“Max too. If that’s what you want.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“This,” Leo says, jogging over and tackle-hugging Teddy, “is going to be epic.”
“It is,” he agrees, laughing. “Now get out of here. Go tell Max.”
Leo hops up again, practically bouncing on his toes as he heads over to the door, and I can’t help smiling as I watch him, because I feel the same way: giddy and excited and wildly, impossibly happy.
“Hey,” Teddy calls out, “how are you getting to lunch?”
Leo shrugs. “I don’t know. Probably the bus.”
“Here,” he says, grabbing a set of keys from the coffee table and tossing them over to Leo, who stares at them.
“The convertible?”
Teddy nods. “It’s all yours.”
“What?” Leo asks, freezing.
“Take it.”
“No way.” He looks slightly panicked. “You love that thing.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not really my style anymore,” Teddy says, half-turning to give me a sheepish grin. “Besides, if all goes well, you’ll be needing a car next year, right?”
It takes Leo a moment to answer; he’s too busy gaping at the keys in his hand.
“I know this is sort of a weird thing to say, considering everything,” he says eventually. “But I kind of feel like I just won the lottery.”
“Funny,” Teddy says, his eyes finding mine again. “So do I.”
When I’m finished packing up the kitchen, the only thing left is the hippo-shaped cookie jar, and I stand there with a hand on its glassy head, lost in the memory of that blue-cold morning when the ticket was tucked safely inside, still a secret, still just a possibility, still only ours.
Now the midday sun is washing the room in honey-colored light, the cookie jar is once again filled with Oreos, and Teddy—the youngest winner in the history of the Powerball lottery—is in his bedroom, tossing his balled-up socks one by one into the box he’s supposed to be packing, and the story of that ticket—of that morning—doesn’t belong to us anymore.
It belongs to everyone.
Across town right now Uncle Jake and Aunt Sofia are eating a late breakfast in the quiet kitchen of the brownstone, the puppy snoozing beneath the table. A few miles away Katherine McAvoy is on her way to the hospital, where she’ll spend the day comforting a seven-year-old girl with leukemia, not because she’s getting paid to but because that’s where she’s supposed to be.
And Leo is driving to pick up his boyfriend in a red sports car, already thinking ahead to next year, to all the many trips he’ll be making in it as long as his luck holds out. And Max is waiting to surprise him with tickets to the new Pixar movie, because he knows Leo better than anyone.
In Portland a woman is standing in front of a mini-mart thinking about the last time she was here, with her four kids in the car, and a sick husband at home, and a long day of work behind her. She closes her eyes, grateful for whatever it was that made her ask for a ticket that day while paying for her terrible coffee and overpriced gas.
Down at the very tip of Florida, an old man is lighting the candles on an enormous cake. When he picked his numbers all those months ago, he tried to play his grandchildren’s birthdays, only he got one of them wrong. He was off by two days, which has sparked a new family tradition. Today, they’re celebrating his youngest granddaughter’s birthday for the second time this week.
And the man who was working the register at the convenience store that snowy night is opening a savings account for his two-year-old son, who will be the first in his family to go to college because of the prize money his father received for selling the winning ticket.
And one of the lottery officials is reading an article in a glossy magazine about what someone as young and rich as Teddy might do after graduation, because even after twelve years of giving away giant checks, the man likes to keep tabs on the winners, to see which ones collapse under the weight of all that money and which use it to make the world a better place.
Sometimes he even makes bets with his wife.
On Teddy, he’s about to lose.
In San Francisco the chicken lady is taking a shift at the hospice care center, listening patiently to a woman who sounds just like she did, with a sick mother and nowhere to turn, and she nods and pats her hand and opens a new file, knowing that now there’s something she can do to help, which is the best feeling of all.
