Legacy Lotto

A look at the darker side to winning the lottery

Legacy Lotto

 

 BelAir

 

The motel was just off Interstate 70 in Warrenton, Missouri.

Allan Paisley checked in around eight p.m., laid his cell phone and cigarettes on the bedside table, and sat down on the worn queen bed with the piece of paper in his hand. He looked away from it long enough to light a Camel (the same brand that finished Uncle Charlie off, but the thought hadn’t changed his mind any about smoking . . . and sitting here, with the cigarette in his mouth, examining it, he imagined that was exactly who he looked like—hell, he even felt like him—and Al had seen him doing this enough times to picture the scene without effort).

He turned the paper over in his hands.

I could get away with it.Yes, he could get away with it much like those older couples do that come along every few years, the kind where their grandchildren find fortunes hidden away in their house after they have passed away. One moment they are cleaning and the next they’ve found Granny’s five-hundred-dollar bills behind a family portrait in the living room. The number one rule was to stay away from the media, keep a low profile. Even if something did come out about him, Al didn’t consider himself or Sheila at large for threats, living in a city of some 12,000 people and where the biggest crime issued in the local paper was usually something about minors attaining alcohol.

 

(But sometimes)There was the "curse," for instance. What about that? He had turned this over in his mind too many times to count before. It sounded like a nice helping of bullshit that would come out of a page in a tabloid like Sun, but when somebody saw the numbers and heard the stories of the winner’s children getting to split the fortune instead, it somehow didn’t seem as unimaginable, did it? The number of deaths (divided into coincidental heart attacks, strokes, suicides, murders), stories about past winners giving everything they had away to charity, every last penny in a matter of minutes, or about long-lost brothers or uncles or cousins who were in tight places and really needed help out of them. Kids sneaking through the house with their parents’ .22, while everybody is still sleeping.

 

. . . He had stared at the words blinking across the screen. Digital red words, those seven letters. He felt his chest tighten at that and his heart start pounding against the bars of his ribcage.

Al Paisley looked up once, toward the front counter, and behind it, at the cashier, a woman looking absently out of the glass window.

The podium.

A new readout was blinking at him from the strip of screen. Al stood there a while longer, gripping the edge of the podium (but unaware of it), watching the numbers.

Blink.

Blink.

He stood there until an old station wagon circled around the gas island and moved past the store front and broke him away from thought. He drew in one breath, let it out, (but quietly—he couldn’t let the Cashier of Boredom or anybody else see anything different from the man who had come in five minutes before, in search of a diet Mountain Dew), and grabbed the ticket out with numb fingers and slipped it into his pocket.

His face was hot. He could feel it throbbing, all of the blood rising closer and closer to the surface of his cheeks. But he didn’t think that mattered much. To the woman, it—the redness of his face—only spelled out two things: Summer Visitor and Bad Sunburn.

Another breath.

He was walking up the aisle closest to the door and looked at the cashier, calm, maybe even a small grin spreading over his face. She smiled in return.

It had been a perfect day in all sense of the word. The sun so far remained uncovered, the wind calm. The thunderheads rolling in at the edge of the city were really only a blue line on the horizon still.

And the parking-lot had been restless, everybody trying to get home from work. He made sure to check the sign at the lot entrance, the dreaded GAS PRICES, one-seventeen a barrel for two weeks now, bumping prices at the pump up to $3.39 a gallon.

Al grinned again, coming to his car, and made it drop from his face. He got in, turned the car on (a 2003 Cavalier which was making its fair share of stops here during the week), the radio down to a steady mumble. He looked up at the gas station, mostly just to see if he had become the center of attention for the cashier (or anybody else, for that matter) and saw her gazing out again, but not at him—behind him, at a man filling his Hybrid up, sweat ringed around the armpits of his faded navy blue Red Sox t-shirt, and the sight led him to wonder, as he had more than once before, why did the fattest people drive the smallest cars?

And, on the tops of that, maybe that really isn’t his shirt—or he doesn’t like the Sox—but it’s the only thing in his closet that fits him, maybe.Al took the ticket out of his pocket and laid it on the seat beside him. He was wondering why he was grinning again.

 

Because things like this don’t happen, something had answered.

