A Winning Ticket Read Free Page B

Saturday. But women like her were to be admired from a distance. He would never have the courage to approach her in person.
    Harrison, who had been dozing off and on all night, perked up to watch.
    As expected, coverage of the snowstorm dominated the top of the newscast. Melissa and John quickly threw to a field reporter who was wrapped tightly in a North Face coat and struggling to keep her balance in the wind gusts. Behind her was an intersection where a traffic accident had already occurred.
    After a couple more reporters braved the elements on-screen, the focus shifted to the weatherman in the studio, Cap Henderson.
    Benjamin wondered why weathermen always had stupid names.
    Cap gave a rundown of the current area snow totals and an updated forecast. It was still looking like a severe winter storm, and it was supposed to continue through most of the day tomorrow. After Cap finished running through his satellite and radar images, the camera moved back to Melissa and John, who were getting ready to go to the first commercial break.
    Benjamin got up from the recliner and walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water before bed. As he was walking, he heard Melissa say, “Before we go to break, here are tonight’s winning Super Millions lottery numbers.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the familiar lottery graphic flash on the television. Five white balls, followed by one red, bounced across the screen.
    He heard Harrison mutter drowsily, “Oh, I almost forgot. I picked up our ticket today at the gas station.”
    Buying lottery tickets was Harrison’s idea, although they both went in on them together. Harrison bought a ticket on Wednesday, and Benjamin would pick one up on Saturday. They had been buying two lottery tickets a week for the past ten years or so. They had never won more than seven dollars off a single ticket. By Benjamin’s calculations, that meant they had spent more than two-thousand dollars on a pipe dream—money they desperately needed right now.
    Benjamin grabbed a glass from the cupboard and turned on the faucet. He could hear the wind howling outside the kitchen window. The snow was continuing to fall with increasing fury. He filled the glass with water and walked back through the living room, toward the hallway that led to his bedroom. “Good night, Harr—”
    “We won.” Benjamin heard his brother say in a monotone, unexcited voice.
    “I wish. See you in the morning,” Benjamin replied as he continued down the hallway.
    “No, I’m serious. We won.” Harrison still kept the cadence of his voice even. Not showing any excitement.
    Something about this made Benjamin turn around and walk back into the living room. Harrison looked as though he was about to pass out. His eyes were glazed, and his face was as white as the snow now falling outside. He wasn’t joking around.
    “We won,” he repeated again, now looking up from the television screen to meet Benjamin’s eyes. A slight smile began to slowly spread over his face.
    Without saying a word, Benjamin grabbed the ticket from Harrison’s hand and looked at it, then at the television. Harrison had stopped the DVR, and the series of winning numbers were now frozen on the screen. The estimated jackpot was seventy million dollars.
    Benjamin swallowed hard and again began to examine the ticket—just to make sure Harrison was not screwing around with him. He had seen something similar happen to some poor guy once on YouTube. His buddies had recorded the drawing and then bought a ticket with the matching numbers the next day. When the guy came home from work, they handed him the ticket and pressed
Play
on the recorded drawing. The guy never checked the date on the ticket, so when the matching numbers came up on the screen, he ran around the house screaming, thinking he had won the jackpot. Idiot.
    It wasn’t a joke—everything about Harrison’s ticket was correct.
    Next, he began to match each of the numbers on the screen to the ones on