Can someone tell me the summary for this lottery everything my mother needs can be found at woodman’s: cigarettes, milk, unsalted rice cakes, six black bottles of diet cola. i want to buy a lottery ticket, she adds, weaving stiff-kneed, half-blind, to the far end of the store, near videos and packaged liquor. neither of us knows how to go about it. i fumble, rubbing in the dots from numbers she has scribbled on a scrap of cardboard. i look at her familiar cursive, wondering what they are—not our ages, birthdays, not her wedding anniversary. that’s six and a half million a year for life, she says of the man who won last winter, and i don’t ask how she figured the years left in his life. nor do i ask if the money could buy back her teeth and eyes, her strong bones and lean flesh, buy back the summers she played squirt guns with us and caught fireflies we froze and sold to science for thirty cents a hundred. no one has claimed it, she whispers, as if everything is still possible.