Prologue

prologue

river

Every Friday, my mom played the lottery. She would stop at the gas station on her way home from cleaning whatever mansion was on rotation that week and buy scratchers for the largest pot on offer. She would win, here and there. Small amounts—sometimes the cost of the ticket, sometimes a little more. Once, she even won a thousand dollars. More often than not, though, she’d come up empty, and she seemed truly surprised every time it happened. I think she really believed that one day, the odds would be in her favor. That one day, she would be a millionaire and magically her life would be better—all our lives would be better. The never-ending debt from her unfinished college degree would be gone just like that. The need for my dad to take on a second and sometimes even a third job would disappear overnight. I could attend college without a single thought about tuition.

We would be rich and happy, but we would be responsible, the kind of family that wouldn’t be destroyed from within by its newfound wealth.

When I turned fifteen and learned about the odds of winning the lottery—“one in three hundred million,” my stats teacher had intoned—I told my mom she’d be better off saving her money instead of wasting it on tickets each week. She’d just waggled her eyebrows and said, “Someone’s gotta win. Why not me?”

As far as I know, she never did win the lottery.

But I did. And all it cost me was everything.