Monday:

Mona brought it up this morning as I was looking over some figures, and I’m afraid I reacted badly.

“Samuel,” she said. “Want to join the lottery pool?”

Those pills I’ve been taking since Father passed were making me testy. I think that was it.

“What?” I snapped. “Why?”

Mona took a half step back and glanced at the floor.

“Well, the jackpot’s pretty high, and having you in the pool will increase our odds.”

Odds, she says. Like she knows.

Odds are my specialty. I’m an actuary. It’s my job to look at people like you, have you answer some questions—do you smoke? drive? work near farm equipment? gun in the house? heart attack in the family?—and then determine how likely it is you’ll be dead this time next year. Then I pass my figures down the hall and someone, based mostly on your bank account, I’m afraid, tells you how much your insurance will cost.

“Mona, the odds against winning the lottery are astronomical,” I said. “Adding me to your pool will hardly make them better.”

Still she wouldn’t leave.

“Maybe not,” she said, “But it’d be fun, wouldn’t it?”

Lucky for her, Ryan from Sales rolled into my office.

“You in the pool, Samuel? Drawing’s at seven Friday. We’ll already be partying on the boat, you know? When we win I plan to buy that boat and sail it home. And then I’ll buy the dock when I get there too.”

And out the door he went, sailing only his Aeron for the moment.

“That’s right,” said Mona, “The company outing! We can check our tickets on the boat! I wonder if it has Wi-Fi?”

She caught me writing and tapped her fingernails on my desk.

“Besides, Samuel, what if we won? We’d all be millionaires. Wouldn’t you be jealous?”

I put the pencil down and rubbed the bridge of my nose.

“No, Mona, I’d be happy for you,” I said, turning to look at her. “And maybe then you’d all quit and I could get some work done around here.”

Now that I’m home, I regret my tone. It was the medication, I’m sure of it. The doctor said it would take awhile to find the correct dosage. I hope tomorrow will be better. If it is, I may even join Mona’s lottery pool. Just to show her I’m okay, of course, that the time off following Father’s death helped. Not because I think we’ll win.

Odds like that are hard to beat.

Tuesday:

Mona wasn’t even angry. In fact, when I apologized she was more concerned about my potato salad than my behavior the day before.

“No, Mona, I’d be happy for you,” I said, turning to look at her. “And maybe then you’d all quit and I could get some work done around here.”

“You’re sure you’ll remember?” she asked. “I’m sorry to pester, Samuel, but I know everyone on the team really likes potato salad, and you don’t usually volunteer for stuff so I just want to make sure.”

She’s right. Before Father passed I would never even have gone let alone offered to bring something to the office outing, a so-called Booze Cruise on the bay. But I’d promised both last week, attendance and potato salad, my attempt at “fitting in to reduce stress and build healthy, supportive relationships” as recommended by my doctor.

“Of course I will,” I assured her. I was feeling extremely positive this morning. I think my medication has finally leveled out.

“Do you keep the skins on? Personally I love having the skins in potato salad but I know some people think it’s too much. And red potatoes or white? Though if you take the skin off I guess it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Mona, I’ll make the potato salad any way you’d like,” I said. That medication really did have me feeling good. I may be ready to start the other pills tonight. “But right now I wanted to ask you about the lottery pool.”

“Great! You want to play, Samuel?”

“I do, but I’m wondering when you’ll need my numbers.”

“Your numbers?”

“Yes. Do you need them now or just before we buy the tickets?”

“What numbers?”

“The numbers we’re playing, Mona,” I said, smiling. Not a trace of frustration. This medicine is wonderful. “The ones we’re hoping the lottery people will draw on Friday.”

“Oh, those numbers!” she said. “We let the computer pick them.”

Now, as I mentioned, I deal with odds every day. Here’s one I bet you didn’t know: over the average lifespan your odds of being killed by a vending machine are one in 112 million. True fact.

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Every day I consider numbers like that. And no matter how unlikely being killed by a vending machine may seem, no matter how high that 112 million looks, it’s the one that precedes it that concerns me most. Because that one means someone somewhere will fall prey to a vending machine eventually. And it could be my client.

