|
|||||
Julia Roberts. Tastes differed. Joe wanted to live in Shaker Heights. Tom wanted to live on Beacon Hill. Everyone wanted a Porsche. Charlie had a satisfactory marriage and his kids were doing all right but he was not satisfied with his lot. "There's more to life than this," he would tell his wife on certain occasions. "Like what, hon?" she'd reply, and he'd be forced to say, "Oh, I don't know." Charlie had always daydreamed about having millions and millions of dollars and the woman of his choice. He daydreamed before he fell asleep at night and when he woke up in the morning and during the commercial breaks in the football games, and sometimes he tossed a football around with the kids. After the layoff Joe hadn't worked for a year. He'd had to sell the house in the divorce settlement and had used up most of the equity. He felt betrayed and brooded a lot. He needed those millions of dollars and the woman 
|
of his choice to get his life back on track. Otherwise he thought he might do violence to himself. Tom also daydreamed about winning millions of dollars but had always thought it might come at the track or the card table. He spent a lot of time reading the scratch sheets and looked like a jockey himself. Tom knew the contest was a swindle. All contests were swindles but you entered them anyway. When he was a kid he'd had a post office clerk standing by with his stamp in the air in one of those earliest postmark radio contests and still he'd lost. The experience had soured him. Until then he had believed in his dreams. People won all kinds of prizes in America but the big prizes were hard to get. Everyone wanted them, so the competition was fierce. Some people said they didn't care if they didn't win because there were more important things in life than being rich like honor and decency but  |
||||
