We never really believed any of it. That was the fun of it. Two dollars a week for a little bit of hope and a lot of laughs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Then, on a Saturday morning in March, Rosa called me screaming so loud I had to hold the phone away from my ear.<\/p>\n
“Bren! Bren! Did you check the numbers? We got five! We got all five white balls!”<\/p>\n
The Friday night drawing had five matching white balls but not the Powerball. That is the second prize. One million dollars.<\/mark><\/p>\n The four of us met at Rosa’s house that Saturday afternoon. We were giddy. Hector brought a cheap bottle of champagne. Walt actually smiled. Rosa’s grandkids ran around the living room screaming because the grown-ups were screaming.<\/p>\n We called Dot to come celebrate. She didn’t answer. We called again. And again.<\/p>\n Finally, around six o’clock, she called me back.<\/p>\n “Bren,” she said, and her voice was strange. Too calm. “I need to tell you something, and I need you to listen.”<\/p>\n She said that the week’s winning ticket was not in the coffee can.<\/p>\n She said that on Friday, when she went to buy the pool ticket, she realized the can was short. Somebody hadn’t put in their two dollars that week. So instead of buying the pool ticket, she said, she bought a ticket with her own money, using our usual numbers, for herself.<\/p>\n “It’s my ticket, Bren,” she said. “I paid for it. I’m sorry. I know it’s hard. But it’s mine.”<\/p>\n I didn’t say anything for a long time. Then I said, “Dot, we’ve been playing those numbers for eleven years. Those are our numbers.”<\/p>\n “Numbers don’t belong to anybody,” she said. And she hung up.<\/p>\n I sat on Rosa’s couch with my phone in my lap, and all four of them looked at my face, and the champagne went flat in the glasses.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n On Monday morning, Dot did not come to work. On Wednesday, we learned that she had claimed the prize at the Ohio Lottery office in Toledo. Two weeks later, she turned in her retirement papers.<\/p>\n The coffee can was still on top of the refrigerator. Inside it, there was one old losing ticket from February, and nothing else.<\/p>\n The four of us were heartbroken, and we were angry. But more than that, we were confused. We had all put our money in that can every Friday. Hadn’t we?<\/p>\n Rosa was the one who finally said it out loud. “Was it me? Did I forget? I’ve been so tired with the kids.”<\/p>\n Hector shook his head. “I put mine in. I remember because I only had a five and I took three out as change.”<\/p>\n Walt said quietly, “I put in four dollars that week. Two for me and two for Rosa. She was at her granddaughter’s school thing.”<\/p>\n Rosa started to cry. “Walt, you never told me that.”<\/p>\n “Didn’t need to,” he said, and shrugged.<\/p>\n So the can had not been short. It had been full.<\/p>\n We pooled more money, this time three thousand dollars, split four ways, and hired a lawyer. His name was Mr. Feldman, an older attorney with an office downtown near the courthouse.<\/p>\n He listened to the whole story and was kind but honest.<\/p>\n “Lottery pools are generally treated as informal agreements,” he said. “Courts have enforced them when there’s evidence of the agreement and that the winning ticket was bought for the pool. But that’s the problem. You have no written agreement. You have no copy of the ticket. Mrs. Kessler says she bought it with her own money. It’s your word against hers.<\/mark>”<\/p>\n “There are four of us,” I said.<\/p>\n “And one of her,” he said, “who happens to be holding a million-dollar ticket that she’s already claimed. Without proof the ticket was in the pool, a judge may not see it your way. I’d hate for you to spend money you don’t have on a case you can’t prove.”<\/p>\n We walked out of his office into a cold March rain, four factory workers who had just paid three thousand dollars to be told we had nothing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n For a week, nobody talked about it at lunch. The break room was quiet. Somebody moved the coffee can into a cabinet. I think we all felt foolish, like we’d been dreaming a silly dream and somebody had shaken us awake.<\/p>\n Walt was quieter than ever. He had been counting on that money more than any of us, though he would never say so. His wife Marion had died of cancer two years earlier, and he was still paying off her hospital bills. More than forty thousand dollars. He worked overtime every week to chip away at them.<\/p>\n Then, on a Thursday at lunch, Rosa suddenly put down her sandwich and stared at Walt.<\/p>\n “Walt,” she said. “Your phone.”<\/p>\n He looked at her blankly.