The Great Sock Drawer Gambit

Burt Aldous, fifty-four years old and retired from the meat counter he still missed, had hidden his winning lottery ticket in the sock drawer, which in hindsight was the single worst decision of his life, and Burt had made some decisions in his time, including a second marriage proposal delivered over a bin of marked-down chuck roasts. The ticket was worth four million dollars, or it had been on Tuesday, and he had tucked it into the back of the drawer because that was where Dottie, his late wife, had hidden everything worth hiding, and Burt's brain had apparently decided that grief was best processed through imitation. The problem, and he was getting to the problem, was that Marjorie had reorganized the sock drawer, and then she had reorganized it again, and somewhere in all that tidying the ticket had migrated to a place Burt could not find, and a man who cannot find four million dollars tends to spend his mornings pawing through hosiery like a raccoon in a laundry hamper.

He had told nobody about the ticket, which was sensible, and he had also failed to sign the back of it, which was not, and his son Randy had explained the difference to him twice over the phone with the patience of a man who loved his father but did not enjoy him. "Dad, sign the ticket. That's it. That's the entire advice," Randy had said, thirty-two years old and already tired in a way that suggested he expected to be tired forever. Burt had meant to sign it. He had meant to sign it the way he had meant to clean the gutters since 2019, meaning he thought about it while eating cheese and then did something else.

Marjorie was fifty-three, a widow herself, sharp-tongued and practical in the way of women who have buried a husband and therefore find nothing frightening anymore, and she had moved in with Burt in the spring after a courtship conducted mostly at the diner and over each other's fences. They were engaged, technically, because Burt had proposed with a ring borrowed from his sister and she had laughed for a full minute and then said yes anyway, which both of them agreed was an accurate summary of their entire relationship.

The morning went the way their mornings went, which meant Burt burned the first pancake, Marjorie ate the first pancake anyway out of what she claimed was love and what Burt suspected was spite, and the coffee came out of the machine tasting faintly of the vanilla candle Marjorie had once stored above it.

"You're doing the face," Marjorie said, pointing her fork at him. She was in her robe, gray hair still damp, reading the back of a cereal box with more attention than she gave most novels.

"What face?"

"The face you make when you've done something dumb and you're deciding whether to tell me. You did it when you dented the car. You did it when you bought a second grill."

"I did not buy a second grill," Burt said, and Marjorie raised one eyebrow with the precision of a woman who had raised three children and a husband. "I bought a smoker. It's a different appliance category entirely."

"Uh huh." She went back to the cereal box. "There's a sock drawer thing, isn't there. You've been hovering near the dresser like a moth for two days."

Burt considered lying, which he was bad at, and telling the truth, which felt like juggling eggs on a bus. "There may be some paperwork in there I need," he said, which was true in the way that most of his statements were true, technically and uselessly.

"Then look in the drawer, Burt. It's your dresser."

The trouble was that the ashes were also part of this, though Marjorie didn't know that yet, and Burt was not ready for that conversation, because it went like this: Dottie had died fourteen months ago, there had been a small urn and a larger funeral and a niece who cried into the potato salad, and Burt had kept a portion of her ashes in a vintage sock, one of her old striped wool ones, on the top shelf of the closet, because Dottie had loved those socks and Burt was a sentimental man and it had seemed right at the time. Then last Saturday, in a fit of ambition he still could not explain, Burt had vacuumed the closet, and the vacuum had found the sock, and Burt had emptied the canister into the outdoor bin before he noticed what the sock was, and that was the whole of it, and Burt had spent the following days being extremely polite to the outdoor bin, which was now the final resting place of a woman who had once organized his entire life with a label maker.

He had not gotten the ticket wet, at least, which was more than could be said for Dottie.

The drive to work took nineteen minutes and Burt spent all of them rehearsing ways to search his own dresser without his fiancée noticing, which was difficult because Marjorie noticed everything, including the time he'd cried at a dog food commercial, which she brought up at parties. He worked at Hollis and Sons Box Manufacturing, which had no sons and a Hollis who was mostly a rumor, and Burt did the shipping paperwork because he was tidy with numbers and untidy with everything else, a division of labor his boss appreciated.

His boss was Gerald Prue, fifty-eight years old, a man who had once written up an employee for humming, and who ran the factory floor the way a man runs a submarine, in enforced quiet and with constant low-grade dread. "Aldous," Gerald said that morning, appearing at Burt's desk at 8:04 exactly. "The Kessler order. Is it done."

"It's done, Gerald."

"Is it done done, or done the way you did it in March."

"It's done done," Burt said, and Gerald nodded once, satisfied, and moved off down the aisle like a heron that had decided to be disappointed elsewhere.

The new intern started that same week, a young woman named Cass Delaney, twenty-four years old, doing a business program placement, and she was friendly in a way that made the older men on the floor behave like windows that needed cleaning. She flirted the way some people hummed, without meaning anything by it, and Burt, being fifty-four and engaged and mostly sensible, treated her like a niece of a friend, cordial and slightly deaf.

The trouble came at lunch. Burt had developed the habit of eating at his desk because the break room microwave had an odor he declined to investigate, and at 12:20 Cass came by with a question about the filing system, and she leaned over his desk to point at the screen, and at that exact moment Burt's phone, which was propped against his coffee mug because he'd been reading about vacuum canister capacities, took a photograph. Burt did not know his phone did that. Apparently it had a feature. The phone made a small shutter sound, and Cass straightened up, and they both looked at the phone, and the phone displayed a photograph of Cass from an angle that was mostly ceiling but partly not ceiling, and the break room went very quiet in Burt's head even though it was loud in actual fact.

"Oh, heck," Burt said. "That's not. I wasn't. The phone does that, apparently, it has a setting, I didn't take a picture of you, Cass, I want you to know that."

Cass looked at the photo, then at Burt, and to her credit she did not scream or call Gerald. "Delete it," she said. "Right now, in front of me!"

Burt deleted it, in front of her, and then held the phone up like a man showing a cleared customs form. "Deleted. Gone. I don't even know how it happened, there's a setting on this thing that takes pictures when it hears, I don't know, noise. Or guilt."

"Okay." She seemed to believe him, mostly, and Burt understood that mostly was the best he was