Lucky Ticket

Nora looked at the tickets, piled in a corner of her living room. The pile would ebb and flow over time as she bought tickets and then threw the pile away simultaneously, a loser again. All of them had the same thing printed on them: 05-06-08-21-79, her lucky numbers. The digits that opened the lock to the life she had always wanted.

Screaming in rage and frustration, Nora ran her hand over the table, showering the tickets across the floor — fallen stars, each one a prayer for a better future. She dropped down onto the ground and wept, the tears dropping onto the linoleum, creating two minuscule lakes on the dingy yellow floor.

It isn’t fair. Nora’s mantra for the last twenty years.

The television — a Zenith, a slice of Americana history — sat on the other side of the room, the evening news resuming, oblivious to the chaos it had wrought. Five dead in nursing home virus. Car crash on the I95. A litter of puppies had gone missing. The newscasters talked and joked, their masks changing as they went through the stories of the day. Strangely they were oblivious to Nora, to what they had done to her.

Nora had been seventeen when she had graduated from high school. She had been so smart that she had skipped a grade — and almost been valedictorian to boot. But salutatorian was still pretty damn good. Mom beamed, watching her daughter walk across the stage, smiling and waving to the one person present to see her.

Mom worked hard, day in and day out, to make sure Nora would succeed. She dealt with drunks, divas, and dips — that's what she would say — so Nora could focus on school.

“You will have what I never could,” Mom would tell her while she sat in front of the TV. “You will be a big shot and run your own company, or be a lawyer, or maybe an astronaut.” Then she would go back to her shows, as she called them, and Nora would work in the corner, hard, to make Mom’s dream a reality. At eleven every night, before going to bed, Mom would pull out her ticket and watch the news, crumpling the paper up into a ball each time.

“You are my ticket honey,” Mom would say as she got out of her chair, letting out a soft groan of discomfort. Nora would smile, proud, knowing that she would make Mom right.

They had both cried when Nora had received her first acceptance letter. Soon, they had two, and then three and four. The ticket was going to be a winning one. Nora and Mom chose University of Colorado, good school and not too far, so Mom would still get to see her. 

The drive there had been fun, an adventure. Their small Toyota chugged along the highway, a cloud of exhaust behind it and other cars passing it by. When they stopped at a gas station, Nora went inside the store to look. She liked studying the displays, examining the stuff they had piled up on carousels or shelves. Who really needs this? Mom got a ticket for that night and let Nora get something too, something small, to eat while they drove.  

School was strange, not like her old one. The students were much more serious and much smarter. Nora had to work harder. She spent her nights in her dorm room studying and her days in class, asking questions. Her scholarship covered most things, but Nora got small jobs, for a little extra money to send Mom. Mom always said thanks and that she was glad her ticket was starting to pay off.

“You need to get out there,” her roommate told her, “make some friends. College is about more than just books.”

Nora declined and kept studying, working while everyone else drank and screwed. School was tough, tougher than her old one, so she had to work harder. But it would be worth it.

Mom never came to visit and Nora didn’t have a car. That was okay though, Nora knew her mom was busy, and so was she. Some day, Nora would come home with her new job and Mom would beam, her cough gone and her teeth white. They would live in a big city somewhere like San Francisco or Denver. 

“You need to come home honey,” Mom told her over the phone one day. She had called from out of nowhere and told her that she needed Nora. She said that things had taken a turn for the worse.

Nora told her teachers and her roommate that she had to go — but she would be back. When her roommate heard about Mom she cried. Nora didn’t know why, since she had never met Mom. Her teachers seemed indifferent, but said okay — Nora knew they didn’t care. But they said she still had to complete her work, work comes first.

The page on the computer said fifty dollars, but it was actually a hundred to get home. The ticket cost a lot more than they wanted to let you know. But she paid, she had to, and she got on the bus. The trip back wasn’t as much fun, the view from the bus was better since she was so high up but it was also much more depressing. 

She found Mom in her chair with some shows on the TV, her shows weren’t on yet. Mom had a tube going across her face, with two little nobs going up her nose. She looked older and more constant like she had always been a part of that chair and that room. Mom said that she had fainted at work, just like that. The doctor said it was due to underlying conditions and that she needed help. Help that she couldn’t afford. All she had was her ticket, Nora. 

Nora stayed with her mom, sitting with her, listening to her talk. Mom would talk about her life, about things she had never wanted to talk about, like Dad. Dad had been Mom’s first ticket, but he had died. She told stories about when she was a kid and about what the town had been like a long time ago. Despite all of her age, Mom didn’t have too much to say though.

Occasionally, some nurses would come to check up on Mom or change parts of her machine. They had the same face, the same words, full of pity and condescension. Nora wanted to tell them that she was smart, she was gonna be a big shot — but she thanked them instead. Nurses came more and more often, so Nora knew they were near the end. She thought Mom knew it too, but she was too scared to voice her fears. Instead Mom watched her shows and checked the evening news for her ticket to win with Nora beside her.

One day, Mom never came out of her room in the morning. It took several weeks of talking with different people to get it all sorted out, but pretty soon the house was Nora’s. When they put Mom in the ground, not many people had shown up. Her boss was there and he offered Mom’s job to Nora. Seemed strange to her to talk about that at a funeral, but he said he needed someone.

Over time, Nora found her own shows, her own chair, and her own numbers for her ticket: 05-06-08-21-79. She forgot about school and dealt with the drunks, divas, and dips instead. In the evening she would go home, stopping to get her ticket at the gas station, the stuff she had examined inside on her way to school now seemed pointless.

At night, she would sit in Mom’s chair, her chair now, and watch her shows. They were sad and funny and different — little escapes is what Nora liked to think of them as. Every night she waited for the news to come on, for them to tell her she won, though they never did.

Until one night, same as any other, they told Nora she had won. Her ticket was a winner and her hard work, her sacrifice had paid off. Nora looked at her hands, once smooth but now becoming mottled and veined. Her hands were empty, she hadn’t bought a ticket that day, the gas station had been closed.