<\/p>\n “Your flip phone,” she said. “Every Monday, when Dot put the ticket in the can, you took a picture of it. Don’t you remember? We used to tease you about it. You said Marion told you to.”<\/p>\n Walt slowly reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out his old silver flip phone. The thing was ancient. We had all begged him for years to get a smartphone.<\/p>\n “Marion always said, ‘Walter, take a picture, just in case,'” he said. “So I did. Every week.”<\/p>\n “Did you ever delete them?” Hector asked.<\/p>\n Walt looked insulted. “I don’t know how to delete them,” he said.<\/p>\n We all looked at each other. And for the first time in two weeks, I felt my heart start to beat faster.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Walt didn’t know how to get the pictures off the phone, so after our shift, Hector drove him home to dig out the charger cord and an old laptop Walt’s grandson had left behind.<\/p>\n At eleven o’clock that night, my phone rang. It was Walt. He never called anyone after eight.<\/p>\n “Bren,” he said. His voice was shaking. “I found it. The one from March. But it ain’t the numbers I’m calling about.”<\/p>\n Walt’s flip phone held five hundred and seventy-two photos of lottery tickets. Eleven years of Mondays. Grainy, slightly blurry, each one taken on the break room counter under the fluorescent lights.<\/p>\n For most of those years, he had taken one picture: the front of the ticket. But about four years earlier, he started taking two. The front and the back. When I asked him why, he shrugged and said, “Marion’s idea. Just in case.”<\/p>\n The March photo of the front showed the ticket clearly. Our numbers. The date of the Friday drawing. The gas station on Airport Highway. It matched the winning numbers exactly.<\/p>\n But the second photo, the back, was the one that made Walt call me at eleven at night.<\/p>\n On the back of every pool ticket, for as long as any of us could remember, Dot had written our initials in blue ink. She did it so nobody could ever argue whose ticket it was. It was her rule. She was an accountant, after all.<\/p>\n The March ticket had the same thing. Clear as day, in Dot’s own neat, curly handwriting:<\/p>\n POOL. B.S. W.P. R.D. H.R. D.K.<\/mark><\/p>\n And under that, the date. 3\/14<\/mark>.<\/p>\n Dot had claimed she bought that ticket for herself. But in her own handwriting, on the back of the ticket, she had written all five of our names.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Hector drove the laptop to my house first thing in the morning. Rosa came over in her work clothes. We sat at my kitchen table, crowded around that little screen, and looked at the photo for a long time.<\/p>\n “She wrote our names,” Rosa whispered. “She wrote my name. And then she took it.”<\/p>\n Nobody said anything for a while. I think we were all feeling the same thing. Not triumph. Grief. Dot had been our friend for eleven years. She had brought Rosa’s grandkids birthday presents. She had sat with Walt at Marion’s funeral.<\/p>\n Walt finally spoke. “She must’ve been in some kind of trouble,” he said. “Dot’s not like that.”<\/p>\n I wanted to believe him.<\/p>\n We brought the photos to Mr. Feldman the next day.<\/p>\n He looked at them for a long time. He had his assistant blow them up and print them. He held the printout of the back of the ticket under his desk lamp.<\/p>\n “This,” he said, “is a very different case.”<\/p>\n He explained that the photos showed the ticket bought for the drawing, with the pool members’ initials written on the back, apparently in the hand of the person who held it. Walt’s phone also had the date and time each photo was taken, and four years of identical photos showing Dot’s habit of writing the initials on every pool ticket.<\/p>\n “It’s strong evidence that this ticket was bought for the pool,” Mr. Feldman said. “Not her personal ticket. If she cashed it, she may have to account to the rest of you for your share.”<\/p>\n He sent Dot a letter. It was polite but firm. It included copies of the photos. It asked her to contact him within thirty days to resolve the matter, or he would file a lawsuit on our behalf.<\/p>\n Ten days later, Dot’s lawyer called. Then, the next day, Dot called me herself.<\/p>\n She was crying.<\/p>\n “Bren,” she said. “Can we meet? Just you and me. Please. I owe you an explanation. I owe everyone an explanation.”<\/p>\n I almost said no. I wanted to say no. But I had known Dot for twenty years, and I wanted to look her in the eye when she told me why.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n We met at a Bob Evans on Reynolds Road. Neutral ground. She was already sitting in a booth when I got there. She had lost weight. Her cardigan was buttoned wrong.