But, as I realized on the way to work this morning, no matter how high the odds, the one is in the bouncing Ping-Pong balls they use to pick the lottery just as much as it’s in that killer vending machine, wherever it is. Isn’t it? I mean, if enough tickets are purchased someone eventually has to win it, right?

Ha! See? I told you I was feeling positive today.

What’s more—and I know better than most—odds can be improved.

Afraid of lightning? There’s a one in 1,107,143 chance you’ll be struck in a given year. Live in Montana and it’s worse, one in 249,550. But move to California, and your odds improve to one in 7,538,382.

Location can tweak the odds. And so can quantities.

Look at this: Your odds of winning the MuchoMillions drawing are one in 175,711,536. But buy another ticket and your odds improve to two in 175,711,536, which equals one in 87,855,768. See? You just doubled your chances. And it keeps going like that. Three tickets? That’s three in 175,711,536, or one in 58,570,512. It just keeps getting better. Get five tickets and the odds improve to one in 35,142,307.

Still a long shot, I know, but remember the one’s out there. And if there’s a chance choosing the right numbers could help flush it out, I’ve decided I’m not going to give up that chance. Besides, I have a few ideas I think might tilt the odds even more in our favor.

“Mona,” I said. “Why don’t you let me buy the tickets this week? I’d really like to do it.”

“Samuel! You’re such the volunteer all of a sudden. Are you sure you’ll remember to get them on top of bringing the potato salad?”

“I’m sure, Mona.” I raised my hand Boy Scout-style. “I’ll meet you at the dock, tickets and potato salad in hand. I promise.”

“Alright, it’s a deal.” she said. “I’ll collect the money Thursday afternoon and you’ll just need to buy the tickets before we get on the boat Friday morning.

“Thanks, Samuel. You’re full of surprises this week.”

Wednesday:

By midmorning I was beginning to think adding the new medication had been a mistake. While the first pills, the light blue capsules, were meant to elevate my mood, to lift me out of the fog I’d been living in since discovering Father, these new pills, the little red ones, are supposed to give me focus, to keep me centered and on task.

I was focused after taking them this morning, all right, but mainly on how much my coworkers were distracting me from what I really wanted to be doing—figuring out the lottery numbers we should play.

On and on they went with their asinine chatter, already spending money they somehow knew they were going to win though they were doing nothing at all to help make it happen.

“You know the way that monorail at Disney just goes right through that hotel? That’s how I want my go-kart track to be. Just, like, right through the living room of my mansion and back out into the yard.”

Ryan from Sales again, as if you couldn’t guess. At least Mark, his fellow from Sales, had slightly elevated, if no less ridiculous, tastes.

“I’m gonna fill a swimming pool with champagne,” he said. “Nothing cheap either, Dom Perignon or Cristal or something like that, and I’ll dive in and float around and just open my mouth and swill it down.”

“That’s disgusting,” said Mona. “You’d get bugs and hair and, like, toenails and stuff in it.”

“Oh yeah? What’ll you do if we win, Mona?”

“Simple, Matt. I’ll buy a mega-yacht and host the world’s most fashionable nonstop 24-hour, year-round floating dance party,” she said. “We’ll sail wherever it’s warm and all the famous stars will want to fly in on their helicopters to be seen during their time off between movies, and I’ll be the hostess.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so, Mona,” said Mark. “I’ll stick with the boat we’re taking on the outing Friday. You keep your nomadic rave barge or whatever.”

“Good,” she said. “Because you weren’t invited.”

Even Becky the receptionist, whom I’ll admit I’ve always been rather fond of, got involved.

“I’d pay off my mom’s house and buy myself an electric car so I wouldn’t have to ride the bus anymore,” she said. “And then I’d buy every single shelter dog in the state and let them all live with me.”

All this while I was trying to ensure these idiotic fantasies could become realities. God help me.

I finally pleaded a headache and left early. I was scheduled for the second dose of the new medication and considering my mood today, I figured it’d be best to be home and comfortable when I took it. No matter what happens, it has to be an improvement on this wasted day.

