It seemed to make her happy. She looked happy.
Dear Mr. McLean,
On a recent car trip, my husband was scanning the radio dial and came across your program, The Vinyl Cafe.
“Wow,” said my husband, “that’s still on the air?”
He says he figures you either have something on the president of CBC or you are the luckiest guy in show business.
Betting on the latter, I was wondering if you could pick my next round of lottery numbers?
With fingers crossed,
Angela
P.S. Just to be clear—if we win, we are not obligated to share our winnings with you or anything. Sorry.
Dear Angela,
Please find enclosed a series of my favourite numbers, ranging from one to one hundred. Take a close look at “ thirty-six”; it’s one I’m particularly fond of. I am also including a story about lottery tickets.
THE LOTTERY TICKET
There is no good time for bad news.
When something bad happens, people often say, “It couldn’t have come at a worse time,” but there is no better time when the news that comes is not the news you want. Bad news always has bad timing.
Stephanie’s boyfriend, Tommy, hung up the phone and walked into his bathroom and stared into his bathroom mirror. He stood there for a long time. When he was finished staring, he went into his bedroom and picked up his grey hoodie off the floor. His toque was on top of the fridge. He fetched his toque, grabbed his notebook from the couch and headed out. Hands in his pockets. Shoulders hunched.
He didn’t know it, but he was going to see Steph. He didn’t go right there, though. He walked around for a good hour before he realized that’s where he was heading.
Steph was in her kitchen when he arrived at her apartment. By the stove to be precise, holding a handful of pasta over a big pot. She was wearing an apron that said, Procrastinate Now! Tommy went to the back door, knocked on the window and walked in.
Stephanie was surprised to see him. He had said he was going to stay home and write.
She said, “What are you doing here?”
And, right out of the blue, just like he had appeared, just like the phone call, Tommy said, “My grandpa died.”
Steph ran across the kitchen and gave him a hug. She said, “Are you okay?” Tommy dropped his canvas bag by the table. All Tommy said was, “I just don’t believe it.”
The first time Tommy took Stephanie to meet his grandpa was on his nineteenth birthday. A family dinner. It was a bit of a deal that he took her. He had never taken anyone before. Especially not a girl. She was nervous. She had talked way too much, but his grandpa liked her. He sat with her after dinner and talked about the war.
Tommy reached for Stephanie’s hand. “He was at the barber’s. He had … a stroke. They didn’t even take him to the hospital.”
Ink.
That was what Tommy was thinking about.
Ink on his fingers. Ink on his shirt. His grandfather was plagued by ink. Now the old man had died and all Tommy could think about was what was going to happen to his grandpa’s pens.
Stephanie said, “I was thinking about them too. Anyone would think that. That would come to anyone’s mind.”
Tommy’s grandpa was ink stained.
He was the only person Stephanie knew who used a fountain pen. He had a collection of pens that he kept in a wooden box on his desk.
“This one is a Parker 51,” he said holding up a sleek grey pen with a hooded nib.
“This is my Waterman.” He took a glass bottle of ink out of the drawer and unscrewed it. Then he sniffed it.
“You have to be careful,” he said, looking at her over his glasses. “Ink can go bad.”
He took an eyedropper and used it to fill the Waterman. When he’d finished, there was a smudge of ink on his forehead. He handed Stephanie the pen. His initials were engraved on the gold clip. Then he got a piece of paper and laid it on the desk.
“You have to break a pen in,” he said. “The paper wears the nib down for the way you write. It’s a gold nib.”
Stephanie looked at him. He nodded.
“Go on,” he said.
She sat down and wrote her name.
“Imagine,” he said. “Paper wearing down gold. You probably write with a safety pen.”
“A ballpoint,” said Stephanie.
“Uh,” he said. “You might as well write with a nail.”
He gave her one of his pens. It was a Waterman, tortoiseshell, with gold inlay. The first thing she wrote was a letter to him. Thank you. She sniffed the ink every time she filled the pen. She had no idea what bad ink smelled like.
