Winning Christmas

By Joan Marchessault

Tracy Noble buys a lottery ticket every Friday, despite her husband’s pleas that her purchases are a waste of money. But when her weekly ritual pays off with a three hundred million jackpot win the week before Christmas, Tracy and Michael can hardly believe their luck. Transformed into multi-millionaires in mere seconds, the couple celebrates with wild abandon. It seems all their worries are over—or so they think.

As Tracy and Michael navigate through aftermath of their windfall, they meet with trusted family members, tackle big decisions, and leave on a lengthy intercontinental cruise. But it is not long before greed overshadows their seemingly idyllic lives, leaving Tracy to question whether she must sacrifice her sanity for wealth. As her marriage teeters on the brink of disaster, Tracy slowly begins to discover the real price of a winning lottery ticket.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jan 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483424040

Book preview

Dean

Chapter One

Popping the Cork

O h, ye of little faith, I joked playfully as my husband and I watched the live drawing for the $300 million lottery jackpot one week before Christmas. Michael usually laughed and teased me for buying a lottery ticket every Friday, never failing to remind me that he thought it was a total waste of money, as the odds of winning were so low. Being practical, he could never completely understand how this weekly routine was my one way of escaping reality and fantasizing about how outrageously different and exciting my life could be if only I won.

It wasn’t just about winning; it was my way of holding on to hopes and dreams of things that hadn’t happened in my life. Michael couldn’t comprehend how much my life had changed once I had become a mother, always putting the needs of the children first and foremost. Every day my identity seemed to fade into oblivion as the wishes and desires of others took center stage. Now that our oldest two children were grown and on their own, with the youngest still in college, it was finally time to get my life back. Especially because this lottery drawing fell right in the middle of the holidays, winning would be the greatest Christmas present I had ever received.

What luck, I quipped when I realized that the first number drawn matched one of my own numbers, which had never happened to me before. When the second number drawn was also on my ticket, I shouted, Hey, we’re really on a roll! After the third number drawn also matched mine, I started to jump up and down, unable to control my excitement, and I exclaimed, Holy cow! Is there a prize for getting three of the numbers? By now, even my cynical husband had his eyes as glued to the television set as he did during the basketball tournament playoffs. Neither of us was able to fully comprehend what we were witnessing.

By the time the fourth, fifth, sixth, and final number drawn had all matched the numbers on my ticket, we were left sitting on our favorite sofa in our family room in stunned silence.

After several minutes, when we were both finally convinced that the winning ticket and my lottery ticket were one and the same, Michael turned slowly to me, looked me straight in the eye, and asked, Did that really just happen?

I think that it just did, I responded, as the moment I had imagined for so long was now a reality. This calls for a celebration! Let’s open that bottle of champagne my mother gave us last year for our anniversary. It’s been double-parked on the back shelf of the refrigerator waiting for a special occasion, and it doesn’t get any more special than this!

Coming right up, Tracy, my dear. Your wish is my command, Michael said as he dug the bottle out of the rear of the refrigerator. After removing the foil covering, he puzzled for a moment over the metal contraption surrounding the cork. Hastily untwisting the metal and putting some pressure on the neck of the bottle, he sent the cork flying, smashing straight into our framed wedding portrait hanging in the living room. The whole picture, frame and all, fell to the ground, and the glass shattered into a hundred pieces on the floor.

I always loved that picture. It captured a candid moment during the reception when Michael leaned over to whisper in my ear, and I had the biggest grin on my face, just about to laugh at the private joke we were sharing. The day of our wedding, along with the days when our children were born, was one of the happiest days of my life. Now winning the lottery was right up there with them.

Sorry, I’ll clean it up, Michael quickly apologized, anticipating my anger at his carelessness.

But instead I just laughed and said, Don’t worry about it. We can clean it up tomorrow. Tonight is all about celebrating, and I wouldn’t care if you broke every single thing in the house with that flying cork. As of now we can afford to replace everything a thousand times over.

"Who would have ever guessed back then that this would be the special occasion for opening the bottle from your mother?" Michael said as he filled our old jelly-jar glasses with the sparkling wine.

Cheers! Merry Christmas! We toasted each other and clinked our drinking glasses. We leisurely polished off the entire bottle of champagne and grew utterly giddy discussing all the things we now had plenty of money to do—everything from buying our own private jet, a fancy yacht complete with a full crew, and a helicopter, to simply traveling barefoot around the globe, visiting every sunny, sandy, spectacular beach possible. This was a sure sign that we were tired of the cold, drab New England winter already, even though it had just started, and we couldn’t wait to escape somewhere closer to the equator. We would even throw in some golf courses along the way so that Michael could work on his game the way he always wanted to.

On and on we went, letting our imaginations run riot about previously impossible things that we could now afford to do. Each suggestion became more outlandish than the previous one, until we were laughing ourselves silly. It was as though all my dreams were finally coming true, and I didn’t have to wait any longer for the good life.

In all the excitement, we even forgot to watch our favorite reality television show. It usually had us on the edge of our seats, waiting to see who would win the million-dollar prize. Of course, Michael and I always disagreed about who we predicted would win. I figured I’d go online tomorrow to see what happened in the episode, although it wouldn’t be as much fun as watching it live with Michael’s funny commentary.

The champagne had finally gotten the better of us around two o’clock in the morning, and we dreamily floated upstairs to bed. Both Michael and I were keyed up like little children on Christmas Eve waiting for Santa to arrive. Once Michael had wrapped me in his arms in our comfy bed, we fell into a deep, cheap-champagne-induced slumber.

Chapter Two

Fizzing Frenzy

I awoke little by little the next morning as the reality of the winning ticket sank in. I was surprised that I had been able to sleep at all with the excitement, although I had to admit that I was feeling sluggish and moving exceptionally slowly, with the biggest headache ever. I felt as though I had just completed a marathon while drunk on champagne. Not a good combination.

I remembered how late Michael and I had stayed up last night going over the winning numbers again and again, still unable to believe that we had actually won. I smiled to myself about some of our wild and zany ideas of how we could spend the winnings, especially the one about building a separate house just to store all the new shoes I would be buying. Michael and I discussed everything from the practical logistics, like needing tax and financial planning advice, to the crazy notion of just quitting our jobs and moving to a little grass shack in Hawaii, albeit an expensive one.

I had a moment of panic in the morning when Michael asked where I had put the winning ticket. I couldn’t remember for the life of me what I had done with it. Both of us ran crazily around the house, going from room to room, emptying drawers, looking under all of the furniture and behind every door. We scoured all the kitchen cabinets, searched the oven and microwave, and even looked in the refrigerator, freezer, and messy garbage can.

Then the big shiny lacquer of my late grandmother’s piano caught my eye. Could I have hidden the ticket for safekeeping in the piano bench, where I secretly stashed all the travel brochures that I had collected over the years? I rushed over to it and inspected every inch of the piano, both inside and out, but to no avail. Nothing was hidden in there.

When my grandmother died, she had left her beloved piano to me, even though I didn’t know how to play. I guess she always held out hope that I would