Betting on Happiness

A tenant died in the one of the rental properties I owned. It wasn’t a suicide really; he had been playing the lottery. I had just sold the house and was planning on handing over the keys on a Sunday afternoon. I got the call from the new owner. He had gone to the house early and peeked in a back bedroom window. 
‘What do you mean dead? How can you tell?’ I asked. 
‘Well, he is bent over his computer and there’s a circle of blood on the floor,’ he responded.  
He tried to get out of the sale. But it was already his house deemed the lawyer, he’d signed the final documents. 
‘We can’t move into this house, it’s a bad omen,’ he protested. 
‘If it makes you feel any better, two babies were conceived in that very bedroom,’ I said. 
 I handed him the keys and final paperwork. 
The tenant was retired and spent most of his days trying to figure out arrangements of numbers that might be lottery winners. Obviously he had never studied statistics. One of my son’s math teachers in high school told him that the odds of winning a lottery were about the same as dropping a penny in a small cup from the twentieth floor of an office building. The cup being two blocks away. I looked up some stats on winning the lottery: 1 to 175,711,536 or a .000000005% chance.  I didn’t have the heart to tell the tenant that winning the lottery was unlikely. Most people do not give a sniff about probability. They just want to know it is possible, and given the right conditions, they might get lucky.  
The tenant had an easy chair in the living room, a television, a bed and computer desk in the bedroom. He lived simply. I’m not sure how much of his pension he spent on lottery tickets, but I imagine most of it. He and his other retired buddy drove daily to the local mall to purchase luck. His buddy also met the same unfortunate end. They both had heart attacks, our tenant while checking his lottery winnings, and his friend while changing a light bulb in his garage about a year after retiring. Both spent their retirement money on lottery tickets, betting on happiness.
The tenants’ blood stained the hardwood. I can’t remember them removing the body. I remember a bucket of hot water and rubber gloves and scrubbing the red splotch that soaked into the wood. It’s the least I could do.
I couldn’t bring myself to tell the new owner that there had been other deaths in the house. Small perfectly formed fetuses trying to hold on; one at sixteen weeks and one at twelve. Both tiny hearts stopped beating in that tiny house. Both delivered dead in the hospital. Labors more difficult than giving birth to my full term children; the remains vacuumed out by D&C the next day. I spent weeks cleansing my mind in the claw foot porcelain tub — folding my body into the white hard shell. 
Recently, I won the cancer lottery. I had a chunk of muscle cut off my leg a few millimeters deep. Enough to leave a dent. So that when I’m looking at my leg in the mirror it looks like PacMan has come by and taken a bite. It is large enough to make me want to clean up my life.  
If my children ask me; I will tell them that by making it into this world—they won the lottery. Their two siblings weren’t so lucky. The memory of them planted as Little Leaf Linden trees in the backyard.