Finnsy almost threw away the winning ticket with her milk receipt. The bodega clerk caught her wrist before she dropped it into the bin, pulled the ticket from between her fingers, and checked the numbers against the television above the cigarettes. Then he locked the front door, which frightened her more than his sudden shouting.
Now she occupied a plastic chair at the Metropolitan Food Recovery Center, trying to remember whether she owned a frying pan. A camera crew was coming to interview her. Somewhere beyond the reception doors, ten pounds of meat belonged to her, an amount she couldn’t picture without imagining something extravagant and faintly criminal, like ten pounds of jewelry.
“Have you decided what you’re making?”
The man beside her held his ticket flat against his knee. He wore a clean blue shirt with one cuff folded higher than the other, and he kept pressing the folded cuff down as though its failure embarrassed him.
“I haven’t decided whether I remember how to cook it,” Finnsy said. “I was thinking I could telephone my mother and let her tell me everything I’m doing wrong.”
“My mother would travel here to do it in person.”
She laughed, and his hands relaxed.
He introduced himself as Mick McCaffrey, although everyone called him Mooch. The nickname required an explanation involving an older brother, a stolen sandwich, and a family’s refusal to allow a person to recover from anything that happened before kindergarten. Finnsy offered her own nickname in exchange and enjoyed the way he tried it aloud before asking whether he could use it.
“What did you win?” she asked.
“Reserve winner. They telephoned this morning and told me to come down.”
“Does that mean you get mine if I don’t show up?”
“I was hoping to make a better first impression than that.”
Across the room, a receptionist raised her eyes from her monitor. Mooch lowered his voice, and Finnsy leaned closer to hear him.
Three years earlier, contaminated feed entered a distribution network supplying most of the country’s commercial livestock. By the time authorities understood the extent of the contamination, slaughterhouses were closing and refrigerated trucks were being stopped on highways. Finnsy remembered watching a neighbor pour beef stock through a sieve because he couldn’t bear to throw it away. She remembered the smell from the dumpsters behind the supermarket.
The Recovery Centers appeared eighteen months later. Their advertisements showed white laboratories, healthy cells dividing beneath microscopes, and smiling families passing bowls across dinner tables. Production remained limited, the advertisements explained. The lottery ensured fair access while the technology developed.
Finnsy bought her ticket because the bodega clerk couldn’t break a twenty.
Mooch bought his every Friday.
“My father used to cook on Sundays,” he said. “Whatever else went wrong that week, there was dinner. I suppose I wanted to do that again.”
“For your father?”
“He died before the shortage.”
He smoothed the ticket against his knee. Finnsy could have offered sympathy, but something in his face suggested he regretted making the conversation sad.
“Then you’ll have to cook for somebody else,” she said.
He glanced at her, cautiously enough that she almost laughed again.
“I could do that.”
A woman in a cream jacket entered reception and asked Finnsy to accompany her. The camera crew was ready, and there were a few photographs to take before the presentation. When Finnsy rose, Mooch stood with her.
“Would you have dinner with me?” he asked. “You can bring a suspiciously small contribution from your winnings. I’ll supply everything else.”
“What if you’re a terrible cook?”
“You can telephone your mother.”
Finnsy took his phone and entered her number. He called it immediately, and she saved him as Mooch, resisting the ridiculous impulse to add a heart.
“Friday,” she said. “And I expect potatoes.”
The woman in the cream jacket smiled at them with professional patience. Finnsy followed her through the reception doors, already considering which of her friends could be trusted to hear about this without turning dinner into an engagement.
The interview took longer than she expected. They filmed her entering a room twice, asked her to repeat what winning meant to her, and suggested she mention the importance of scientific progress. She complied because ten pounds of meat seemed worth a little foolishness, although she refused to say the lottery changed her life.
During a pause, she heard wheels rattling along the corridor outside.
Then Mooch’s voice, raised in protest.
She turned toward the door.
The woman adjusted Finnsy’s collar, freeing a strand of hair caught beneath it. “They’re taking our reserve winner through the production wing. People always have questions when they see the equipment.”
“What sort of equipment?”
“Harvesting and processing. Would you mind holding the ticket a little higher?”
By the time they finished, Finnsy’s smile hurt.
Her prize arrived in an insulated carrier, divided into neat vacuum-packed portions. She lifted it with both hands while a photographer crouched to find an angle that included the Recovery Center emblem behind her.
Mooch wasn’t in reception.
The woman checked with someone through her earpiece, then told Finnsy he completed his visit and left. Finnsy sent him a message about Friday, followed by another warning that she would eat all ten pounds herself if he failed to produce acceptable potatoes.
Outside, she turned back for a final look through the glass doors. His chair was empty. She wished she’d asked where he lived.
In the processing wing, a technician retrieved a phone from the pocket of a clean blue shirt. Its screen lit beneath his hand.
You still owe me dinner.
He powered it off and placed it beside a wallet, keys, and a folded reserve ticket. Through the partition, a supervisor watched the delivery vehicle carry Finnsy and her winnings toward the gate.
“Did she ask about him?”
“Twice,” the woman in the cream jacket said.
The supervisor removed his glasses and pressed the bridge of his nose. They were supposed to keep the winners apart. He would have to speak to reception again.
On the cutting table behind him, one of Mooch’s hands hung over the edge beneath a sheet. The technician tucked it back under before wheeling him toward the grinder.
At home, Finnsy cleared a shelf in her refrigerator and set aside two portions for Friday. She photographed them and sent the picture to his phone.
Then she found her frying pan, called her mother, and asked how long a good steak should rest.
© 2021 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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