I looked at my name.
Patricia Ann Whitmire Dunn.
I looked at the date Mr. Mehta had written.
March 24, 2006.
I looked at the words underneath.
Week 1. For Mama.
I didn’t win anything that week.
I checked the numbers in the newspaper on Saturday morning. I got two right. The lady at the gas station told me that meant I’d won nothing.
I folded the ticket and put it back under the pineapple.
On Friday, I went back.
Mr. Mehta smiled when he saw me.
“Mrs. Dunn. You are back.”
“I am.”
“Did you win?”
“No.”
He nodded, as though this was what he’d expected.
“What numbers this week?”
I looked at the play card.
The same five, I told him.
He printed the ticket.
I signed my name.
Week 2. For Mama.
He initialed it again.
And that was how it started.
Every Friday, I drove to Highway 41 Gas & Go. I bought a two-dollar ticket. I signed the back. I wrote the week number. Sometimes I added a few words.
Week 3. For Mama. I miss her cooking.
Week 4. For Mama. Robby called.
Week 5. For Mama. Tessa got the job.
Week 6. For Mama. Kyle needs new tires.
Week 7. For Mama. Gary forgot our anniversary.
That last one made me laugh when I wrote it.
Not because it was funny.
Because it was true.
Gary had forgotten our anniversary. Again. He’d come home that evening with a bag of groceries and asked what was wrong with me.
“Nothing,” I’d said.
That was what I always said.
Nothing.
I put everybody else’s feelings on the table and tucked my own underneath it.
But that night, after Gary fell asleep, I went into the kitchen and looked at the ticket under the pineapple.
I thought about Mama.
I thought about how she’d spent forty-one years being somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, somebody’s helper.
And how, at the end, she’d looked at me with those tired eyes and asked me to find one thing.
Just one.
So I kept going.
The lottery became a kind of diary.
Not a diary anybody would recognize. There were no long entries, no descriptions of the weather, no pages filled with thoughts I was too afraid to say aloud.
Just one sentence on the back of a ticket.
Week 12. For Mama. I bought myself a book.
Week 15. For Mama. I said no to June.
Week 19. For Mama. I went to lunch alone.
That last one took courage.
I sat in a restaurant for forty-five minutes with a plate of chicken salad and a glass of iced tea, and nobody needed me to cut their meat, refill their drink, find their keys, or settle an argument.
I ate slowly.
I ordered dessert.
I took the rest home.
When Gary asked where I’d been, I told him.
He stared at me.
“You went to lunch by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I wanted to.”
He shrugged and turned back to the television.
It wasn’t a grand moment. Nobody applauded. No music played.
But I went to bed that night feeling as if I’d opened a window in a room I’d been living in for thirty-two years.
By summer, I had a small box in the kitchen drawer.
Inside were my lottery tickets, stacked in order.
I didn’t win the jackpot. I didn’t win anything worth talking about. A couple of times I won five dollars, and once I won ten.
I spent the winnings on more tickets.
But that wasn’t why I went.
I went because every Friday, for two dollars, I got to practice being a person who had a name.
And then, one Friday in August, something happened.
I was standing at the counter when Mr. Mehta asked, “Mrs. Dunn, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Why do you write the week number?”
I looked at the ticket in my hand.
I hadn’t told him about Mama. Not really. He knew she’d died. He knew I’d started buying tickets afterward. But I had never explained the rest.
So I told him.
About the house in Gary’s name. The truck. The bank account. The Christmas cards.
About Mama’s last promise.
About how I’d written my name on that first ticket because it was the first thing I’d ever owned that didn’t feel like it belonged to somebody else.
Mr. Mehta listened without interrupting.
When I finished, he took off his glasses and polished them with the corner of his shirt.
“My wife,” he said, “she does something like this.”
“What?”
“Every month, she buys a little plant. Nothing expensive. Sometimes a flower. Sometimes a tomato plant. She puts it outside the kitchen window.”
He smiled.
“I used to ask her why she needed so many plants. She told me they were hers. She could water them when she wanted. She could forget them if she wanted. Nobody could tell her what to do with them.”
He put his glasses back on.
“I thought it was silly,” he said. “Now I understand.”
I smiled at him.
Then I signed my ticket.
Week 23. For Mama. Mr. Mehta understands.
The next week, I did something I’d been thinking about for months.
I went to the bank.
Not with Gary.
By myself.
I opened a savings account in my own name.
Patricia Ann Whitmire Dunn.
I deposited fifty dollars.
