I could hear the television, a morning news program, the volume higher than necessary. The kind of deliberate noise that fills a room when the people in it don’t want to talk to each other or be overheard. I walked to my bedroom, closed the door behind me, and sat down at my small writing desk.
I am not a woman who panics. I have outlived a husband, a brother, a miscarriage, three layoffs during Roland’s working years, a cancer scare in 2015 that turned out to be nothing, and a flood in the basement in 2018 that destroyed 30 years of holiday photographs. Panic is a luxury for people who have not yet learned that it changes nothing.
What changes things is clear thinking followed by deliberate action. So, I thought clearly. What did I know for certain? I knew that the winning lottery ticket had been purchased at Garfield’s pharmacy on the 6th of March on a Thursday in the afternoon during my regular weekly visit. I knew that it was a multi-draw ticket using my specific numbers.
Roland’s birthday in the first sequence, my birthday in the second, our wedding year in the third. I knew that no one else in my household played those numbers because no one else in my household had any reason to. What did I not know? Whether my name was on the back of the ticket? Whether Derek or Cynthia had added their own name before or after mine? Whether they had in fact already contacted the Ohio Lottery Commission.
What could I find out? Everything. if I moved quickly and carefully. I opened my desk drawer and found the small leather address book I had kept for 40 years, its spine soft from handling. I found the number for James Whitmore, an attorney who had handled Roland’s estate and who had over the years become something closer to a trusted adviser than a professional contact.
I had not called James in 2 years. He answered on the third ring. I explained the situation concisely, the way Roland had always told me to explain things to lawyers. Facts first, feelings never. James was quiet for a moment and then said something that I wrote down in the margin of my address book because I knew I would need to remember it.
Margaret, he said, ‘The first thing we need to establish is the chain of custody of that ticket. The second thing is your purchase history at that pharmacy. If you’ve been buying from the same location on the same day with the same numbers for 11 years, we can establish a pattern that significantly supports your claim.
Do not let them leave the house with that ticket, and do not confront them directly again until I’ve made some calls.’ I told him I understood. I hung up and sat for a moment in the quiet of my bedroom with Roland’s old cardigan folded on the chair in the corner and the smell of the house around me.
Wood and old books and something faintly floral that had lived in the walls so long it had become part of the structure. My house, Roland’s porch, my hydrangeas, still trying to write themselves where the suitcase had landed. I was afraid. I want to be honest about that. I was 64 years of age in a house that was suddenly not entirely mine, with a son I was no longer sure I recognized, and a sum of money so large that it had apparently been enough to rewrite everything he thought about me about family, about decency. But fear, I have
learned, is not the opposite of courage. It is the condition under which courage operates. I opened my bedroom door. I walked to the kitchen. Derek and Cynthia were at the table now, both of them looking at Dererick’s phone, and they looked up when I came in with the particular carefulness of people who have been discussing someone and are now pretending they haven’t.