<\/p>\n For a long time, Dot just stirred her coffee. Then she started talking, and she didn’t stop for nearly an hour.<\/p>\n She told me that her son, Kyle, was forty and had been in trouble for years. Bad investments, bad business partners, and debts he had hidden from his wife. A year earlier, he had borrowed against Dot’s house, with her as a co-signer, and then fallen behind on the payments. The bank had sent a notice. Dot was facing the possibility of losing the home she and her late husband had bought in 1981.<\/p>\n “I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I couldn’t tell anyone. I was so ashamed.”<\/p>\n When she checked the numbers that Saturday morning and saw that we had won, her first feeling was joy. She meant to call us. She swore she did.<\/p>\n Then she called Kyle to tell him. And Kyle said, “Mom, nobody has to know. It’s your ticket. You bought it. You could save the house.”<\/p>\n “He told me what to say,” Dot said. “About the can being short. He said nobody could prove anything. He said you’d all be angry for a while and then get over it.”<\/p>\n She looked up at me with red eyes.<\/p>\n “I forgot I wrote your names on the back, Bren. I forgot. I wrote them on every ticket for eleven years without even thinking about it. It was just habit.”<\/p>\n “You wrote our names because you knew it was ours,” I said. “Your hand remembered what your heart forgot.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n She put her face in her hands and sobbed in the middle of the Bob Evans, and an elderly couple in the next booth pretended very hard not to notice.<\/p>\n “I paid off Kyle’s loan,” she said. “I saved my house. Most of the money is still there. I’ll give you everything I can. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”<\/p>\n With the lawyers’ help, it was settled in mediation within two months. There was no trial.<\/p>\n After federal and state taxes had been withheld, the million-dollar prize had come to a little over seven hundred thousand dollars. Dot had used part of it to pay off the loan on her house. She agreed to pay each of the four of us our equal one-fifth share, about $140,000 each<\/mark>, and to cover our legal fees. To make up the difference, she took a mortgage on her paid-off house.<\/p>\n She kept her own one-fifth share and nothing more.<\/p>\n When the papers were signed, Dot asked to speak to all of us together. We met in Mr. Feldman’s conference room. She stood in front of the four of us like a child in the principal’s office.<\/p>\n “I don’t expect you to forgive me,” she said. “I just want you to know that I’m sorry. And Walt, I’m sorrier to you than anybody. I sat with you at Marion’s funeral, and then I did this.”<\/p>\n Walt had been quiet the whole time. Then he did something none of us expected.<\/p>\n He stood up, walked around the table, and hugged her.<\/p>\n “Marion would’ve told you to take a picture, just in case,” he said. “Next time, listen to her.”<\/p>\n Dot laughed and cried at the same time.<\/p>\n I’m not sure I could have done what Walt did that day. But I have thought about it every day since.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Dot moved to Indiana that summer to be near her sister. She sends Christmas cards to all four of us. Mine always has the same handwritten note at the bottom: Thank you for letting me make it right.<\/mark><\/p>\n I’ve heard that Kyle is in counseling and that he and his wife are working on things. I hope that’s true.<\/p>\n The money didn’t change our lives the way lottery money does in the movies. But it changed them in the ways that mattered.<\/p>\n Walt paid off every penny of Marion’s hospital bills the week the check cleared. Then he bought a used fishing boat, a little fourteen-footer with a trolling motor, exactly like he always said he would. He named it Just In Case<\/mark>. He takes it out on Lake Erie every Saturday morning, and he takes Rosa’s grandkids out with him at least twice a month.<\/p>\n Rosa bought a house. A small brick three-bedroom in Point Place with a big fenced yard. For the first time, each of her three grandkids has a room of their own. She still drives a forklift at Hendricks because, as she says, “I like it, and the kids still eat a lot.”<\/p>\n Hector did not buy a hair transplant. He put most of his money into his two daughters’ college funds and the rest into his retirement account. He still tells terrible jokes.<\/p>\n As for me, I paid off my car, put most of the rest in savings for retirement, and bought one thing just for me: a big, ugly, wonderfully comfortable recliner with not one but two cup holders.