Maybe to somebody like Uncle Charlie they had happened, but not people like Al Paisley, the kind of people the cashier at the window probably observed every day, knocking fountain drinks and coffee over the back counters, watching them go to their cars, get in, and start to open the bag of Doritos they’ve just bought and the bag explodes all over the front seats of the car.

Those kind of people.

Al Paisley’s sort of people.

Not that he was a klutz. That wasn’t true by any means . . . just not usually lucky. For some people they looked one in the same.

The smile was gone when he looked at the ticket again.

 

 

He had overheard things at work. Men filling their coffee mugs in the staff lounge before getting back to work, as he stood at the Snax machine, eyeing the Zingers his wife warned him to stay away from because his cholesterol was already too high, but really with no interest.

Did you hear who won the Powerball?He had tensed, expecting his own name to follow, or at least something like actually, the guy standing behind us. Name’s Al Paisley. Wasn’t anybody from Missouri, was it?And his own wife. Sheila came home with two or three lottery tickets a week and a scratch-off or two thrown in, announcing that this was it, this was the end of working. Of course, what did he expect out of her? She asked him if he had heard anything in the kitchen, the morning after.

 

 

 

 

 

"No, sure haven’t," and choked a bite of toast down.

The night before he had tucked the ticket away in his coat pocket in the closet and tried to forget about it for a while with a few Ribbons (as much as Sheila would allow him now) in front of the television, and then had lain awake, listening to his wife snore gently next to him, evaluating:

six numbers—26 2 36 42 45 40—equals

180,000,600

Al stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray on the bedside table, next to the phone. It wasn’t as good as he thought it would be—suddenly he didn’t want a smoke anymore.

180,000,600, which equals:

No work. Say goodbye to over-the-phone surveys—how would you rate your service with Ameristar, one being the worst possible rating and ten the best?

Sheila could retire with him from the nursing home, which equals no more watching her tape her swollen ankles at night.

And their children. Carly wouldn’t have to worry about student loans anymore, and Joseph could settle for that house he and Amy had looked at. Jesse would be able to move into a house closer to school in the city, where she always wanted to be, and take that trip to Ireland.

As for his wife . . . he would take her to the Caribbeans like she teased him about. While everybody else is working they would be cruising a half of a mile from the island coast, playing craps and blackjack and eating foods that have five syllables to them.

Another voice spoke up in him.

He decided to call Sheila instead. She would be getting home now.

He dialed his home number and listened to it ring eight times before hanging up and then calling again. He was met with his wife’s voice on the third ring this time, winded as though she had been running to answer the phone.

"Hi, hon, it’s me," he said.

"Hi . . . I was carrying in groceries. Went by the store tonight."

That was right. Carly was coming home this weekend.

Listening to her voice, it felt as if he hadn’t been home in weeks.

"Where’re you, Al? I saw your note, but I haven’t got to read it."

"Oh, uh . . . I’m in Warrenton—"

"Warrenton? What’re you up to, Al?"

"Just read the note . . . I should let you go so you can unpack, all right? I just wanted to make sure you saw my note."

"Al—"

"The note."

He was gentle, much different than his usual booming voice or the rattle box laughter that accompanied it.

"All right, Al," she mocked. "Yes, Al."

"Tell Carly I said hi when she gets there."

"How long—?"

"It’s all on the note. I’ll call you tomorrow."

"Okay."

"Bye, hon."

He put the phone in its cradle again. Probably now she was racing away from the living room telephone to the kitchen refrigerator, where they always left their notes. She would be unpinning it from under the red, white, and blue joke magnet he had picked up at a gas station years ago ("why don’t Americans tell more political jokes? they’re too tired of seeing them in office."), laying it on the counter top.

Al laid back onto the bed with the ticket on his chest.

I had to go to Jeff City—it’s a surprise. I’ll be in Warrenton tonight. Be back tomorrow night.Looking at the ceiling.

 

He had gotten less sleep over the past few days than any other time in his life.

He closed his eyes and listened to the room furnace rumble on.

(sneaking through the house while everybody’s still asleep)

1 in almost 14,000,000 odds.. . . Al opened his eyes.

 

He would wait.

If he couldn’t fall asleep, he would check out of the motel and keep driving until Jefferson City.