Thursday:

It was a few minutes after 7:30 last night when I realized what I’d done.

I’d rushed out of the office, frustrated and angry with my coworkers and their stupidity. I took my blue pill and the new red one with the last inch of coffee in my cup as I walked out the door, figuring traffic would be so bad it’d be time for my next dose before I reached home. But then, miracle of miracles, the highway was clear and when I walked into the kitchen and saw the clock on the stove said it was only 4:02, I thought, “Ah, just in time for my pills!” and, completely forgetting I’d already taken them, swallowed another blue and another red just 20 minutes after the last. And I was feeling the effects.

My first instinct was panic. I’d OD’d! As I willed my heart to slow though, I had to admit I was feeling good. Better than good even. The blue pills had me so in touch with my surroundings that my legs could feel the texture of the fabric of my slacks, and the red pills had me so focused that my eyes were turning toward the papers that held my lottery research as if of their volition.

There was no need to call 911. I was going to ride this.

The world is full of numbers if you look for them. I was looking very closely and, as an expert in the insurance industry, I had access to databases.

Consider: The birthdates of past winners cross-referenced with numbers drawn over the past 20 years to find their occurrence and correlation, or lack thereof, with win dates; the GPS coordinates of lottery sales points plotted against state ticket sales figures and the address numbers of past winners, juxtaposed against the model and average mileage of the car driven by those winners in the year they won; the letters in past winners’ family names transposed alphanumerically and multiplied by each of the numbers they played for their win, divided by their postal code (when you account for the month of their win and move the decimal point back accordingly, of course).

I think you can see where I was going.

I may have lapsed into numerology or astrology or maybe even alchemy, I don’t know, but the numbers unfolded for me, revealing tensions, connections, hidden sequences, and the meanings previously concealed within them. I saw the odds that numbers would surface or stay hidden burst across my vision like fireworks.

And the deeper I dug into my research, the more it all made sense.

At eight o’clock I took another dose of my pills, a full 12 hours earlier than I was supposed to, and another dose four hours later at midnight, and another dose four after that. I didn’t care. I was a 50-ton locomotive, burning odds like coal and steaming downhill on a track made of data, and who’s going to get in the way of that? I worked all night and through the morning until it was time to go to the office.

My smile stiffened on my face as I stared at the two twenty dollar bills, the ten, and the five Mona handed me when I stopped by her desk at the end of the day.

“That’s it, Samuel. We put in five dollars apiece. With you in the pool we have 12 people, so that’ll be 60 dollars total once you throw in, and the tickets cost two dollars each, so the entire pool splits 30 tickets,” she said, her eyes back on her screen, fingers again tapping at her keyboard. “You see why we let the computer pick the numbers? Trying to fill out 30 different tickets? I can’t even.”

I thought of the six notebooks filled with columns of random-seeming but in truth painstakingly calculated digits now stowed in my backpack. Thirty tickets! Thirty tickets would hardly make it halfway down the second column on the first page of my notebooks. My imbecile coworkers might be happy with their chances of 30 random shots winning at 5,857,051 to 1 odds, but I wasn’t. Far from it.

I felt my fists clench so tightly the money was crumpled and the muscles in my forearms bunched, but I kept them at my sides and maintained my smile. Father left me considerable savings. I’d augment this pitiful stake and subtract it from our winnings. I stuffed the bills in my pocket.

This was nothing to get upset about.

My arms relaxed.

I stood next to Mona’s desk and I was calm.

I was very calm.

And I kept that smile on my face for the rest of the day.

After work my first stop was the bank, where an envelope thick with cash joined the notebooks in my bag. I swallowed two of the red pills plus another two of the blue and drove out to buy tickets.

Friday:

The final leg of my trip was the longest and I returned to town as the sun was rising. In the seat next to me rode two backpacks heavy with lottery tickets, my medication bottles, empty save for a last pair each of the red and blue pills. In the back, two bottles rolled around the floor, one half full of Gatorade and another half full of a different yellow liquid. I’d purchased tickets at 82 all-night convenience stores, newsstands, pharmacies, and grocery stores, 26 split along the border between the two adjoining states and 56 in this one. It had been a very long night.

