New Hampshire has the largest Irish American population of any U.S. state. Irish Americans are a perennially aggrieved and mediocre people; they love to drink, and they gravitate toward New Hampshire, perhaps partially because the state motto, “live free or die,” appeals to their sense of responsibility. Residents of New Hampshire, especially the drunken Irish, constantly suffer tragic, seemingly supernatural twists of fate. Things like this happen anywhere it snows. They crash their cars into ditches and snow banks. They gamble away meager savings and go into debt which they never repay. Their vehicles spin off the road across oceans of black ice. They’re killed by falling trees, under fallen telephone poles; they die alone in underheated cabins where the phone lines are too inundated by snow to reach help in time.
They play the lottery because there isn’t much else to do, despite fate not being historically on their side. Michael McKenzie, or Mike as we will know him from here on out, was very traditionally Irish American in this way and in most other ways.
Village Convenience was the only grocery store in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, besides the Citgo mini-mart. Outside the building, a sign boasted of authentic Indian food served there on Fridays and Saturdays. The proprietor of the store was an Indian woman, maybe the only one in town. Mike was buying a six-pack of Budweiser and a scratch ticket. No matter what else he bought, he always threw in a scratch ticket. This habit was inculcated in him from childhood by his grandmother, who would drag him to the local market under the guise of buying a jug of milk or some other household item, but the real objective would always be the lottery. She’d have him pick out the ticket, said he was lucky. Sometimes they won a couple of bucks, which never happened when she got them herself, so he began to believe her; he was lucky.
Mike’s grandmother was the type to wear house dresses to the store and get behind the wheel of her Buick in the morning after several Irish coffees. In other words, she was a classic lottery-playing type. Most people who play the lottery are old, hopeful, and have no other way to make money. They like to spend money because it makes them feel like they’re part of something, contributing to society in some way. Habitual scratch ticket buyers have rituals around it; if they win on a scratcher they bought from a certain cashier, they’ll always go back to that person, even just to buy a pack of cigarettes or gum; sometimes they’ll tip the cashier who sold them the winning ticket, too. Lottery players are kitschy by nature. They say things like, “I’m busier than a one-armed paper-hanger,” in response to the pleasantry, “How are you?” And they are always lonely, the types who talk to cashiers for too long, and often don’t let the people in their lives know how attached they are to playing the lottery.
The pathology of a lottery winner is slightly different than that of an ordinary player. The types of people who win the lottery look like liars. They could say, “I won x amount on a scratcher,” but just as easily and more believably have said that they were homeless. The lottery is a great equalizer in this way; it gives its winnings only to people who would never see such a sum of money in their lifetime and will have no ability to hang on to it. Winners of the lottery are not meticulous or pathological like those who play multiple times in a day. Mike’s grandmother, who once played numbers seventy times in a single day, never won more than twenty dollars.
The expectation of nothing is essential to the character of a lottery winner. Lottery winners let life wash over them; they buy a ticket once a day at most, a habit, not a ritual, like buying a coffee. Lottery winners are careless, detached, and typically unlucky in life right up to the point they scratch that winning ticket.
Mike would learn—as he left Village Convenience on an average day in late October and scratched the ticket with a quarter from his pocket—that he was a lottery winner. A lottery winner to the tune of $100,000. Which made sense, because he hadn’t been expecting it, and nothing meaningfully good had happened to him in a very long time, maybe ever. There was a moment where he couldn’t believe it, thought he’d read it wrong, added two or three extra zeroes. But the longer he looked at the number, the more he became convinced that not only was this real, it was divine; it was fate; he deserved it. All his years of waiting and drinking and failing and being alone were a test, elements of the universe conspiring to make him feel like it was hopeless, just to make it that much sweeter when he finally got his due. Mike’s ego ballooned outwards from this ticket, which itself was something flimsy and small, made to be tucked into a pocket, easy to be lost, hard to be won. But this time, he had won.