Lewis J. Waterman was an insurance man. So was Tommy’s grandfather. Waterman got drawn into the pen business after a leaky pen messed up one of his contracts. Tommy’s grandfather, who was also Lewis, didn’t go anywhere without his Waterman.
Tommy stayed at Stephanie’s for dinner that night. It was while they were doing the dishes that Stephanie said, “Hey! What’s going to happen to the ticket?”
Tommy said, “I hadn’t thought about that.”
His grandfather’s famous lottery ticket. He had owned it for ten years.
“Longer,” said Tommy. “Longer … for sure. I remember it from when I was a kid.”
There were different stories. Lewis bought the ticket after he had touched a bride. He bought it the day he found a four-leaf clover. He bought it with a hundred pennies that he had found, “heads up.”
He had a whole routine with pennies he found. If they were “heads up,” he kept them and made a wish. If they were “heads down,” he would give them away—because “heads down” meant bad luck. So he had to give them away “heads up,” to cancel the bad luck.
Tommy and Stephanie were sitting on her couch.
Tommy said, “When I was a kid, if I was with him when he found a penny, he would give me the wishes. Then he would make me tell him what I’d wished for. I told him you weren’t supposed to tell. He said you were allowed to tell grandfathers.”
Tommy stood up and started pacing. “I asked him about it when I was older.”
Stephanie said, “I don’t think he really believed it.”
Tommy nodded.
Stephanie said, “Weird that he’d still do it, though.”
Tommy said, “He told me he did it because he had heard that it still worked, even if you didn’t believe.”
So Tommy’s grandfather had a lottery ticket. It was one of those scratch tickets from way back. There was no date on it, not even an expiry date. The prize was one million dollars.
That’s what he used to say. “Imagine. A million dollars.” Then he would say, “What would you do with a million dollars?” And you had to tell him what you would do.
Lewis would listen, ever so carefully. And when you were finished, he would say, “Are you sure that’s what you would do? Is that your heart’s desire?” And you had to go through the whole thing all over. It was all very serious because this, he told everyone, with absolute conviction, was a winning ticket. It might sound crazy, but he was a very convincing man.
The ticket was of considerable concern to the family. You might even say an obsession. It underlined shared points of view and it provoked differences. It got to be so everyone in the family, everyone, except perhaps the small children, had to have an opinion about the ticket. And when you settled on your stance, you had to defend it. Tommy’s family argued about the ticket whenever they got together. They argued about it at family dinners. They argued about it at Christmas.
“Lewis!” shouted his brother. “A million dollars isn’t what it used to be.”
“It’s still a million dollars,” said Lewis.
“But if you had put it in the bank instead of leaving it on the mantel, you’d have collected interest. All these years. You know how much you would have?”
“Maybe I’d have nothing,” Lewis would say. “Tommy, pass your mother the peas. You’ve read what happens t
o lottery winners. That man in Niagara Falls. That family in New Brunswick. I still have the million. How much does one man need?”
Then he would gesture toward the ticket, or maybe get up and walk over to the mantel where he kept it in a box. He might pick it up and wave it in the air.
Lewis believed having the dream was better than having the pile of money. Money? Well, money could cause no end of problems.
“It’s far better to stick with dreams,” he said.
Tommy said, “It used to drive my uncle nuts. My uncle thought he was crazy.”
Stephanie pushed her hair away from her face and said, “What do you think?”
Tommy plopped onto the couch beside her and stretched out his legs. “I don’t know,” he said. “He was so sure. He was certain. I mean. It could be the winner. You can’t deny that. It could be.
“Neighbours used to come to the house just to see it. Just to look at the winning ticket.”
Steph said, “Do you think you should scratch it?”
Tommy said, “Do you think so?”
Steph said, “That way you’d know.”
Tommy started to stand up and then sat down again.
“Because he is gone? Don’t you think we should check the will?”
She hadn’t thought of that. She hadn’t thought of what he would want.
