Grandma’s Numbers on the Store Screen

She would sit at her kitchen table with the slip and a pencil and fill in the bubbles slowly, and she would say each one of them under her breath as she went, her sister first, then herself, then the three boys.

I knew those numbers before I knew my own phone number. Every grandchild did.

For years Grandpa bought the tickets on his way to the elevator. After he passed, my dad did it. After Dad passed, eight years ago, it was a little bit of whoever was going to town.

Then, when my nephew Tanner turned sixteen and got his license, he asked if he could be the one.

I remember that. He was a sweet, gangly kid with his ears sticking out under a seed cap, and he stood in Grandma’s kitchen and said, “I’ll do it, Grandma. Every week. You won’t even have to ask.”

She cried a little. She gave him a hug and two dollars and the slip, and that was that. For six years he picked up her money on Monday or Thursday and brought her the ticket back in the same afternoon.

Tanner is my sister Marlene’s boy. Marlene is five years older than me. She is a nurse’s aide at the care center on the edge of town and has worked the day shift there for twenty years.

Tanner’s dad left when he was four and lives up in Minnesota now. He sends a card at Christmas. So Tanner grew up in Marlene’s little house with the rest of us filling in, Grandma most of all.

He is 22 now. He works at a body shop in Dyersville, sanding and priming fenders, and most of the time he is a good kid who makes bad choices about who his friends are.

Last fall he made the worst one.

A buddy of his let him borrow a pickup to haul a load of firewood, and Tanner took a gravel corner too fast coming home and put it nose first into the ditch. Nobody was hurt. The truck was.

The buddy did not have full coverage. He said Tanner owed him $3,000, and he said it in a way that made Tanner jumpy for months. I heard about it at Thanksgiving, in pieces, the way families hear about things.

I did not know he still owed it. I found that out later.

What I knew on Wednesday was this. I was driving between a knee replacement in Farley and a stroke patient in Epworth, eating a sandwich out of a bag, and the noon news came on the radio station out of Dubuque.

They read the numbers from Tuesday night’s drawing the way they always do, quick and flat, right after the hog prices.

I nearly drove into the ditch myself.

It was her numbers. I said them out loud in the car, one birthday at a time, the way she does, and they matched.

I pulled over by a field of corn stubble and looked it up on my phone to be sure. The state lottery page said the same five numbers. And it said a $4,000 winner had been sold in Dubuque County.

I sat there with my hands on the wheel. Then I called Grandma.

“Did you see your numbers?” I asked her, trying to keep my voice light.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “Tanner called last night. Didn’t hit. He said better luck Friday.”

I did not say anything for a second.

“Did he bring you the ticket?” I asked.