Even though the ticket was worth $100,000, after taxes, Mike only got to keep $68,000. The first thing he did with the money was pay off $16,000 of medical and insurance bills from when his car skidded into another car and off the road last winter; both he and the other driver broke bones. He was glad to clear his debt, but it felt more like resetting the deck and righting some injustice than a real win. It was New Hampshire, after all; people don’t take kindly to taxes, let alone insurance debt. Now he was down to $52,000, only slightly more than half the value of the original ticket. But still enough for something.
Mike thought about the last time he had gotten lucky or gotten laid and how maybe he never really knew himself, so he couldn’t really know what he wanted. He’d always thought he wanted money, but when he got it, he didn’t have a clue how to spend it. It made the drinking easier. It made him popular at the bar, too; he’d buy everybody a round. It didn’t make that feeling go away, the one he’d had all his life, that even though he stayed exactly in one place, he
was running, running toward nowhere from something like his bills or the cops on a drunk night. He quit his job as an air conditioner repairman, but after that, he didn’t know what to do with his time. He’d always washed his hair with bar soap, but now that he was rich, he decided to buy a set of shampoo and conditioner.
Mike watched a lot of TV—game shows, reality shows, The Price is Right, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, etc.—and he soon grew a dim awareness that the objective of each of these shows was to win money, usually the same sum of money he had already won. A life-changing sum of money. Contestants guessed the prices of vacuum cleaners and did inane challenges and answered what-is questions about thirteenth-century poetry, all to win what he had already won on that scratcher. He turned off the TV. Maybe he should buy a nicer TV, he thought; he could now. Maybe he should buy a nicer house, but that was too expensive. He should have won a million dollars, then he could really get something going.
He went to the casino and lost on slots but broke even at blackjack. He bet some on horses, some on greyhounds, anything that ran around a track. He wanted to double his money, maybe buy a piece of property, or a Rolex, or a nice car, all of which he realized were too expensive even with this life-changing sum of money. He met a woman at the casino bar and spent some buying her drinks. He had lost almost $5,000 that day—bringing his remaining money down to $42,000—but the win was new enough that this didn’t feel significant. What felt significant was the way this woman looked at him like he might be somebody. She was blonde and thin, definitely Irish, and told him she hadn’t won anything that day, but she wouldn’t let that stop her from playing again. He said “that’s the spirit” and asked her if she wanted to go back to his hotel room. He didn’t have a hotel room yet, but he could get one. He could do anything. He booked them a room at the casino resort with a California king bed. They made bony, unfamiliar
love all night, which neither one of them particularly enjoyed in the physical sense, but both of them relished the liminal excitement of sharing a bed with a stranger, the way it allowed them to pretend to be in love. She was gone in the morning. Mike ate a continental breakfast in the lobby alone. He hadn’t been in love in years.
Mike would never have done something like that before, but after winning the lottery, he had an easier time talking to women. An easier time telling troublesome men to go fuck themselves. He could look at himself in the mirror and convince himself that he’d lost a couple of pounds and it didn’t matter so much that he was going bald. He contemplated buying an exotic animal like a small monkey, but chickened out at the last moment. He considered taking up golf so he could eat lunch with all those country club types. But there was not a country club in Bethlehem because rich folks only came to town to stop for gas or snacks on their way to ski vacations. He thought about how in movies it seemed like fathers always sat their sons down and told them how to live. His father hadn’t been a talker, so maybe that was why Mike wasn’t sure of anything now.
He bought his mother a new microwave, a new couch, a set of highball glasses. He took his brother to Outback Steakhouse and got used to saying things like “it’s on me” and “I’ll pick up the tab.” His brother wanted to order the New York strip, but Mike insisted he get Victoria’s Filet Mignon & Lobster. “Hell, why don’t you get two lobsters!” he said, and wondered whether the pretty young waitress would consider sleeping with him. He started buying organic orange juice and premium-grade maple syrup, which usually sat untouched at Village Convenience. He bought a bottle of scotch that cost $399. It didn’t taste that much better than the cheap bourbon he usually drank, but he felt warmer drinking it, like yes, this was the stuff. He’d been missing out on stuff like this all his life, but he didn’t have to anymore.
