The first Friday was in March of 2007.
Gary had lost his job at the power company in a round of layoffs. We had three kids still at home. We were eating a lot of rice and beans.
I stopped at the Shell station on Route 12 for a gallon of milk.
At the counter, the woman in line ahead of me bought a lottery ticket. She didn’t scratch anything. She just handed over two dollars, tucked the ticket in her purse, and walked out the door looking lighter somehow.
And standing there holding my gallon of milk, I thought:
I haven’t bought one single thing just for myself in eleven years.
So I bought a ticket.
Two dollars out of the grocery money.
I picked numbers I’d never forget. The birthdays of our three children, Danny, Beth, and Colleen. Our wedding anniversary, June ninth. And the day my mother died, the nineteenth of February.
I came home and showed it to Gary.
He laughed so hard he had to sit down at the kitchen table.
“You’re throwing money in the toilet, Patty.”
“It’s my two dollars.”
“It’s our two dollars.”
I didn’t say anything back.
I took a ballpoint pen out of the junk drawer. I turned the ticket over. And I wrote on the back of it.
This ticket belongs to Patricia Ann Dunn, who paid for it with her own money, on her own Friday, and who will not be sharing it with anyone who laughed.
Then I stuck it to the refrigerator under the yellow pineapple magnet Beth brought back from a church trip.
And I made myself a promise. One I’ve never told a living soul.
I’ll keep this ticket in my own hand. In my own name. Until the day it matters.
I wrote those same words on the back of every ticket. Every Friday. For nineteen years.
A few years in, I added the little line at the bottom.
If found by Gary, put it back.
Because he kept taking the old ones down to make room for his fishing calendar.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.