I hadn’t realized how panicked I had sounded or that my hands had started to shake again.
“It could change everything,” I told her. “It could change me. It could change you. It could change us. I can’t take that chance, Mayra—I can’t. I can’t be without you…I can’t…I can’t…”
“Shh,” Mayra said again. She held me against her shoulder, and I tried to keep the rising panic spurred by all the possibilities from consuming me.
For the second time in an hour, I flipped out while Mayra comforted me. It only solidified my opinion that there was nothing worth risking my relationship with her, and I was, by no means, going to find out if that ticket was the winning ticket with the intent of cashing it in before midnight tomorrow.
No way.
Eventually I calmed though I had to admit a lot of it had to do with my own refusal to discuss it anymore. I made Mayra swear she wouldn’t go digging for it herself, and then I untangled myself from her arms and placed the old photo album in the cardboard box next to the couch.
I couldn’t even consider looking at the ticket, so I went back to packing, feeling like a loser.
Chapter 20—If It’s Ignored Long Enough, It’s Still There
“Are you really going to let me sit here, knowing that ticket is in the next room and that it might be the winning ticket and that it’s going to expire tomorrow? Are you really, really going to do that?”
“Yes.”
“You are so stubborn.”
It was at least the fifteenth time in the last hour Mayra had brought up the ticket. I really, really wished I hadn’t said anything about it, and I was considering sneaking down to the kitchen in the middle of the night to throw the damn thing back in the trash where it belonged.
On the plus side, my avoidance of the ticket and all things related to discussing it had led to getting a lot of packing done. My third box was almost filled, and as soon as it was finished, I was going to make sure I ended up with cake and sex. Maybe both at the same time.
I thought about what that would be like, and a smile crept over my face as the images and tastes flashed through my mind.
“Matthew, I’ve been thinking about the ticket,” Mayra said.
Fantasy destroyed.
“No,” I said automatically. I shoved a calculator and stapler into the box, figuring those were always needed at school, and wondered where my staple remover might be.
“Listen to me for a minute,” she said.
I shook my head vigorously.
“You’re avoiding this,” she claimed.
“Yep,” I answered.
“Matthew—that’s not good for you.”
I ignored her and continued to take various office supplies out of the desk drawer and put them into the box. A notebook, a pair of scissors, seven different pens, all different colors—one for each day of week—and a three-hole punch joined the stapler and calculator.
“Dr. Harris told you avoiding things that upset you is not the same as coping,” she said.
I sighed and crossed my arms over the top of the desk. I dropped my forehead to rest on top of them. I felt Mayra’s fingers on top of my head, and I let out another long breath.
“Why don’t you want to know if the ticket is the winner?” Mayra asked quietly.
“Because if it is, I have to do something about it,” I said. “As long as I don’t know, I don’t have to make the decision.”
“But if you wait, it definitely doesn’t win,” she told me. “It will expire, and then it doesn’t do you any good.”
“It wouldn’t do me any good anyway,” I insisted.
“You don’t want the money?”