After I won the lottery, a lot of strangers showed up to tell me what a piece of trash I was. Then they would ask me for money. Neighbors known and unknown to me, people I used to see at the market, old high school classmates who’d never given me the time of day—they all felt compelled to “just say hi.”

I knew they hated me because most people hate unglamorous luck. That’s what winning money with a mindless number is, unearned and uninherited wealth, and each new arrival acted like something had been stolen from them. “It’s so nice that someone like you won the lottery, Bonnie,” they’d say in a half-joking tone verging on a sneer. “Want to take me out to dinner?” They knew how to keep it subtle. Some of them even called me Bon Bon, an overfamiliar nickname I hadn’t heard since childhood, which told me their hatred had ripened into the sourest grape on the vine.

These strangers swarmed onto my tiny porch, undeterred by the sunken corner that had rotted through, and knocked on my door one by one, jerking me out of the deep planning and dreaming I was absorbed in. For this, I wished them dead. But I tried to be polite. Each time I opened the door I told myself that this was the sacrifice that was required. One of many to come, I suspected.

Even when the cameras and news teams came to gawk and rut up the scabby grass in front of my trailer, I stayed cool. What does it feel like to win so much money? they’d say. What will you be doing with it all? Reporters loved asking those types of questions when they caught me coming out my front door. One of them even asked, Are you planning on investing in your community? They’d looked around at my shit neighborhood and expected me to soak in it forever, I guess.

I told them that I didn’t know what I would do with the money. Or I answered the way I knew I was supposed to answer—that I was planning on saving it. I’d say it in a really earnest voice, as if the mere thought of saving all that beautiful cash was turning me into a realer, wiser adult as I stood there.

But my days of scrimping and saving were over. I had big ideas, was planning big moves. My fate had been brewing long before I walked a mile to where LOTTO BEER CIGS glowed in neon letters on the gas station door, long before I handed over my money to the pimply cashier and my future was handed back.

I didn’t dare tell that story to another human being, though. Let alone a reporter. Back then I never shared my plans or preferences, my ambitions or desires. I never gave away the things I loved.

I knew better. Other people can ruin a dream just by knowing it.

My brain had been feeling ragged for weeks by the time I bought the lottery tickets, it’s true, sick of everything around me, and I longed for something more, something extraordinary. But on the afternoon I walked to the gas station, I received the mission of my life, the plan, and it was channeled through the television show Three’s Company.

It had been a Saturday, my day off from work, and I had just finished watching “The Root of All Evil,” wherein Jack Tripper goes to the racetrack, bets on the horses chosen by his roommates Chrissy Snow and Janet Wood, wins, and returns to Apartment 201 with fistfuls of money. I’d already seen the episode dozens of times, and it wasn’t even one of my favorites, but on that afternoon in late August, as the credits rolled, I sweated and dreamed inside my trailer that never seemed to get cool, yearning for a different time and place, a different identity—and I was wishing, as usual, that I could crawl into Three’s Company and live there, curled up on the trio’s living room carpet, willing to eat scraps and suck vinegar from a sponge if that’s what it took to have the honor—when a voice emerged from the dulling cloud that had been hanging over my life for the past five of my thirty-six years and whispered, Now. Your turn.

And I knew then and there that it was my turn, and my power, my own life, that I was the grand master puppeteer, running this show, up onstage and in charge. My winning horse would be myself.

The idea was like an electric shock that reset my brain. The details still vague, I marched out of my house and started toward the gas station, keeping to one side of the narrow, shoulderless road. Cars whooshed by me in the heat, sometimes coming so close that I had to hop into the thin strip of tick-infested grass separating the road from the forest beyond, the uneven terrain threatening to break my ankles.

Some cars honked angrily; there were several blind curves on this stretch and all the locals drove like maniacs. The road was a test of speed and mortality—could you round the bend at 55 mph and not die? 60? It was a game we all played. Indeed, at the halfway point of my trek a car rounded the curve directly ahead of me and hit the brakes so hard it fishtailed and went over the center line, nearly flipping off the road and into the trees before steadying itself. Had another car come the other way at that moment, everyone involved, including me, would have died spectacularly.

I owned a pickup truck that worked fine, and I knew how dangerous walking on the road was, but it seemed important that I risk death in my journey. I was on my way to a blessing, and every blessing required sacrifice. If I died, well, that would be another kind of blessing. Either way, my fortune would be arranged.

Obviously I made it back fine. I bought those tickets. I admit, I was much more careful on my return journey. My future was in my pocket, after all.