“If you really lost your job, Madison, don’t come here trying to turn this lunch into a charity drive.”
My father said it loudly, right in front of the waiters at the restaurant in Brooklyn, in front of my mother, my younger sister, and my older brother, as though needing help was more embarrassing than spending years using your own daughter. I was thirty-four years old. My hair was pinned back neatly, and I was wearing a blouse I had ironed twice because I didn’t want to look defeated. Inside my purse, tucked beneath an old notebook, I was carrying a secret worth 47,000,000 dollars.
No one knew.
A week earlier, on my birthday, I had bought a State Lottery ticket at a small corner store in Astoria. I chose numbers that meant something to me: my birthday, my mother Patricia’s, my father Robert’s, my aunt Ellen’s, and my best friend Jenna’s.
