“Four hundred twelve thousand dollars,” Harjit said, and he pressed a paper cup of water into my shaking hands. “Five numbers and the bonus number, the second Saturday of last month. The ticket is signed on the back in blue ink. Graciela Fuentes. Do you sign your tickets, Mrs. Fuentes?” I nodded. Tomás taught me that in 1984. A signed ticket belongs to the name on it, and nobody else can claim it without that person and a photo identification. “Then that is why he came here,” Harjit said. “The man cannot cash it. He needs you. His name is Dale Pruitt. He works for a man in Bakersfield who lends money to people who play on the computer. Ricky owes that man forty eight thousand dollars.”
I looked at the printout until the numbers swam. Our wedding day, June the ninth. the birthday of Daniel, March the second. The birthday of Marisol, October the nineteenth. Tomás, I thought. Even now you are still running errands.
I became angry in a way I had not been angry since 1974, when a landlord tried to keep our deposit. “Harjit, what do I do?” He smiled for the first time that day. “Three weeks I could not sleep. I called the state lottery security office in Fresno. An investigator named Paula Reyes is waiting in my parking lot right now in a gray sedan. She says nobody has to know you were here today. Not your daughter. Not Dale.”
A seventy eight year old widow in Bakersfield exposed her daughter and son in law with the help of a gas station clerk, claimed her four hundred twelve thousand dollar lottery win, and took her house and bedroom back.
Investigator Reyes was a small woman in a blue windbreaker who held my hand with both of hers. She laid out the plan quietly. Dale Pruitt had left his phone number with Harjit. Harjit would call and say Mrs. Fuentes had come in confused and frightened and would sign anything on Monday morning at nine, right here. A tiny recorder would sit behind the calendar from the tire shop. “You do not have to say much,” Reyes told me. “Sit, look tired, and let him talk.” “I am seventy eight years old and I live in a camper,” I said. “Looking tired is the one thing I do well.” She laughed so hard she had to wipe her eyes.
Sunday night I did not sleep. I lay in the camper with the water dripping onto my feet and listened to the bells from the laptop of Ricky. Near midnight Marisol came to the camper door with a plate of rice and beans, the first plate she had brought me in two months. She sat on the edge of the bed and would not look at me. “Mom, I am sorry about the latch. I will fix it.” I wanted to ask, Marisol, where is my ticket? But Reyes had said to wait. So I took her hand and said, “Thank you, mija.” She cried, and I let her believe I did not know why. It was the hardest night of my life.
Monday at nine, Dale Pruitt sat across the little desk, a big man in a golf shirt with a manila folder. He did not shake my hand. He slid out my ticket, the blue ink of my signature on the back, and a claim form. “Your son in law owes my boss money, and this covers it,” he said. “You sign, I drive you to Fresno, and you walk out with one hundred thousand dollars in cash. Everybody goes home happy.” “And the rest?” I asked slowly. “The rest pays what Ricky owes, and what he will owe next year.” “So the ticket is worth four hundred twelve thousand dollars,” I said, “and you want to keep three hundred twelve thousand of it.” He shrugged. “Call it a fee.”
The door opened. Investigator Reyes came in with her badge out and two Kern County deputies behind her. “Mr. Pruitt, that ticket belongs to a seventy eight year old woman, and you just described an extortion scheme on tape.” Dale stood so fast his chair fell over. “Her daughter gave it to me!” “A person who has no claim to a ticket cannot give it away,” Reyes said. “That is not a gift. That is theft.” He put the ticket on the desk as if it were hot. The deputies took him out past the beer cooler. That evening his boss, a man named Vic Lomax, was arrested too, and the online casino took the bells off the internet for good.
On Wednesday Harjit closed the store for the first time in nine years and drove me to Fresno himself, with his mother, Kuljit, in the back seat holding a foil packet of warm parathas for me. At the lottery office a clerk named Mr. Albright checked my identification twice, smiling the whole time. Four hundred twelve thousand dollars, less the federal tax, came to a check for three hundred thirteen thousand one hundred twenty dollars. California takes nothing from lottery winners, he told me. I tried to give Harjit ten thousand dollars in the parking lot. He folded my fingers back over the check. “Come buy your lemons and your ticket from me every Saturday, Mrs. Fuentes. That is payment enough.”
That evening I walked into my own kitchen and set the papers on the table in front of Marisol and Ricky. Eighteen cashed tickets, one thousand six hundred forty dollars in all. The loan papers, with a signature that was not mine. Detective Marcus Hale of the Bakersfield police fraud unit had already found the notary, a man named Ray Ostrander, who admitted he stamped the papers without ever meeting me. The lender voided the sixty three thousand dollar loan in writing nine days later. “Ricky, you have until Friday noon,” I said. “Mom, he told me they would hurt me,” Marisol whispered. “Then you come to me, mija. You never hand what is mine to a man like that.”
Ricky was gone by Thursday night, and his big television went with him. On Friday a flatbed truck hauled the camper off my lawn, and my son Daniel drove down from Sacramento to hang the picture of our wedding back on the living room wall. A crew led by a man named Beto put on a new roof for fourteen thousand eight hundred dollars. Marisol sleeps in her old room now and sees a counselor every Tuesday at the church hall on Union Avenue. Last Saturday I bought two tickets at the gas station, and Harjit checked them on the counter machine while his mother waved. Nothing again. I laughed all the way home.