<\/p>\n I named it Dot. I’m not entirely sure why.<\/p>\n Maybe it’s because a recliner holds you up when you’re tired. And for eleven good years before one bad one, that’s what Dot did for all of us.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The coffee can is back on top of the break room refrigerator at Hendricks Tool and Die. There are six of us in the pool now. A young welder named Tyrell joined last year. Every Monday, Walt takes a picture of the front and the back of the ticket with his flip phone.<\/p>\n And every Monday, before the ticket goes in the can, all six of us sign the back of it ourselves.<\/p>\n I share our story because millions of people play in office lottery pools. Most of them are like ours were: two dollars, a coffee can, and a lot of trust.<\/p>\n Most of the time, that trust is enough. But sometimes, when life gets hard and a lot of money shows up all at once, good people make bad choices.<\/p>\n So here is what we learned:<\/p>\n Put your pool agreement in writing.<\/mark> It doesn’t need to be fancy. A single page listing who’s in the pool, how much each person pays, and how winnings will be split, signed by everyone.<\/p>\n Make copies or take photos of every ticket, front and back,<\/mark> and share them with all members before the drawing. A group text works fine.<\/p>\n Have everyone sign or initial the back of the ticket, not just the person who buys it.<\/p>\n And if someone in your pool is quietly struggling, check on them. Dot was drowning for months before she ever touched that ticket. None of us noticed.<\/p>\n A million dollars almost destroyed five friends. An old flip phone and a dead woman’s advice saved us.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Walt still won’t get a smartphone. We’ve stopped asking. Marion was right about the flip phone, and he says he’s not going to argue with her now.<\/p>\n Every Friday at lunch, we still talk about what we’d buy if we won the big one. Walt says a bigger boat. Rosa says a swimming pool for the kids. Hector says a hair transplant, for real this time.<\/p>\n And I say I’d buy a second recliner, so Walt has somewhere to sit when he comes over to watch the Mud Hens game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dot kept our lottery tickets in a coffee can on the break room fridge for eleven years. When our numbers finally hit for a million dollars, she swore that week’s … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10733,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9114],"tags":[61,18992,63,18994,6295,308,919,18989,325,18991,18990,79,2140,18993,1016],"class_list":["post-10746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-career-workplace","tag-betrayal","tag-coworkers","tag-evidence","tag-factory-workers","tag-flip-phone","tag-friendship","tag-lawsuit","tag-lottery-pool","tag-lottery-win","tag-office-pool","tag-powerball","tag-second-chances","tag-settlement","tag-toledo-ohio","tag-workplace-drama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theviralstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theviralstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theviralstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theviralstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theviralstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10746"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/theviralstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10782,"href":"https:\/\/theviralstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10746\/revisions\/10782"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theviralstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theviralstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theviralstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theviralstory.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}PART 2 \u2014 DOT’S PHONE CALL<\/h2>\n
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PART 3 \u2014 THE LAWYER<\/h2>\n
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PART 4 \u2014 WHAT ROSA REMEMBERED<\/h2>\n
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PART 5 \u2014 THE BACK OF THE TICKET<\/h2>\n
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PART 6 \u2014 THE LETTER<\/h2>\n
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PART 7 \u2014 DOT’S EXPLANATION<\/h2>\n
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PART 8 \u2014 MAKING IT RIGHT<\/h2>\n
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PART 9 \u2014 WHAT WE DID WITH IT<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nPART 10 \u2014 WHAT WE LEARNED<\/h2>\n
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