Soon, however, Mike began to feel something strange, a pull toward something he couldn’t see, beyond Bethlehem and the cover of fog and mist, behind the evergreens, a desire he didn’t quite understand and couldn’t articulate. His world had always been small. There were many things he hadn’t done and would never do. He would never get on an airplane, never see the Pacific Ocean, never feel a dry desert heat or go someplace where the primary spoken language is not English. He would never experience a flood or a forest fire, or see a redwood tree or a cactus. He would never own a second home or go to college. He would never grow old with somebody.
Mike thought about his old girlfriend, Kate, and how he would go about getting her back.
She was an elementary school teacher. He imagined showing up at the school and telling her, “I’m rich now. I love you. It’ll be different this time.” It was honest and hopeless, and she wouldn’t believe him. They broke up six years ago. He hadn’t been in a real relationship since. But Mike began to fixate on her; he began to think that something might be possible again. He thought of Kate when he heard a microwave ding, when he saw a Subaru, or heard a bad pop song on the radio, or cooked pasta sauce using tomato paste. He thought of her when the snow turned to brown slush underneath his boots and when he cleaned the grout on the wall of the shower. He thought of her when he saw turquoise dresses or colorful bedspreads, like in the window of a store, or when somebody at the pub ordered a vodka martini and didn’t eat the olives. He remembered being young and dark bars and long windy nights that hurt your ears. He thought of her when he imagined being forgiven.
When Kate had first ended things with him, Mike tried to change her mind. But halfway through begging her to take him back, a feeling spread through his body, the same one he got when he saw expensive trucks or vacationers going on ski trips he could never afford. A slow
and dumb epiphany washed over him; there was nothing he could do or say to change the outcome, to convince her to do the thing that he wanted her to, no matter how badly he wanted it. The feeling became an ache in his body, like stretching or drowning. Even though he loved her, he could not convince her to love him back. Love is one of the few acts that it is impossible to convince another person to perform against their will.
After they had split up, Mike drank too much, went to work—a lot of air conditioners broke in Bethlehem during the summers—visited his mother, went through the motions. When he had some extra cash, he visited the local strip joint. He hired a prostitute once, but she wasn’t very good because she was on crystal meth. He was lonely, but he did not know it, which is better than being lonely and knowing it. He had wanted to leave town after they broke up, but he didn’t know where to go, so he stayed and hoped that maybe she would go. He liked picturing her in some new place. He imagined Kate seeing a waterfall or a cover of snow on an unfamiliar road. He couldn’t have put any of this into words, but he did feel it. He thought about the phrase “if you love something, set it free,” and pictured a brown horse running at full speed through a field. The scene he imagined was Western—the mountains in the background looked like the Rockies, and the field was vast and low—even though he had never been out West himself and never would. He hadn’t cared about that at the time. He began to care about it now.
Mike used his lottery money to fill Bethlehem with more, but he couldn’t bring himself to use it to take him somewhere else. He bought a snowmobile, a big, expensive one from a catalog. Then, after thinking it over, he bought a second snowmobile so that Kate could ride one next to him if he ever successfully won her back. These purchases totaled a little over $20,000 and brought his lottery winnings down to $19,000. Mike had always envied moneyed men. But his real envy was for their freedom and mobility, not the souped-up trucks they flaunted it in. He
hadn’t been able to work this distinction out for himself, so now he lived in Bethlehem with two snowmobiles and no more debt and not much else that he could imagine wanting, buying, or doing.
Mike’s mother had also lived in Bethlehem her entire life. Her house was small and cramped, and Mike wished he had enough money to buy her a new one, but there were limits to this thing, and property seemed to be one of them. His mother’s house looked the way all Irish widows’ houses looked in this part of the country. There were conflicting patterns of faded flowers on the armchairs, lamp shades, and wallpaper. There were portraits of Catholic saints and Gaelic crosses oppressing the room. The mantel held the customary photograph of her late husband, Mike’s father, ensuring all visitors knew that he was unhappy with his wife and children even in death. The new couch Mike had bought her was lime green and stuck out like a beacon. His mother was sitting in the old armchair, him on the couch. They were watching Jeopardy.