“He didn’t mention it,” said Tommy’s father, holding his cellphone against his chest.
“Don’t you think that’s odd?” said Tommy’s mother.
“What?” said Tommy’s father. “That it wasn’t mentioned? Or that I am phoning a lawyer to ask him to re-check my father’s will to make certain that he didn’t mention an unscratched lottery ticket that he had on his mantelpiece for over a decade. Yes. Now that you ask, I think it’s odd.”
“What would happen,” said Stephanie, “if you scratched it, and it was a winner?”
“I would feel bad for not trusting him,” said Tommy. “For not believing.”
“And if it wasn’t a winner?”
“I would just feel bad.”
The funeral was scheduled for Monday. Tommy went home on Thursday. By the time he got there, the whole neighbourhood was buzzing. No one had a say, but everyone had an opinion.
Wherever Tommy went, they were talking about it. And they all wanted to tell him what they thought. They were talking about it at the funeral parlour.
“Tommy, the reason he didn’t mention it in the will is because he knew it wasn’t a winner. He knew it was worthless. You should just scratch it and be done with it.”
They were talking about it at the corner store.
“Ahmed, if you are so sure it is not a winning ticket, why are you in a such a hurry for the boy to scratch it? If you are so sure, you should tell him to throw it out.”
And they were talking about it at the barbershop—the very place where Lewis had had his stroke.
“Tommy, I went to your grandpa’s house once, so he could show it to me. I have a picture. In the picture I am holding the ticket.”
“Maybe we could scratch the picture.”
Some were believers. “It made him happy,” they’d say. “And no harm was done. Everyone should have such a thing.”
Others thought the whole thing was foolish.
“It is not the original ticket,” claimed one. “He scratched the original ticket years ago. He won five bucks. That’s all. I know a guy who was there when he did it. It was only five bucks. The guy told me.”
The whole neighbourhood was divided into two camps, the scratchers and the non-scratchers. The believers and the ones who didn’t believe.
The night before the funeral, Tommy’s family gathered at Tommy’s house. After dinner Tommy, Tommy’s father and Tommy’s great-uncle, Lawrence, were sitting at the dining-room table. The ticket was lying on the table.
Lewis used to torment Uncle Lawrence with the ticket. He would bring the ticket out at family dinners and lay it front of him and watch him squirm.
“Watch him squirm,” he would say.
And oh, he would squirm. “Lewis,” he would start, “it is arrogant to say that money doesn’t matter.”
“Arrogant?” Tommy’s grandfather didn’t have to say much. He would poke his brother Lawrence now and again if he was running out of steam. “Arrogant?”
“It is irresponsible. If you don’t want the money, you should use it for something else. Send the grandchildren to university.”
He said that at Christmas this year. And when he did, Lewis twinkled. He winked at Tommy and said, “But the grandchildren are already at university.”
Uncle Lawrence said, “Bah! Give it to charity then.”
And that’s when Lewis pounced. Lewis said, “Ah … now we’re talking. Tell me exactly which charity. Come on. What would you do if you had a million dollars?”
Uncle Lawrence knew he had been suckered again, and he slapped the table. And that was the end of that.
“It’s not about the money,” said Uncle Lawrence, for the third or fourth time. “I don’t want the money—it’s the principle.”
“If it’s not about the money,” said Tommy’s father, “then what’s the hurry? How many years have we have gone without scratching? We can’t wait until he’s buried?”
And so it was decided. They would wait until after the funeral. And after the funeral, when everyone was together, they would scratch the ticket.
Even though the family had made their decision, the debate echoed in their minds. So although everyone agreed that the Rev. Simms spoke nicely at the service, it was hard not to think that he had weighed in on the subject.
“Lewis was a man of faith,” said the Reverend in his homily. “And faith is the ability to believe in something that cannot be proven.”
“What is he talking about?” said Uncle Lawrence under his breath. “We scratch it and we know. It’s as simple as that. There’s the proof.”
