I Won $1 Billion and Ditched the Deadbeats novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Back Room

Lana hides him from Kyle and helps him sign the ticket; at dawn his mother is at her door calling him a thief.

"Back room," Lana said. "Now."

She didn't ask a single question.

She grabbed the ticket, my sleeve, and a ring of keys, and she pulled me through the swinging door behind the counter.

The back room was a closet full of paper cups and cardboard.

She pushed me down behind a stack of boxes.

"Stay."

Then she walked back out to the register and put her hands flat on the counter.

I heard the front door rattle.

"Hey!" Kyle shouted through the glass. "I know he's in there! Open up!"

"We're closed," Lana called. "Door's locked for cash count."

"Your sign says open twenty-four hours."

"Your sign says you're an idiot, and I don't see that on anything either."

I put my hand over my mouth.

Kyle pounded on the door with his fist.

"My brother is in there. He's in trouble. He's not well, and he needs to come home."

"Then he can call you from his own phone. Have a good night."

"I'll call the police."

"Please do. They know me. They come here for the free coffee."

There was a long silence.

I heard the truck door slam, and the engine rev, and then, slowly, the sound of tires on gravel.

Lana waited a full minute.

Then she came back and opened the closet door.

"He's gone," she said. "Probably to his mother."

"You didn't have to do that."

"It's one in the morning and I like my job quiet."

She held the ticket up between two fingers.

"Do you have a pen?"

I didn't.

She took one from the vest and handed it over.

"Sign the back. Your full name, your real address. Don't tell me what it says. Then it's yours and nobody else's, and no brother can say it fell out of your pocket."

I signed it.

My hand was shaking so hard that Briggs came out.

She made me do it again on the line below.

"Now," she said. "Is there somewhere you can sleep?"

I thought about the room I rented from my mother's friend, three streets from the house.

I thought about Kyle sitting outside it right now, waiting.

"No," I said.

She sighed through her nose.

"Okay," she said. "I get off at six. I live over the laundromat on Third. The couch is ugly but it's clean."

I opened my mouth to argue, and she held up a hand.

"I'm not doing this for you. I'm doing it because I sold you that ticket, and I don't want to read about you in the paper next week with a lump on your head."

She sold me that ticket.

I hadn't thought of it that way.

"Thank you."

"Thank me when you've got a lawyer. Sit down."

For five hours I sat on a case of napkins and watched her work.

She rang up truckers and a woman buying wine at three in the morning, and she called every one of them hon.

Not once did she glance at my coat pocket, where the ticket was.

At six, a girl in a hoodie came in to take over.

Lana took her coat off the hook and said, "Come on, birthday boy."

Her apartment was exactly what she'd said.

One room, one bed behind a curtain, a green couch with a blanket folded on the arm.

The whole place smelled like dryer sheets because the machines hummed under the floor.

She gave me a glass of water, a pillow, and a clean towel.

"The shower's got a temper," she said. "Hot is on the left, but it lies."

I stood in her tiny kitchen with the ticket in my hand.

"Where do I even keep it?"

"Not in your boot."

She took a metal tin down from a shelf.

It had once held butter cookies, and now it held spare keys and a few folded dollar bills.

She dumped them out on the counter.

"Put it in here, close the lid, and sleep on top of it. In the morning we'll find you someone who is not me."

I lay on the couch with the tin under my ribs.

For the first time in nine years, no phone buzzed against me asking for money.

The laundromat machines turned over and over beneath the floor, and I fell asleep before the next cycle.

When I woke up the sun was in my eyes.

Somebody was pounding on the apartment door.

"Tanner!"

It was my mother's voice.

"I know you're in there. Open this door, you ungrateful little thief."

Then Shelby's voice, high and cold and loud enough for the whole stairwell.

"Mom, maybe we should let the pastor handle this."

Lana sat up in the bed behind the curtain and looked at me.

"Friends of yours?" she asked.

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