It wasn’t much. Fifty dollars wouldn’t pay the electric bill for a month. It wouldn’t cover a car repair or a trip to the emergency room.
But when the teller handed me the paperwork, I looked at the signature line and felt something loosen inside my chest.
My name.
My account.
My fifty dollars.
I drove home and told Gary.
He looked up from his newspaper.
“Why would you need a separate account?”
“I want one.”
“For what?”
“For me.”
He frowned as though I’d started speaking another language.
“Patty, we’re married.”
“I know.”
“We share everything.”
I thought about the mortgage. The truck. The bank account with his name first. The forty-one years Mama had spent not knowing how to write a check.
“No,” I said quietly. “We don’t.”
He stared at me.
I was afraid then. More afraid than I’d been at the bank. More afraid than I’d been sitting alone in that restaurant.
But I didn’t take it back.
Gary didn’t speak to me for the rest of the evening.
The next morning, he asked if I wanted coffee.
I said yes.
We drank it together at the kitchen table.
We didn’t solve everything that morning. We didn’t suddenly become different people. Gary was still Gary, and I was still learning how to say what I meant.
But something had changed.
I had stopped pretending that keeping the peace was the same as being happy.
By the time the leaves turned, I had bought myself a new pair of walking shoes, started attending a Wednesday evening class at the library, and learned how to balance my own checkbook.
I was forty-six years old.
I felt ridiculous sometimes, learning things other people had known since they were twenty.
But I learned them anyway.
Every Friday, I kept buying my ticket.
Week 31. For Mama. I opened an account.
Week 35. For Mama. I told Gary the truth.
Week 40. For Mama. I am not as afraid anymore.
And then came March 14, 2007.
Mama’s birthday.
I drove to the gas station in the rain. Mr. Mehta was behind the counter, just as he had been that first Friday.
“Today is a special day,” he said.
I nodded.
“Her birthday.”
He reached beneath the counter and pulled out a small paper bag.
Inside was a Moon Pie.
“I thought she might have liked one today,” he said.
I stood there with that little bag in my hands and cried.
Mr. Mehta waited while I cried.
Then I bought my ticket.
I picked my five numbers.
Three. Eleven. Twenty-two. Sixteen. Fourteen.
I signed the back.
Week 52. For Mama. One year. I am still here.
Mr. Mehta initialed it and handed it back.
I looked at the ticket, then at him.
“Do you know something?” I asked.
“What?”
“I don’t think I care if I ever win.”
He smiled.
“Then you have already won something.”
I laughed at that.
I put the ticket in my purse and drove home.
That evening, I took down the pineapple magnet and removed the first ticket from behind it.
The paper had faded a little. The ink was still blue.
Patricia Ann Whitmire Dunn.
Week 1. For Mama.
I held it in both hands.
For a long time, I thought Mama had been asking me to claim something. A house. A bank account. A little corner of the world where nobody could tell me what to do.
And perhaps she had.
But I finally understood that she had been asking for something even smaller, and even bigger, than that.
She wanted me to remember that I existed.
Not just as Gary’s wife.
Not just as Robby’s, Tessa’s, and Kyle’s mother.
Not as the daughter who had held her hand at 4:15 in the morning.
Me.
Patricia.
The woman who liked chicken salad and library classes. The woman who wanted to walk in the mornings and buy books she didn’t have to share. The woman who could open a bank account, sign her name, and sit alone in a restaurant without apologizing to anybody.
I put the first ticket back under the pineapple.
Then I took a piece of paper from the drawer and wrote something on it.
I wrote it slowly, carefully, in the handwriting I’d used on all those lottery tickets.
My name is Patricia Ann Whitmire Dunn.
I put the paper on the refrigerator.
Right beside the ticket.
Under the ugly yellow-and-green pineapple Mama brought home from Tybee Island.
Gary came into the kitchen and read it.
He looked at me.
“What is that for?”
I smiled.
“It’s a reminder.”
“Of what?”
I touched the paper with my fingertips.
“That I’m here.”
He stood there for a moment, then nodded.
He didn’t understand all of it. Maybe he never would.
But I did.
And every Friday, I still drive out to Highway 41 Gas & Go.
I still buy my two-dollar ticket.
I still pick the same five numbers.
I still write my name on the back.
Sometimes I write about the children. Sometimes about Gary. Sometimes about Mama.
And sometimes, when the week has been hard and I’ve spent too many days trying to be everything to everybody, I write just four words.
Week 86. For Mama.
I haven’t forgotten myself.