I Won $1 Billion and Ditched the Deadbeats novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Birthday Check
At his own birthday dinner Tanner finds his ticket wins a billion, cancels every payment he makes, and walks out into Kyle's headlights.
I checked the numbers in the bathroom at my own birthday dinner.
I locked the door, sat on the edge of the tub, and held my phone with both hands.
The winning Powerball numbers had been posted since ten the night before.
I had been too tired to look.
I had worked a ten-hour shift loading trucks, then I had come straight to my mother's house.
The ticket was folded in my work boot, because it was the only place nobody went through.
I pulled it out and read the first number off the paper.
Then I read it off the screen.
They matched.
I did it again for the second number, and the third, and all the way to the red ball.
Every one of them matched.
The jackpot was one billion and forty million dollars.
I read the sixth number a fourth time, and my hands started to shake so hard the ticket rattled.
Someone pounded on the door.
"Tanner, we're waiting on you," my brother Kyle yelled. "Mom's cutting the cake and you're hiding."
I put the ticket back in my boot and flushed the toilet for no reason.
Then I walked out and sat down at the table I had paid for.
My mother had made a pot roast.
She had set out the good plates, the ones with the gold rim, which she only used when she wanted something.
"Happy birthday, baby," she said, and kissed the top of my head.
My father Ray didn't look up from the football highlights on his phone.
My brother's wife Shelby slid a stack of papers across the table to me.
"We made it easy for you," she said. "Everything's in order of due date."
There was a bill for Kyle's truck, seven hundred and twenty dollars.
There was my mother's credit card, with a balance I didn't recognize.
There was a handwritten note in my father's cramped writing that said only, "Bookie needs 2,000 by Friday."
I knew who the bookie was.
He was the man my father owed for losing on games he had no business betting on.
"And the mortgage is late again," my mother said, cutting the cake. "The bank called twice this week."
"It's the same eighteen-fifty it's always been."
"Then it should be easy."
Kyle leaned back and put his boots on the chair next to him.
"Mom thinks you should pick up a third job," he said. "Weekends. You're young. You've got the energy."
"I work two," I said.
"And you complain about them," Shelby said, smiling. "It's not attractive, Tanner."
"We're a family," my mother said. "Family carries each other."
I looked around that table.
I was twenty-seven years old that day.
For nine years, since the week I turned eighteen, I had slept five hours a night.
I had eaten dinners out of a vending machine so this house would stay warm.
Nobody at the table had ever once asked me what I wanted.
They hadn't even asked what I did for my birthday.
I picked up my phone.
"Tanner," my mother said, "put that away while we're eating."
"One second."
I opened my banking app.
The first autopay was Kyle's truck.
I tapped cancel, and the screen asked me if I was sure.
I was sure.
"What are you doing?" Kyle said.
I canceled my mother's credit card transfer.
I canceled the house payment, the eighteen-fifty, with one clean tap.
I canceled the two hundred dollars a week I sent my father to pay off his bookie.
"Tanner Briggs," my mother said, and her voice had gone flat and hard. "Look at me."
I stood up.
I put the stack of bills back in the middle of the table, on top of her gold-rimmed plates.
"Happy birthday to me," I said. "I'm done."
Nobody spoke for a second.
Then my mother laughed, because she thought I was joking.
"Sit down. You're upset. You'll be back by Friday, and you know it."
"You've got nowhere to go," Shelby said. "You live in a room we found you."
"I'm not coming back Friday."
I picked up my coat.
"Donna, let him go cool off," my father muttered, still on his phone.
My mother ignored him.
"If you walk out that door," my father said, finally looking up from the screen, "don't think you can come home crying."
It was the first thing he had said to me all night.
I almost thanked him.
I walked out into the cold, and the front door slammed behind me hard enough to shake the porch light.
I had sixty-one dollars in my checking account and a ticket worth a billion in my boot.
I made it to the end of the block before I heard an engine behind me.
I knew that engine.
It was my brother's truck, the one I paid for, and it was coming up the street slowly, with its lights off.
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