The Back of the Ticket
At 2:47 on a Friday afternoon in September, my cell phone rang.
I was sitting on my front porch in Dalton, Georgia. In the white wicker rocker my mother left me. With a glass of iced tea sweating in my hand and my bare feet up on the railing.
I’d just watered the tomatoes. The Cherokee Purples were coming in late this year. Fat and dark and splitting at the tops the way they do when you water them too much after a dry spell.
The phone buzzed on the little table next to me.
A 404 number. Atlanta.
I let it ring twice.
Then I picked it up.
“Is this Patricia Dunn?”
A woman’s voice. Middle-aged. Careful. The voice of someone who’d been trained to say difficult things calmly.
“It is,” I said.
She cleared her throat.
“Mrs. Dunn,” she said. “My name is Linda Holloway. I’m with the Georgia Lottery Claims Center on Centennial Olympic Park Drive. Your husband is here. He’s trying to claim a winning ticket.”
“I thought he might be,” I said.
There was a pause.
A tense one.
I could hear something in the background. Muffled. A man’s voice. Loud. Getting louder.
“Ma’am,” Linda said. “We have a problem with the back of this ticket.”
I took a sip of my iced tea.
“It’s already been signed,” Linda said. “And the signature doesn’t match his ID.”
In the background, I could hear Gary.
Shouting.
That’s my wife’s handwriting! She signs everything! It’s a joint ticket! We’re married! Thirty-four years!
I smiled to myself.
I set my glass down on the table.
“No, Linda,” I said. “I don’t imagine it would.”
Because nineteen years ago, on the very first Friday I ever bought a lottery ticket, I made myself a promise.
And Gary was about to find out exactly what I’d been writing on the back of every single one.
But I need to go back.
To the pineapple magnet.
And to my mother.
My name is Patricia Ann Dunn. Everybody calls me Patty. I’m fifty-eight years old.
I’ve lived in Dalton, Georgia, my whole life. The carpet capital of the world. Ninety percent of the carpet in America is made within sixty-five miles of my front porch. My father worked at Shaw Industries for thirty-one years. My mother worked at Mohawk for twenty-six. Everybody’s daddy worked at a carpet mill.
I married Gary Dunn when I was twenty-four.
He was twenty-seven. A forklift driver at the Shaw plant on Industrial Boulevard. He had a red Chevy pickup and a mustache and he made me laugh at a church fish fry in 1990 by doing an impression of our pastor that was so good the pastor laughed too.
He asked me to marry him six months later. In the parking lot of the Dairy Queen on Walnut Avenue. With a ring from Kmart.
I said yes.
We had three children.
Robby. Born in 1992. He’s thirty-three now. A lineman for Georgia Power. Married. Two little girls.
Tessa. Born in 1995. Thirty now. A nurse at Hamilton Medical Center. Right here in Dalton. Single. A cat named Biscuit.
And Kyle. Born in 1999. Twenty-six. Our baby. He’s in the Army. Stationed at Fort Stewart, down by Savannah.
I raised them.
I want to be honest about that. Gary was there. Gary lived in the house. Gary went to some of the ballgames.
But I raised them.
I packed the lunches. I drove the carpools. I sat up with the fevers. I went to every parent-teacher conference at Westside Elementary and Dalton Middle and Dalton High. I signed every permission slip. I made every Halloween costume. I cried at every graduation.
Gary went to work. Came home. Ate dinner. Watched TV. Went to bed. Went fishing on Saturdays at Carters Lake. Went to the Moose Lodge on Thursday nights.
That was the deal.
I didn’t know it was a deal. I thought it was just how things were.
I worked too.
Part-time. When the kids were small. Full-time once Kyle started kindergarten.
At the front desk of the Walker County Health Department. Twenty-two years. Checking people in. Answering phones. Scheduling immunizations.
I made twenty-eight thousand dollars a year when I retired.
Gary made more. He got promoted. Shift supervisor. Then warehouse manager.
He managed the money.
That was the deal too.
My paycheck went into the joint account. Gary’s paycheck went into the joint account. Gary paid the bills.
Every Sunday night, he gave me cash.
Two hundred dollars.
For groceries. For gas. For whatever the kids needed that week.
If I needed more, I asked.
He usually said no.
Patty, you spent two hundred dollars on groceries last week? What are you feeding these kids? Steak?
Patty, why do you need new shoes? What’s wrong with the old ones?
Patty, the kids don’t need to go to that camp. I didn’t go to camp. I turned out fine.
I learned to stretch it.
I clipped coupons. I bought generic. I made casseroles that could feed five people for three nights. I bought the kids’ clothes at the Goodwill on Thornton Avenue and told them they were vintage.
Two hundred dollars a week.
For thirty-four years.
My mother died on March 14, 2006.
Ovarian cancer. She was seventy-one.
She was sick for fourteen months. I took care of her. In her little brick house on Murray Avenue. Every day after work. Every weekend.
Gary didn’t come.
Not once.
He said hospitals made him uncomfortable. He said sick people made him nervous. He said I was better at that kind of thing.
My sister June came when she could. June is three years younger than me. She lived in Chattanooga then. Forty minutes north. She has a bad heart. Congenital. She’s had two surgeries since she was a baby. She couldn’t do the heavy lifting.
So I did it.
I bathed my mother. I fed her. I changed her sheets. I gave her the morphine when the hospice nurse showed me how. 