One's Company

One’s
Company

a novel

Ashley
Hutson

For Brian George Hose, my oldest and dearest

The dream that I see makes me what I am.

—Walter Marks, “I’ve Gotta Be Me”

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Acknowledgments

One

After I won the lottery, a lot of strangers showed up to tell me what a piece of trash I was. Then they would ask me for money. Neighbors known and unknown to me, people I used to see at the market, old high school classmates who’d never given me the time of day—they all felt compelled to “just say hi.”

I knew they hated me because most people hate unglamorous luck. That’s what winning money with a mindless number is, unearned and uninherited wealth, and each new arrival acted like something had been stolen from them. “It’s so nice that someone like you won the lottery, Bonnie,” they’d say in a half-joking tone verging on a sneer. “Want to take me out to dinner?” They knew how to keep it subtle. Some of them even called me Bon Bon, an overfamiliar nickname I hadn’t heard since childhood, which told me their hatred had ripened into the sourest grape on the vine.

These strangers swarmed onto my tiny porch, undeterred by the sunken corner that had rotted through, and knocked on my door one by one, jerking me out of the deep planning and dreaming I was absorbed in. For this, I wished them dead. But I tried to be polite. Each time I opened the door I told myself that this was the sacrifice that was required. One of many to come, I suspected.

Even when the cameras and news teams came to gawk and rut up the scabby grass in front of my trailer, I stayed cool. What does it feel like to win so much money? they’d say. What will you be doing with it all? Reporters loved asking those types of questions when they caught me coming out my front door. One of them even asked, Are you planning on investing in your community? They’d looked around at my shit neighborhood and expected me to soak in it forever, I guess.

I told them that I didn’t know what I would do with the money. Or I answered the way I knew I was supposed to answer—that I was planning on saving it. I’d say it in a really earnest voice, as if the mere thought of saving all that beautiful cash was turning me into a realer, wiser adult as I stood there.

But my days of scrimping and saving were over. I had big ideas, was planning big moves. My fate had been brewing long before I walked a mile to where LOTTO BEER CIGS glowed in neon letters on the gas station door, long before I handed over my money to the pimply cashier and my future was handed back.