes away by bicycle. It had been raining sporadically throughout the afternoon, and I figured that it would be best to don my yellow raincoat on my journey into town. Just in case.

I peddled toward the center of town, hugging the white line of the breakdown lane. The ground below me glittered with oil slicks and fallen summer leaves. The sky remained dormant, but my shoes were splattered with mud from each puddle I passed over. Moments like these—when my bike exposed me to the elements—I wished I weren’t so afraid of driving a car.

I was already sweating in my raincoat by the time I hit the roundabout. I eased right onto the sidewalk and plopped my feet on the ground by the crosswalk grating. As I pulled the coat off, the checkered lining lingered on my arms—soaked with perspiration—until I gave one final tug. I sighed audibly, disturbing a few pigeons that bobbled awkwardly along a nearby patch of grass. I smiled, scrunched the yellow raincoat into a ball, and threw it in the rear milk crate, on top of the bungee cords. Cardham House of Pizza was only halfway across the roundabout.

The petrichor waned to give way to the smell of pizza. I peddled slowly, swerving around pedestrians, until I reached the next crosswalk. Traffic funneled past me into the roundabout. I glanced around the area while I waited for a break in the cars. The sidewalk that curved left along the road was bleached white from the sun, a stark remnant of the past sandwiched between two darker sections of concrete. Across the median, the fluorescent sign of the salon flashed NAILS at a striking rate. It made me dizzy.

A car horn violently brought my focus back to the immediate surroundings. A man was stopped at the intersection, leaning out of the window of a black SUV.

“Hey! You can go!”

I lifted my right hand in thanks and walked my bike across the crosswalk. The texture of the pavement changed abruptly below me, signaling that I was just inches away from my lunch pickup. I leaned my bike against the wall of the shop, pulled the door open, and heard a bell ring.

“Name?” asked a voice from the kitchen.

“Uh…" I stammered. “Nat—Natalie.”

A comically large white chef’s head bobbled across the kitchen and behind the register. “Two large thin crust”—there was a small man attached to the hat—“one pepperoni and onion, one mushroom and pepper with light sauce, side caesar, breadstick?”

I walked up to the counter. “Yep.”

“$33.37. Cash or card?”

The man held out his hand expectantly. He was shorter than I was but broad like a barrel.

“Cash,” I said. “Hold on.” I fumbled to pull two wrinkly twenty-dollar bills out of the back pocket of my shorts. I slapped the sweaty bills on the counter and they made a noise reminiscent of a wet flipflop hitting cement. “You can keep the change.”

The cash register flew open with a bing. The man slowly peeled the bills away from each other, winced, and slipped them into the drawer as smoothly as he was able. The drawer clicked shut and, as if on cue, two pizza boxes appeared on the shelf behind him. A plastic container and a smaller box were stacked promptly atop. The man turned, grabbed the boxes, and turned back to face me in one fluid movement.

“Thanks,” I said.

I pivoted, stepped forward, and pushed the swinging door open with the side of the pizza boxes. The bell rang behind me as I exited Cardham House of Pizza.

My bicycle remained untouched in my absence. I carefully slid the containers holding the salad and breadsticks into the milk crate I had zip-tied to the front. Then, I turned to the rear milk crate, shuffled the raincoat aside, grabbed the bungee cords, and balanced the pizza boxes carefully atop the crate. I threaded the cords through the open handles of the crate, forming an X across the boxes before hooking the ends of the cords together. Gently, I tugged the pizza boxes to ensure they were secure enough to survive the miles home.

To mirror the flow of traffic, I continued following the counterclockwise curve of the roundabout from the sidewalk. Cars often exited or entered the circle so quickly that I could imagine myself flattened—another casualty of the steel horse—within milliseconds of my tire touching the breakdown lane. With that vision lingering in my mind, I chose to forgo the rules of the road in favor of the sidewalk.

Just beyond the next crosswalk, something in the gutter caught my eye. I slowed my peddling and then swung off the bike, my right foot hitting the ground before my left. The NAILS sign flashed spastically in my periphery. I walked closer to the gutter. My hand clutched the handlebars, steering the bike in line with my ginger steps.

The gutter was flooded, backed up with the recent rainfall. I kneeled down to observe a little more closely, balancing the bike skyward with my arm. There were cigarette butts, leaves, and a few mystery stones caught along the weathered divots in the pavement; this was usual debris—the litter that makes up the fabric of a town center. It was a thick white envelope that was the cause of the clog.

The envelope was soaked through, too wet for even its contents to stick to the adhesive seal along its edge. I opened the envelope and a chunk of it stuck to my thumb like a melted marshmallow. Benjamin Franklin’s face greeted me.

What? I thought.

My heart was beating in my ears. I could feel the sweat starting to form once more.

Wait, I thought. Harvey would know what to do.

I inhaled deeply, stood up, and tossed the soggy envelope into the front milk crate, on top of my caesar salad. Before I let myself think, I jumped onto the bicycle seat and began to ride home.

