Grandma’s Numbers on the Store Screen

Dorcas Wille turned the lottery screen around on its little swivel so my grandmother could see it, and then she pointed at one line with one finger.

“There,” Dorcas said. “Wednesday morning, 7:12. Checked right here at this counter. Four thousand dollars.”

Grandma leaned in close. She is 87 and she does not see as well as she pretends to, so she leaned in until the clear plastic rain bonnet over her white hair almost touched the glass.

“That’s mine,” she said. Her voice was very small. “Those are my numbers.”

I had my hand under her elbow. I could feel her arm shaking through the sleeve of her camel wool coat, the good one she wears to Mass and to the clinic and nowhere else.

Then she put her other hand over her mouth and stood there in the bright morning light from the big front windows, looking at a screen that told her the truth her grandson would not.

I want to tell you how we got to that counter, because it was not a straight road, and because my grandmother is the kind of woman people should know about.

My name is Jodie Kroll. I am 39, and I am a physical therapy assistant for a home health outfit that covers most of Dubuque County, the hilly northeast corner of Iowa.

I spend my days in farmhouse kitchens and small-town living rooms, helping people in their seventies and eighties get up out of chairs and walk to their mailboxes again after a hip or a fall.

So I know old people. I know how proud they are, and how they hide things, and how one bad month can take away a life they spent sixty years building.

My grandmother is Philomena Kroll. Everyone in town calls her Phil, except the priest, who calls her Philomena, and her grandchildren, who call her Grandma.

She has been a widow for nineteen years. Grandpa farmed a quarter section north of town, and when he passed she sold the cows, rented out the ground and moved into a little white house two blocks off Main.

She does not drive anymore. She gave up her keys herself, three winters ago, after she slid through a stop sign on ice and nobody got hurt. She said once was a warning and twice would be a sin.

So she walks where she can, and the rest of us drive her where she can’t. Church on Sunday. The clinic. The fish fry at the Legion hall on Fridays in Lent.

And every week, for thirty years, she has played the same five numbers.

They are not lucky numbers. They are birthdays. They are the days of the month that she and her sister Gertie and their three brothers were born, the five children of a dairy farmer up near the Minnesota line.

Gertie was the oldest. She was the one who wrote letters. When she married and moved to Wisconsin, she wrote Grandma every single week for forty years, and Grandma kept every one of them in a shoebox.

Gertie died in 1996. That spring, Grandma bought her first lottery ticket with those five birthdays on it, and she has never once played anything else.

“It’s not about winning,” she told me once, when I was maybe ten and asked why she wasted two dollars a week. “It’s so I say their names every Tuesday and every Friday. That’s all.”