The woman in the doorway was Charlene Boudreaux, who worked the bakery counter beside me at Brookshire for eleven years. She had shared my lunch table. She had cried with me at the funeral of my mother. She was holding a plate of hushpuppies, and she was wearing the pearl earrings that Rick told me, last Christmas, he had lost in the car. She did not drop the plate. She set it on the doorframe, very carefully, and said, “Darlene, I can explain.”
I said I did not need her to explain. I had read the text. A one bedroom, first month paid. I only needed her to say it out loud in front of his mother, so nobody could ever say that Darlene misunderstood. Charlene looked at Rick. Rick looked at the grass. Then she said quietly that it had been two years, and that Rick promised he was leaving me anyway. The whole backyard heard it. A child asked his mama what the lady meant.
Mrs. Gaspard put down her fork. She is seventy nine years old, and she raised four sons in a house with a tin roof. She said, “Rick Gaspard, you stood up in this yard, in front of your family, and you lied about money that belonged to your wife.” Rick said, “Mama, I was going to share it.” She said, “With who?” He had no answer. Nobody in that yard had an answer.
I held up the ticket and let them read the back once more. Darlene Marie Gaspard, in blue ink. I told them I signed it the night he brought it home, and that in Louisiana the lottery pays the person whose name is on the back, and nobody else. I told them I had called the lottery office in Shreveport that week and a lady there had checked it twice. The prize was mine, and only mine. It was never his to give.
A woman who signs her name in small blue letters on the back of a plain card can change the ending of a whole family.
Rick stepped down off the lawn chair with the envelopes still in his hand. I said, “Honey, those checks are no good. You have no money to write them with.” There was a small, nervous laugh from the back, and then it died. One by one, his brothers walked out to their trucks. The wife of Russell stayed behind to hug me. She said she was sorry for the part her husband played, and that she was driving to her sister in Lafayette in the morning to think.
I claimed the prize on Tuesday at the office in Shreveport, with my sister Gail beside me. After taxes it came to a little over thirty six thousand dollars. They handed me a check, a real one with my name on it. I held it in the parking lot for a long time. It was the first time in thirty four years I could say, without anyone laughing, that this one was mine.
I saw a lawyer that same afternoon, and Rick was served the next week. He came home that night with his duffel bag and asked to talk. I let him talk for ten minutes at the kitchen table. Then I slid a key across to him. “You already have an apartment,” I said. “Bossier, one bedroom. First month is paid.” He opened his mouth. Then he picked up the bag and left, and for the first time in my marriage the house was quiet in a way I liked.
Mrs. Gaspard came to my door on Sunday with a pound cake. She cried and said she was ashamed of how she had talked about me for years, that I had never won anything but her son. I told her that was true, and that I had also won plenty of other things in thirty four years, mostly by outlasting people who thought I would not. She laughed and wiped her face. I let her in. She is not Rick. She is a woman fooled by her own son, and I know that feeling.
I spent the money carefully. I paid off my car. I paid for a new roof. I bought Mrs. Gaspard the recliner she had been promised at church, because she had done nothing wrong, and she cried again when it was delivered. I put twenty thousand dollars into a savings account at the credit union in my name alone, a number I look at every morning over my coffee.
And I took Gail to Gulf Shores for a week, our first trip together since we were girls. We rented a little condo with a balcony. We ate shrimp until we groaned. On the last night we walked the beach with our shoes in our hands, and Gail asked if I was sad. I said, “No. I feel like I held a door shut for thirty four years, and someone finally let me go.”
The next Friday after work, I stopped at the Circle K on Youree Drive and bought a scratch off, like always. Two dollars. I scratched it in the car, and it was nothing. I laughed all the way home. Some luck you only get once, and it was never in the ticket.