“Be quiet,” whispered Lawrence’s wife. “He isn’t talking about the ticket. Show some respect for your dead brother.”
“Hocus-pocus,” muttered Uncle Lawrence.
Back at the house after the service, there was a lot of discussion about what the Reverend Simms had meant.
“What he is saying,” said Tommy’s father, “is if you believe you know, then you know. That’s what faith is.”
Tommy’s head was spinning. If you were among the faithful, then, you believed that scratching the ticket would be a loss of faith. Lewis had had faith. He hadn’t needed to scratch the ticket.
Uncle Lawrence was sitting in Lewis’s favourite chair. He had a coffee cup perched precariously on the arm.
“Lawrence,” said Tommy’s father, “owning that ticket gave him hope. Maybe he needed hope more than he needed money.”
“Hope,” said Uncle Lawrence, “is false and foolish. All he had was false hope.”
“Hope,” said Tommy’s father, “keeps despair at bay.”
“Not mine,” said Uncle Lawrence. “I despair that I’m living in a family of idiots.”
There were seven people around the table on Tuesday night: Tommy, Tommy’s mother, Tommy’s father, Uncle Lawrence, Lawrence’s wife, Muriel, his aunt Edith and Edith’s son, Tony.
Tony was the youngest. When everyone was settled, Uncle Lawrence nodded at Tony and Tony got up from the dining-room table and walked to the mantel. He carried the wooden box carefully across the room and placed it in front of Uncle Lawrence, who was the oldest. Tommy was sitting opposite Uncle Lawrence. Tommy squeezed his eyes closed as Uncle Lawrence opened the box.
Uncle Lawrence looked into the box and then slowly around the table. Then he picked the box up and held it so everyone could see in. Lewis’s faded lottery ticket was gone. There were seven brand-new tickets in its place.
And so a week passed.
And Tommy and Stephanie were back at her apartment.
Tommy said, “It was only a week ago.”
Tommy was sitting at the table where
he had sat that night. He was holding a beer.
Stephanie said, “I wish I could have been there when you told them.”
Tommy said, “My father laughed. No one else said anything. What could they say? I put the ticket in Grandpa’s pocket. The ticket was buried. They weren’t going to dig him up.”
Tommy stumbled over the word buried. He started to cry.
“Whoa,” he said. “That took a while.”
“It is okay,” said Stephanie. “It’s about time.”
She waited. Then she said, “I wish I could have seen your uncle Lawrence. I wish you had a video.”
“Yeah,” said Tommy. “He surprised me. I thought he would have scratched his right away. To make a point. But no one did.”
Then she said, “Why did you do it?”
“Because,” said Tommy. “I trusted him.”
Stephanie said, “I think he would have liked you to have it.”
Tommy said, “The money?”
Stephanie said, “Not the money. The dream.”
And Tommy said, “I do.” And he reached into his pocket, and he pulled out his ticket.
“I bought seven,” he said.
Stephanie held out her hand, and he handed it to her.
Stephanie said, “Do you think it’s a winner?”
And Tommy said, “Oh I know it is. I am sure it’s a winner. You can tell.”
Stephanie said, “Are we going to scratch it?”
Tommy said, “No. We’re going to hold onto it. Just in case.”
Stephanie said, “Just in case what? We need the money?”
Tommy said, “No. We don’t need the money. We’ll never need money. In case we need him.”
“But Grandpa,” said Tommy.
This is a long time ago. He is remembering this part from a long time ago. To be honest he is not even sure this part happened. When he remembers it, it seems like a dream to him. Maybe he had imagined it. But this is the way he remembers it.
“But Grandpa,” he says, “it’s just a dream of a dream.”
And his grandfather says, “Now you’ve got it. Now you understand. It’s just a dream. That is exactly what it is. It is nothing at all. And in the dream, I am still here. I am still with you. I may seem to be gone, but I have only gone on a little trip. Whatever I was once, I am still. When you see a penny, you must pick it up for me. Save all the ones that are ‘heads up’ in the little jar the way we do.
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