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.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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