Prologue
They never could remember whose idea it had been, finally, to buy the ticket.
This was frustrating for them all, not because any one of them wanted to have special claim on the ticket—whatever else they’d forgotten about the night, none of them ever questioned the fact that the ticket had been for all three of them, that they’d split the winnings on the off-chance they won. It was frustrating because it seemed so unlike all of them to even think of buying a lottery ticket.
Kit wasn’t the type to quote you statistical unlikelihoods, but she was one of the most talented observational scientists around, and anyone with a shred of observational talent knew going in for a lottery ticket wasn’t altogether sensible. Plus, of the three of them, she was the most practical about money. She still lived in a shitty one-bedroom above One-Eyed Betty’s Bar and Restaurant, swearing that she wouldn’t buy a place of her own until she had a certain percentage of her student loans paid off and at least a twenty percent down payment for a house. No way could it have been Kit.
Zoe was the most impulsive of their group; she sang karaoke and threw darts with whatever bearded hipster dude at the bar asked her and always ordered the special and also jetted off to exotic locales every year for vacation. But Zoe was also the most successful, and she didn’t need the money, and she wasn’t the kind of woman to want more of what she already had enough of. Zoe wouldn’t have thought to buy herself a ticket.
And Greer thought the lottery was bad luck. She thought lots of things were bad luck, actually—the usual stuff, like black cats and walking under ladders and hats on the bed. But she had other ones too: goldfish, old brooms in new houses, opals, candles with two wicks. Mostly she accepted teasing about these superstitions, but Zoe and Kit both remembered clearly that Greer had once said lottery bad luck was real—she’d watched a whole show about it on TLC. Greer wouldn’t schedule a doctor’s appointment on the thirteenth of any month, so there was no way she’d buy a lottery ticket without some real coaxing.
And yet—they’d bought a lottery ticket. There was even grainy surveillance video of their purchase, all three of them at the Seventh Street Quick Mart, looking like they’d had a bit too much to drink (they had—Betty ran a good happy hour), which was embarrassing, but maybe not quite as embarrassing as the fact that they were also purchasing twelve Snickers bars, a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, and a box of tampons. One of the local news blogs had run a headline under a screenshot of the video: “Gal pals find best cure for PMS is a jackpot.” Zoe wanted to sue over that quip, and knowing Zoe, she would have done her hot-shot lawyer thing until the blog was wiped off the internet forever, but Kit—who was more concerned about keeping it quiet than any of them—had reminded her that it would just draw more attention to the whole thing.
What they wanted, once they learned of their winnings—Gary from the Quick Mart called Betty, Betty called Kit, and Kit called Zoe and Greer—was to absorb the shock, to the collect their shares as privately as possible, and to make sense of their new lives.
But that all came later.
What came first was the three of them at Betty’s on a Wednesday night, where and when they’d met almost every week for the last four years. Seven total alcoholic beverages, two total plates of nachos, and three terrible days between them, and someone, at some point, brought up that night’s lottery.
Maybe it was that others at the bar had been discussing it—last week’s jackpot had reached record proportions owing to a long stretch of no winners, but a group of twenty postal workers from the next state over had claimed the four hundred million, doing a press conference over the weekend all together, looking stunned and joyful and a little uncomfortable on camera. It was a big news story, and it seemed as if everyone was devoting at least a brief amount of dinner conversation to the life-changing implications of winning that kind of money.
“Six of them said they’re going back to work,” said Greer, going straight for the newly deposited plate of nachos. “Can you imagine? You win four hundred million dollars and go back to delivering the mail.”
“It’s really only around two-hundred-forty-eight million,” Zoe said. “Taxes.”
“I’d go back to work,” said Kit.
“We know, honey,” Greer said, patting Kit’s arm affectionately. “It’s you and that big microscope until the end of time. The greatest love story of the century.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Zoe, more firmly than perhaps any of them would have anticipated, since Zoe seemed to both love her work and do amazingly well at it. Zoe waved a hand dismissively. “It’d be just—a lifetime of spa treatments and male strippers, I’m pretty sure.”
“Jesus, Zoe,” Kit said, on a laugh. “Why does your mind always go to male strippers?”
“I think that Magic Mike movie rewired my brain.”
“At least one of those twenty will do something like that, though,” said Greer. “I mean, maybe not the male strippers. But you’ll read about one of them buying a six-million-dollar RV and a gold-plated pickup truck or something.”
“Judge not, lest ye be judged,” said Betty, snaking her tattooed arm between them to refill Greer’s beer. Betty winked at them, her trademark move when she served a drink. Betty actually, literally only had one natural eye, the left one a very convincing prosthetic, and all the regulars here had heard a different story from Betty herself on how she came to have it. “I saw that on a fridge magnet,” she said.
“Oh, I’m not judging,” Greer said, embarrassed, though it’s not as though Betty herself had a multi-million-dollar RV or a gold pickup truck. “I mean, people can—you know, do whatever. I’m not judging!”
This was classic Greer—quick to feel as if she’d said the wrong thing, always apologizing. Zoe kept telling her she needed to let her balls drop, but so far this hadn’t worked to make Greer any more assertive.
Betty smiled, bright red lips passing over her white teeth. “I’m teasing. So what would you ladies do if you won the lottery?”
There’d been a pause, a too-long one, because then Betty had shrugged and said, “Well, you three sort that out while I go serve some more drinks,” shimmying away in her vintage dress, little lemon and lime and orange slices printed all over it, her jet-black hair stiff in its pompadour. Except for the tattoos, Betty could’ve walked straight off a vintage poster, the kind that’d keep soldiers going.
“She must not have heard me about the strippers,” Zoe said.
“Seriously, though,” said Greer. “What would we buy?”
Another pause, while they all took a drink. Maybe on another day, they would have taken Zoe’s lead and riffed on all their ridiculous, overindulgent ideas—the ones where you speculate on how many shoes you could fit in a walk-in closet the size of your current apartment, on whether you could afford a private plane, on the likelihood of being able to purchase some rare piece of historically important jewelry.
But on that day—when Kit had spent two hours cleaning up after a pipe burst in her apartment, when Zoe had, not for the first time, watched a grown man cry at a conference table, and when Greer had, for the third time in a single calendar year, decided to quit a job—not a single one of them was feeling all that overindulgent.
Kit said, “A house,” but what she thought was, home.
Zoe said, “An adventure,” but what she thought was, forgiveness.
Greer said, “An education,” but what she thought was, freedom.
So in the end, it didn’t matter all that much who had said, at the Quick Mart, to add the ticket to their bill. What mattered was that the three of them had heard each other’s desire.
And not a single one of them was going to see the other waste the opportunity.