Four dollars and twelve cents. That was the exact amount in Ray's pocket on Tuesday, November 17th, 1998. He counted it three times, which was his habit when he was anxious, and each time the number stayed the same, which was his habit when he was resigned.

The four dollars got him a hot dog from the cart on Roosevelt Avenue. The cart man, an Ethiopian immigrant named Beke, gave him the hot dog without a bun and a squeeze of mustard, because that's what four dollars bought in 1998: a hot dog, no bun, mustard on the side, and if you were lucky, the cart man didn't notice your hands were shaking.

Ray ate the hot dog standing up, the way you eat when you don't want to sit down and think about what you're going to eat for dinner, which is the same as asking yourself whether you can afford to eat for dinner, which is the same as knowing the answer before you ask the question.

His phone buzzed. It was a payphone call—he didn't have a cell phone, which in 1998 meant he was behind the times, which meant nothing because being behind the times when you were already broke was like bringing a spoon to a knife fight.

"Mickey's got something for you," the voice said. It was Vinny. "Lucky Vinny. That's me."

Ray went to the bar on Northern Boulevard where Mickey and Vinny hung out on weekdays. Mickey—"Fingers" because he had once picked a lock with his fingers and then refused to explain which lock or why—was working on a project involving a photocopier, a stack of black cardstock, and enough ambition to get them both arrested.

"Look at this," Mickey said, holding up a fake magazine that was, Ray had to admit, pretty good. The cover looked like Rolling Stone. The inside looked like real articles. It was so convincing that Ray felt a pang of something that might have been pride if he hadn't known it was coming from a man who was photocopying his way out of a life.

"I got a winner for you," Mickey said, and pushed a piece of paper across the table. It was half of a lottery ticket. The other half was missing, torn off at some point in whatever happened to make someone throw it in a casino trash can. But what remained was enough to read: WINNER, $2,000, and a series of numbers that Ray could verify if he had the other half.

"Where'd you get it?" Ray asked.

"Does it matter?" Mickey said. "The casino found it in the trash. They don't want it. The guy who dropped it doesn't want it. But we got half, and half of two thousand is still something. You go to the lottery commission, explain the situation, and— who knows? They might honor it."

Ray went to the lottery commission on a Wednesday. He waited in line for two hours. The woman at the counter was polite but skeptical. She told him he needed the other half of the ticket. He told her the casino had found it and thrown it away. She told him that was his problem, not the state's.

Ray waited three more hours. He pleaded. He explained. He showed her the numbers. He told her about Mickey and the photocopier and the bar on Northern Boulevard and the hot dog without a bun.

Finally, she called her supervisor. The supervisor came. The supervisor looked at the ticket. The supervisor called the casino. The casino confirmed that a half-ticket had been found in their trash.

After six hours in line, Ray was offered a deal: the state would honor half the prize—$1,000—if Ray signed a waiver releasing the state from all future liability related to the claim.

Ray signed. He got a check for $1,000.

He took half of it—$500—to Diane's house in Newark and gave it to her for Chloe's tutoring fees. Diane looked at him with an expression that was not quite kindness and not quite contempt. It was something in between: the look a woman gives a man she used to love when she realizes he is trying, however inadequately, to do something right.

"Thank you," she said. It was the first time in two years she had said those words to him without an adjective attached.

Ray bought a beer with the remaining $500 and sat on a bench outside the grocery store and watched people go in and out, carrying bags of food and boxes of cereal and the small, daily evidence that other people had money and other people had choices and other people had lives that were not this.

Then the phone call came.

"Ray," said a voice from the city housing authority. "Your building. They're selling it. You're getting relocation assistance. Five thousand dollars."

Ray sat on the bench and stared at the phone. "How much?"

"Five thousand. Cash. You have sixty days to find a new place."

Ray hung up the phone and walked to Mickey's apartment and told Mickey about the five thousand dollars. Mickey said: "That's great, man. That's really great. You should celebrate."

Ray celebrated. He moved to a basement apartment in Brooklyn for $400 a month. He bought a used couch. He started talking to a woman named Linda who worked at a gas station on Flatbush Avenue and who laughed at his jokes even when they weren't funny.

Everything was getting better. Ray could feel it. The luck was turning. The tide was coming in. He was forty-one years old and he was finally, finally getting a break.

Then the building burned down.

Not his new building—the old one, the one that was being sold. Three days after Ray got the $5,000 check, the old building caught fire. The fire department said it was electrical. The news said it was suspicious. The insurance company said it was an act of God.

Ray stood on the corner and watched the building burn and thought about the $5,000. He had gotten the money because the building was being sold. But if the building had burned down first, he wouldn't have gotten the money. He had gotten the money only because he had been lucky enough to be displaced before the building was destroyed.

He had been compensated for a loss that hadn't happened to him yet.

Linda broke up with Ray two weeks later. Not because she was cheating on him—he found out about the other two men she was seeing after she left, which is the kind of irony that Ray's life seemed to specialize in—but because she said being with Ray was like "riding a bicycle in a hurricane."

"I don't know which way is up," she told him.

Ray worked at a collection agency for three months. His first client was Mickey. He sat across from Mickey in Mickey's apartment, surrounded by photocopiers and black cardstock and a half-finished magazine that looked enough like Rolling Stone that Ray felt a strange mix of professional admiration and personal disgust.

"You want your money back?" Ray asked.

Mickey looked at him. "You gotta do your job, Ray. I know."

Ray did his job. He took $20 out of Mickey's weekly cash from the numbers operation and put it in an envelope marked "M. O'Brien—Account 4471." He felt dirty doing it. He felt clean doing it. He felt nothing, which was the most honest thing he had felt in months.

One evening in February, Ray sat in a 7-Eleven on Flatbush Avenue, drinking a beer and watching the rain hit the window. The beer was cold. The rain was cold. The seat was cold. Everything was the temperature of the city in winter: indifferent, unchanging, vast.

He thought about the lottery ticket. About the $1,000. About the $5,000. About the fire. About Linda. About Mickey. About Chloe, who had not called in three weeks. About Diane, who had said "thank you" without an adjective.

Luck was not a force. It was not a blessing or a curse. It was just the word he used for the gap between what he wanted and what happened. And the gap was always there. It was the only thing that was always there.

Ray finished his beer. He put the empty bottle in the recycling bin. He walked home through the rain, which was neither kind nor unkind but simply wet, and which soaked through his coat the way it soaked through everybody's coat, regardless of whether they were lucky or unlucky or whatever word people used for the gap.

He was Ray Kowalski. He was forty-one years old. He had four dollars and twelve cents in his pocket on November 17th, 1998. And he was, in every meaningful sense of the word, exactly where he was supposed to be.

Not happy. Not sad. Just there.

And sometimes, in the cold light of a 7-Eleven at ten o'clock on a Tuesday night, sometimes that felt like the only honest answer anybody could give.

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