Grandma’s Numbers on the Store Screen

“Not yet. He said he’d drop it by on the weekend. He always does. Why?”

“No reason,” I said. “I’ll stop by after work.”

I finished my afternoon. I do not remember much of it. I helped a retired mail carrier up and down his back steps, and I counted his reps, and the whole time I was doing math in my head.

By the time I got to Grandma’s at four o’clock, the sun was still bright on her front walk and she had a pot of coffee on, because she always does, because somebody might come by.

I sat down at her kitchen table across from the calendar from the funeral home and the picture of Jesus over the stove, and I told her what I heard on the radio.

She listened with her hands folded. She did not interrupt.

When I was done, she said, “Well, he must have read it wrong.”

“Grandma,” I said. “He didn’t read anything. He takes it to the counter and they scan it. The machine plays a little song if it wins. You can’t read it wrong.”

She looked at her hands for a long time.

“Then maybe it’s somebody else’s ticket. Lots of people play birthdays.”

“Maybe,” I said. “That’s what I’d like to find out.”

She knew what I was thinking. She has known me since the day I was born.

“You are not calling anybody,” she said.

That was the first thing out of her mouth. Not the money. Not the lie. Just that.

“Grandma, if he took it, that’s theft. That’s your money.”

“I don’t care whose money it is,” she said. “I’m not having that boy hauled off in a sheriff’s car over two dollars and a piece of paper. I would rather never see a dime. I would rather it went in the river.”

And there it was. People ask me why I didn’t just call the sheriff on Wednesday afternoon. That is why. Because she asked me not to, and because she meant it.

My grandmother would rather lose the money than lose her great-grandson. I could argue with a lot of things, but I could not argue with that.

“All right,” I said. “I won’t call anybody. But will you do one thing for me?”

“What?”

“Come with me in the morning and just look. Just look at the screen at the store. If it’s not your ticket, I’ll drop it and I’ll never say a word.”

She thought about it for a long time. Then she nodded once.

“After the eight o’clock Mass,” she said. “And you buy me a donut.”

I called my supervisor that night and moved my Thursday morning visits to the afternoon. I did not call Marlene. I did not call Tanner. I wanted to be wrong so badly that I did not want to say it out loud to anyone else yet.

I lay awake most of that night anyway.

Thursday came up bright and cold, a March morning with the snow mostly gone from the fields and the ditches running full. There had been a sprinkle just after sunrise, and the pavement had mostly dried.

I picked Grandma up in front of the church right after Mass. She came down the steps with her cane in one hand and her purse on her arm, and she had that clear plastic rain bonnet tied under her chin.

“It’s not raining anymore, Grandma,” I said.

“It might,” she said, and got in the car.