Name: Split Ticket
Author: Charles Meyer

A lottery ticket doesn't look like a love letter.

It looks like two dollars and six numbers on a slip of thermal paper. It looks like a chore — someone's job, bought on the way home, filed in a drawer with all the others that lost. For twenty years in East Wendell, New Hampshire, that was Gordon Coolbroth's job. Every Wednesday and Saturday. Same numbers. Same counter. Same quiet act of keeping faith with something he couldn't quite name.

Then his wife asked for a divorce over coffee she never drank, and he said okay, and drew up a list of the pans.

Split Ticket is the story of what happens when two people — officially, legally, finally finished — each drive to a different store on the same weekend and play the same six numbers. And both tickets win.

What follows is not a courtroom drama, though there is a lawyer with a whiteboard. It is not a love story, exactly, though there are two people in a diner booth who haven't really looked at each other in years. It is something rarer: a story about the things we do faithfully and quietly for decades, never quite understanding why — until the moment when continuing or stopping means everything.

Gordon kept every losing ticket in a drawer, rubber-banded by month. Helen didn't know what to do with a ring and a dead begonia on a windowsill. Their daughter brought groceries instead of saying what she felt. And somewhere in a convenience store called Dacey's Market, a man named Randy watched all of it unfold from behind an upside-down name tag and knew more than any of them gave him credit for.

There is a question at the center of Split Ticket that has nothing to do with money. It is the question Gordon started writing on a legal pad and couldn't finish past the first letter. It is the question Helen answered at seven-fifteen in the morning by doing, for the first time in fifteen years, the thing that had always been Gordon's job.

Don't let this one go unread. Some stories ask what you're worth. This one asks what you've been keeping — and why.

Read the opening

At eleven forty-seven on a Friday night in August, Gordon Coolbroth stood at the counter of Dacey’s Market on Route 4 and bought what he believed was the last lottery ticket of his marriage.

He had planned it. Gordon planned most things. He had planned the drive over, the parking space, third from the door, and the exact minute, because Roger Haskins, his lawyer, had told him the divorce would be over at midnight. His Wednesday-night ticket was always the one for Saturday, so he had skipped Wednesday, and this would be his only ticket in Saturday’s drawing.

“Midnight Friday,” Roger had said that afternoon on the phone, in the voice he used for good news and invoices. “You’re on the judge’s Friday list. She signs today, the paperwork goes through, and as of midnight you’re a free man. Nobody knows what hour a judge signs, so I always tell clients midnight. People like a clean line.”

Gordon did not feel like a free man. He felt like a man in a convenience store at a quarter to twelve, under lights that buzzed, in air that smelled of burnt coffee and the pine tree hanging from the register.

“The usual?” said Randy.

Randy had worked the night counter at Dacey’s for nineteen years. He had a ponytail that had gone gray without asking his permission and a name tag he wore upside down, on principle, though nobody had ever found out which principle.

“The usual,” Gordon said.

“Four, eleven, seventeen, twenty-three, thirty-five, thirty-seven.” Randy punched them in without looking. “You know I could do these in my sleep. I have done them in my sleep. My wife says I mutter thirty-seven.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“She thinks it’s another woman.” Randy tore the ticket off the machine. “I told her it’s a man named Gordon who never wins.”

Split Ticket

Read the opening

More by Charles Meyer

Split Ticket