I still had time to make quick stops at Save-Rite and the hardware store though, and then I was back home to do one final chore before heading to the office.

When I arrived the doors of the bus stood open and I could see most of the seats were already occupied. Mona was holding a clipboard and looking at her watch as I pulled up beside her. Her peevish look turned into a sunny smile when she saw what I was holding out to her—two large cellophane-covered bowls of potato salad, one skin intact, one peeled clean.

She did give me a funny look though as she took in the surgical mask I was wearing.

“I’ve come down with a terrible cold, Mona,” I explained through the window, working to make my voice sound nasal and congested as she took the bowls from me. “I’m going to skip the office outing, but I couldn’t let you go without the potato salad I promised. And I assure you I wore this mask the entire time I made it.”

That was true too, even if the terrible cold wasn’t. I’d taken the final couple pills when I got home and I felt incredible. I’d made the potato salad like a whirlwind, washing, peeling (or not peeling), chopping, and mixing on automatic pilot as my mind continued to calculate the numbers.

I even followed Father’s recipe and added some curry powder, just as he’d done for the countless picnics the two of us shared in the backyard.

It had occurred to me while driving home from buying the tickets, you see, that I’d tackled every factor I could for this drawing—geography, timing, plus a thousand different numerical considerations, and more—but there was one number I hadn’t yet considered: the $472,000,000 jackpot. If my objective was to win, shouldn’t I be aiming to win the largest prize I could? And since I already knew our pool held the winning ticket, there was only way I could affect that number.

I wore the surgical mask when I made the salad, and also added more curry powder than Father would have, because I was adding a special ingredient of my own—the gopher poison I’d bought at the hardware store. Its active ingredient was strychnine and it was an off-white powder, which made it easy to mix with the mayonnaise.

I’d added the extra tablespoons of curry powder to make sure the taste was covered. A little might have done it, but who knows? I sure wasn’t going to taste it to find out. And until the powder was mixed in, I had to avoid breathing it, hence the surgical mask.

So on that at least, I wasn’t lying to Mona.

“Oh, Samuel, the summer outing is the best workday of the year,” she said. “I’m so sorry you’re sick. And you even brought the potato salad!”

A slight wince.

“I hate to ask, but did you remember the lottery tickets too?”

“The tickets! Damn! I did remember them, Mona, but I left them at home,” I said with a sniffle. “If you can wait a few more minutes I’ll go home and get them.”

Nearby the bus revved its engine.

“No, you’ve done enough with the potato salad, Samuel. Go home. Hole up in bed with some chicken soup. Just be sure to watch the drawing and call us on the boat if we win, okay?” Mona said. “Otherwise, we’ll see you on Monday.”

Or not, I thought, if everyone likes potato salad as much as you told me.

I’m on my couch in front of the television and the drawing is minutes away. Piles of lottery tickets are spread around me, on the cushions beside me, on the floor, on the card table Father and I used for TV dinners, even along the arms of the couch, all arranged so I can sort them with maximum efficiency once the numbers are picked. On the boat, dinner is being served.

In my mind, the smirk on the face of Ryan from Sales turns into a potato salad-filled grimace as he slithers from his chair and falls to the floor beneath the table. And my winnings go up, from a measly twelfth share, $39,333,333, to a more robust eleventh share, $42,909,090.

Ding!

Mark keels over and I have an even tenth share, $47,200,000.

Ding!

Mona gasps her last (Those potato skins too much, Mona?) and it’s a ninth share, $52,444,444.

Ding!

The web team, Jason, Chris, Janet, and Billy, go down like dominoes and I’m up to a fifth share, $94,400,000.

Ding! Ding, ding, ding, ding!

I hope I talked up my potato salad recipe enough this week that everyone gives it a taste. There’s nothing more I can do, but I’m not worried.

The pretty girl is coming on TV to draw the numbers. And, you know what?

I think my odds are pretty good.