The Back of the Ticket

At 2:47 on a Friday afternoon in September, my cell phone started ringing.

I was sitting on my front porch in Dalton, Georgia, in the white wicker rocker my mother had left me. I had a glass of iced tea sweating in my hand and my bare feet resting on the railing.

I’d just finished watering the tomatoes. The Cherokee Purples were coming in late this year, growing fat and dark, with their tops splitting the way they do when you give them too much water after a dry spell.

My phone buzzed on the little table beside me.

A 404 number. Atlanta.

I let it ring twice before answering.

“Is this Patricia Dunn?”

A woman’s voice. Middle-aged. Cautious. The voice of someone trained to deliver difficult news without losing her composure.

“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 attempting 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 at first. A man’s voice. Loud. Growing 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 continued. “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.

Then I placed my glass 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 discover exactly what I’d been writing on the back of every single one.

But first, I need to go back.

To the pineapple magnet.

And to my mother.

My name is Patricia Ann Dunn. Everyone calls me Patty. I’m fifty-eight years old.

I’ve lived in Dalton, Georgia, all my life. The carpet capital of the world. Ninety percent of the carpet in America is manufactured 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. Around here, just about 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 drove a red Chevy pickup, wore a mustache, and made me laugh at a church fish fry in 1990 by doing an impression of our pastor so convincing that even the pastor laughed.

Six months later, he asked me to marry him in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen on Walnut Avenue. The ring came from Kmart.

I said yes.

We had three children.

Robby. Born in 1992. He’s thirty-three now, a lineman for Georgia Power. Married, with two little girls.

Tessa. Born in 1995. She’s thirty now, a nurse at Hamilton Medical Center, right here in Dalton. Single. She has a cat named Biscuit.

And Kyle. Born in 1999. Twenty-six years old. Our baby. He’s in the Army, stationed at Fort Stewart, down near Savannah.

I raised them.

I want to be honest about that. Gary was there. He lived in the house. He attended some of their ballgames.

But I was the one who raised them.

I packed their lunches. Drove them to school and activities. Stayed awake through their fevers. Attended every parent-teacher conference at Westside Elementary, Dalton Middle, and Dalton High. Signed every permission slip. Made every Halloween costume. 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 our arrangement.

I hadn’t realized it was an arrangement. I thought that was simply how life worked.

I worked, too.

Part-time when the children were young. Full-time after Kyle started kindergarten.

I spent twenty-two years at the front desk of the Walker County Health Department, checking people in, answering phones, and scheduling immunizations.

When I retired, I was making twenty-eight thousand dollars a year.

Gary earned more. He got promoted, first to shift supervisor and then to warehouse manager.

He handled the money.

That was our arrangement, too.

My paycheck went into the joint account. Gary’s paycheck went into the joint account. Gary took care of the bills.

Every Sunday night, he handed me cash.

Two hundred dollars.

For groceries. Gas. Whatever the children needed that week.

If I needed more, I had to ask.

Most of the time, he 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 never went to camp. I turned out fine.

I learned how to make it stretch.

I clipped coupons. Bought generic brands. Cooked casseroles that could feed five people for three nights. Bought the children’s 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 had been sick for fourteen months. I took care of her in her little brick house on Murray Avenue, going there every day after work and spending my weekends with her.

Gary never came.

Not once.

He said hospitals made him uncomfortable. That sick people made him nervous. That I was better at handling that sort of thing.

My sister June came whenever she could. June is three years younger than me. She lived in Chattanooga then, forty minutes north. She has a congenital heart condition and has undergone two surgeries since she was a baby. She couldn’t manage the heavy lifting.

So I handled it.

I bathed my mother. Fed her. Changed her sheets. Administered the morphine after the hospice nurse taught me how.

Three days before she died, she asked me to sit on the bed beside her.

She had become so small by then. Eighty-one pounds. Her hair was gone. She wore a pink scarf my daughter Tessa had knitted in home economics.

She took my hand.

“Patty,” she said. “Can I tell you something?”

“Of course, Mama.”

She studied my face for a long time.

“I’ve watched you,” she said. “Thirty-two years. Since you were born. And for the last fifteen, I’ve watched you with Gary.”

I remained silent.

“You put everybody else’s name first,” she said. “The kids. Gary. Me. June. Your boss at the health department. The church. Everybody.”

She squeezed my hand.

“I’ve never once seen you put your own name on anything.”

I didn’t understand what she meant.

“What do you mean, Mama?”

“The house is in Gary’s name,” she said. “The truck is in Gary’s name. The bank account says Gary and Patricia Dunn. Gary first. The Christmas cards say The Gary Dunn Family.”

She gave me a faint, tired smile.

“Even your mailbox,” she said. “DUNN. In Gary’s handwriting. He painted it.”

“It doesn’t matter, Mama.”

“It does,” she said. “It matters.”

She fell silent for a long time.

“I did the same thing,” she said. “With your daddy. Forty-one years. I let him put his name on everything. And when he died, I didn’t know how to write a check. I didn’t know which bank we used. I didn’t know what the mortgage was.”

She looked directly at me.

“I was sixty-four years old,” she said, “and I had never once in my life signed my own name on something that belonged only to me.”

“Promise me something,” she said.

“Anything.”

“Find one thing,” she said. “Just one. Something small. Something that’s only yours. And put your name on it.”

She tightened her grip on my hand.

“Every week,” she said. “So you don’t forget you have one.”

She died three days later.

At 4:15 in the morning.

I was holding her hand.