“Do you like your new microwave?” he asked.
“Ehh, there are too many buttons.” She took a drag of her Camel.
Like many mothers of her age and disposition, she was perpetually disappointed with her son, whom she had not raised to be particularly smart or responsible. She had not raised him to be much of anything, but when he grew up to be nothing, she was disappointed nonetheless in a chagrined way that eschewed all responsibility.
“Do you remember Kate?” he asked. “The schoolteacher?”
“Yeah.”
“The one your brother went out with?”
“No, Ma, I went out with her. She was my girlfriend.” “Are you sure?”
“Yes.” He began fiddling with the tassel of a throw pillow.
“THIS U.S. CITY NOW HAS 10 TIMES THE POPULATION OF THE OTHER U.S.
CITY FOR WHICH IT WAS NAMED IN 1845” flashed in white text on the blue screen. “What is Portland,” said his mother.
The question was worth $300 on TV, but she only knew the answer because it was a
rerun.
“Which Portland?” Mike asked. “Fishermen or fags?” “Fags, I think.”
“What’s the most money someone ever won on this show, Ma?”
“Four point nine million dollars,” she answered, and then gave Mike an irrationally pointed look.
She was not proud of Mike for winning the lottery because it was not an accomplishment, although she didn’t have many of her own to show. She would say that her sons were her biggest accomplishment, and grit her teeth before saying it. One son owned a snowplow business and was still young enough to find a wife; the other had won the lottery and was a lost cause entirely.
“Have you sat on the couch yet?” he asked.
She shook her head. Mike bit the inside of his cheek and thought about all the impotent things he could but really could not and would never say to his mother.
It was the coldest day so far that year, the day before the first storm. Unlike other years, Mike could afford to turn the heat up in his house as high as it would go. He told his mother to turn her heat up, too, said he’d pay for it, but she hadn’t, and the house was an unbearable
fifty-five degrees. Outside, the bare trees stood stock-still, bracing themselves; the air got thinner, too, like the sky was holding its breath in anticipation of the storm.
When the snow came, as it did every year, all the residents of Bethlehem woke up with the unique knowledge that the world was theirs alone. The frost covered everything, coated doorjambs and handles, iced them into their houses and out of their cars. The snow piled up outside of doors feet high, and nobody could see anything except what was right in front of them. Mike told himself that it would be warm again someday soon, that it happened every year. Most people in this part of the world seemed to forget this each time, and the cold came at them like a big surprise, even though they had lived in New Hampshire for generations. Everything was white, but a dull white, the color some people paint their second bathrooms. The sun shone through the cloud cover like a blinking light that did not look like the sun at all; it looked like the deep yellow flashers on those statie trucks that do road repairs. It almost looked like lightning, but not quite—too subdued, no flash. On particularly gray winter days, nobody could tell whether it was snowing or sleeting or raining or some other foggy thing entirely.
It was the end of December by now. Mike had spent the month sitting in plastic lawn chairs under his porch lights, watching the darkness slowly cover the snow in his yard, feeling the temperature drop and drop and drop until his hands were so cold he couldn’t even smoke with gloves on. He stared at the snowmobiles as he did this, but couldn’t get himself to ride them. He had not yet formulated a plan to win Kate back. He was, perhaps, not a person cut out for love the way other people seemed to understand it. But he still thought this time could be different. This time, he had something up his sleeve besides love; he had nearly $20,000 left.
He considered buying a limousine and showing up at Kate’s school to ask her to marry him. He wanted to get the girl. The hero has to get the girl. And why would he, out of all the
people who played the lottery, have won this money if he wasn’t the hero? But things like never giving up on love or pining in secret for years or dying of a broken heart only work out in movies; in real life, they get you slapped with a restraining order or involuntarily committed. He thought about endings in romantic comedies and wondered whether he could pull one off. It always seemed to him that those guys were completely doomed right up until the last moment. But those guys had not waited six years. He used the last of his lottery winnings to buy the limousine just in case and decided to wait even longer. The Powerball that winter reached 1.8 billion dollars. But Mike’s luck had run out.
