I could feel her watching the back of my head. Good, I thought. Let her wonder. The formal dispute was filed on a Tuesday afternoon. James submitted it to the Ohio Lottery Commission along with the transaction record from Garfield’s pharmacy, the security footage documentation, and a sworn affidavit from Ununice Garfield confirming the circumstances of the purchase.
James also sent a registered letter to the commission noting that the ticket in question was purchased under a customer account in my name and that any claim filed by another party should be subject to verification pending the outcome of the dispute. I did not tell Derek. I want to be honest about that decision.
I made it deliberately and I do not regret it. He had put my suitcase in the hydrangeas. He had told me to go to a home. He had taken something from me. Not just the ticket, but the version of him I had believed in for 44 years. And he had done it casually, the way a person throws away something they no longer consider valuable.
He had forfeited the courtesy of advanced notice. For 2 days after the filing, the house felt like a held breath. I went about my routines. I made meals I ate alone in the kitchen. I tended the garden in the cold. I slept in the bedroom that had been mine for 30 years, in the bed that still had Roland’s nightstand on one side with his reading lamp and the book he had been halfway through when he died.
A history of the American Railroad that I had never been able to move. On the third day, they found out. I don’t know exactly how James suspected that the commission sent a routine notification to Derek’s filed claim. He had, as we had guessed, already submitted paperwork claiming the ticket as his own, though the claim had not yet been processed.
When that notification arrived indicating a dispute had been filed, Derek’s name was on the claim and mine was on the dispute. And the gap between those two facts apparently produced something combustible in my son. He came to my bedroom door at 7 in the morning. He knocked once, then opened it without waiting.
‘What did you do?’ he asked. ‘I was sitting at my writing desk. I turned in my chair and looked at him the way I had looked at him when he was 12 years old and had broken a neighbor’s window and tried to claim a bird had done it. I filed a dispute with the lottery commission.’ I said the ticket was purchased in my name.