The ride home felt like a slow-motion blur—a dizzying contraction of time. I kept glancing at the white envelope as I rode. The top of one of the bills poked out, as if to say, “Hello!” I found myself swallowing nervously every time my eye saw the numerals at its corner, wondering why this twenty-minute trek had to seem so much longer than the first.

Almost there, I said to myself, like a chant. Almost there.

I nearly rode past my house, skidding into the bushes to avoid catapulting myself into the neighbors’ neatly manicured lawn. The envelope—along with my salad and breadsticks—flew out ahead of me and into the grass. The money, still soaked with rainwater, barely budged from its papery nest. The box of breadsticks, however, popped open, and the container housing the marinara dipping sauce inside cracked and spilled, creating the scene of a breadstick massacre. The caesar salad survived the accident with no injuries.

I grunted aloud and unstrapped the pizza with shaking hands, glancing back at the cash-filled envelope repeatedly, fearful of an errant crow, child, or passerby, potentially eager to steal my mystery find. The envelope remained untouched until I stacked my cargo—both ruffled and untouched—and headed inside.

Harvey was waiting eagerly at the kitchen table.

“I’m starving, sis,” he said, grabbing the stack from me. “I should’ve just driven to pick that up myself. You took too long.”

“I know.”

He cocked his head and pointed to my arm. Marinara had dripped from the breadsticks onto my skin. “If you get over your car thing,” he continued, “maybe you wouldn’t have to be covered in sauce.” He spotted the envelope atop the stack of boxes. “What is that?”

“I found it,” I stated.

Harvey lifted a bushy brow and then poked the envelope with his index finger. “And why is it wet?”

“Gutter,” I mustered.

“Gutter,” Harvey repeated. “Okay. And what’s in it?”

He was already pulling the envelope ajar as he asked. I watched his eyes widen cartoonishly before locking with mine.

“It’s money,” I said.

“Nat,” he said, “this has to be the most money I’ve ever seen in my life.” He thumbed through the bills, spraying water droplets through the air between us.

“I panicked,” I explained. “What do we do with it?”

“Natalie, my dear,” Harvey cooed lyrically, like an old-time movie star, “we count it.”

He pushed the food across the table with his elbow and began to peel the bills out of the envelope, one by one.

“$20,000,” Harvey said. “You found $20,000.”

I stared at the kitchen table, which was now fanned with cash. “You sure? You don’t want to double check?”

“Nat! I’ve counted this four times. This is the biggest stack of bills I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah,” I replied quietly.

“And it’s all hundreds,” he said. “All one-hundred dollar bills.”

“Where do you think it’s from?” I asked.

Harvey let out a hearty guffaw. “Oh, to be eighteen again… and so naive…”

I stared blankly at him. “So we should turn it in, right?”

Harvey laughed, as if my suggestion was absurd. “No way!”

I sometimes wondered how Harvey and I were crafted from the same DNA. I was meek and cautious, and cognizant of the rules and my safety. Harvey was brash and wild, bubbling over with conspiracy theories, radical ideas, and cologne musk.

“Then what?”

“I have something that can help,” he said. “Be right back.”

He jolted away, back into the basement, moving faster than the sound of his footsteps.

Harvey returned carrying a battered black notebook. Its spine was held together with silver duct tape, and the elastic strap that once closed the cover flat against its pages hung loosely. He stood over the kitchen table, flipping dogeared page after dogeared page, before stopping two-thirds of the way through the book. He slammed the notebook down and pointed to a semi-legible scribble at the top of the page.

“Bucket list,” I read. “In no particular order: go skydiving, own a boat, go to Disneyland, buy a motorcycle…”

“It’s pretty long, Nat,” Harvey interrupted. “But it gives us something to work with.”

I nodded, continuing to read the list to myself. “Why can’t we turn the money in?” I asked.

Harvey picked up the soggy envelope and pointed. “See? No name. No identifying information. Nothing!”

I flipped a page in the notebook. “So what you’re saying is—”

Harvey cut me off. “What I’m saying is that the police won’t be able to locate the proper owner of the money. Anyone who keeps this much cash in an unmarked envelope was probably doing something illegal anyways.”

I took a deep breath. I hated when Harvey made sense.

“Anything pique your interest, sis?” he asked.

“That road trip to the Grand Canyon seems like fun,” I said, slowly warming to the idea of keeping my find. “As long as you drive.”

Harvey grinned widely. “Let’s do it,” he said.

I took a breath and sat down at the kitchen table, elevating my arms away from our moistened fortune. “Can we do one other thing first?”

“What?”

“Can we eat the pizza? It’s getting cold.”

Harvey flopped into the chair next to me. His hair bounced with the momentum. “Sure thing,” he said, pushing my salad and breadsticks aside to open the top pizza box.

“Thanks, bro.”

Harvey took a large bite of pizza—pepperoni and onion—and began to mumble through his chews. “The possibilities are endless,” he said with a swallow. “Just endless.”

We laughed and fantasized between bites, slowly filling our stomaches as our minds overflowed with ideas. Harvey was right: with $20,000, the possibilities for us were endless. Anything could be ahead of us now. And maybe I didn’t have to be afraid of that.