It was difficult to maneuver the limousine around the winding roads of Bethlehem, especially when they were covered in ice. The limo had four-wheel drive, but because of its length and shape, the effect was negligible. Mike did not, of course, realize that driving the limo instead of sitting in the back did not make him like a rich man but like an employee, a rich man’s chauffeur. Nobody in Bethlehem had the heart or the wherewithal to point this out to him. The purchase ate up the last of his lottery money, and he was now $4,000 deep into his own savings and verging on more debt. He had this recurring dream where he was in the backseat of a car, and the car had no driver. He knew that he was supposed to be driving, and the car was going to run off the road if he didn’t get up to the front seat. But there was some invisible force field preventing him from doing so. The car always eventually swerved into a ditch or a tree or another car or, worst of all, a pedestrian. Then he would wake up. He never understood what the dream meant. He still hasn’t figured it out.
It was as if the lottery win never happened at all. Mike was unprepared for it—the ache he would feel for the rest of his life and the realization that the money had not relieved it, even
temporarily. He knew he would do it differently if he had the chance to do it again. But there was no other way it could have gone.
Mike parked his limo in front of Village Convenience. He’d considered selling it to settle his debt, but couldn’t get himself to; it felt like giving up. Kate entered the store. She was there to buy a box of Kraft mac and cheese, two scratch tickets, and a bottle of Barefoot red wine. She never played the lottery herself, had none of the necessary traits of a lottery player or winner.
Kate bought scratchers as gifts for her coworker, Martha, a characteristically wide school administrator. Martha was a quintessential lottery player, and Kate—as somebody distant from the whole enterprise and pathology—did not understand the importance of lottery players’ rituals. Because of this, her frequent gifts went unscratched by Martha. If Martha were to win money on a gifted scratcher, custom would dictate that she had to give some or half of those winnings to Kate, the original ticket purchaser. This prospect sullied the whole ordeal for Martha, who would never know that she had $35,000 unscratched in the back of her junk drawer, underneath coupons for soup, an office Secret Santa gift from Kate a couple of years back.
Mike was in front of Kate in the checkout line, buying a scratch ticket and nothing else. “Mike?” she asked. “Is that you?”
“Kate?”
He’d dreamt of this moment for years, and of course, it had to happen now, after he’d already run through all the money. He wondered why things were so unfair and whether he was cursed because nothing ever worked out for him. He wondered if the ticket he was holding now was another winner; then everything would finally be all right.
“Are you a limo driver now? Whose is that?” She pointed out the window at Mike’s limousine, which was parked horizontally across all four spaces.
“It’s mine.” It was all going wrong.
Kate smiled one of those vague smiles usually directed at waiters and hotel busboys. “You ever win anything?” She gestured at the scratcher in Mike’s hand.
They had not spoken in almost seven years; Kate did not think of him often.
“What?” He couldn’t stop looking at the small scar above her lip and trying to work out if it had been there the last time he saw her.
In the months since losing the money, Mike had become a compulsive lottery player of the same ilk as his grandmother. He bought a scratcher, sometimes multiple, every day, increasing the scope of his loss incrementally.
He contemplated not telling Kate that he’d ever won, but after studying her face for what may have been over thirty seconds, deciding that she was even more beautiful now than she used to be, and quickly imagining a life in which they had grown old together, he said, “Yeah, about six months ago, I won a hundred grand.”
“What did you do with the money?” She cocked her head, adopting the voice she generally reserved for behaviorally challenged students.
“It didn’t last.”
“Luck of the Irish,” Kate said.
She didn’t believe him. Mike nodded and turned away.
It hadn’t gone the way he thought it would—no swell of music, no strike of lightning, not even a follow-up question. Kate put her groceries on the counter and watched the cashier scan the items. Mike left Village Convenience, ticket in hand. This one would not be a winner.
Nobody wins the lottery twice.
