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My grandmother is eighty-three years old, and she has approximately zero filter left between her brain and her mouth, which is frankly one of my favorite things about her. She calls me every Sunday at exactly ten in the morning, and she always starts the conversation the same way: “Well, are you still alive?” It’s her version of hello. I love it. I love her. And about six months ago, I found myself in the strange position of having to explain to her why I suddenly had an extra seven hundred dollars to put toward the new glasses she desperately needed but kept refusing to buy because Medicare doesn’t cover the kind with the progressive lenses that actually let her see things without getting headaches. She’d been squinting at menus for months, holding her phone at arm’s length like she was trying to defuse a bomb, and every time I offered to help with the cost, she’d wave me off and say something about how she’d made it this far without being able to read the fine print and she wasn’t about to start now.

The whole thing started on a Thursday night that was so aggressively unremarkable I almost can’t believe it turned into anything worth remembering. I’d had a long week at my job—I’m a veterinary technician, which means I spend my days getting scratched by anxious cats and trying to explain to people why their dog needs dental work that costs more than their rent. I love the work, but it’s emotionally draining in a way that’s hard to explain to people who don’t do it. You see a lot of hard decisions, a lot of tight budgets, a lot of people who love their animals more than anything but just don’t have the resources to give them everything they need. I carry that stuff home with me. I was carrying it home with me that Thursday, along with a scratch on my forearm from a dachshund who was very convinced I was trying to murder him with a thermometer. I got back to my apartment around seven, microwaved some leftover pasta that was honestly past its prime, and collapsed onto my couch with my laptop.

I wasn’t looking for anything specific. I was just decompressing, the way you do when your brain is too full to handle anything that requires real attention. I scrolled through social media for a while, watched a video of a goat yelling at a man who was trying to fix a fence, read a few articles about nothing. At some point I clicked on a link that took me somewhere unexpected—I don’t even remember what I was searching for originally, maybe something about cheap dog beds for the clinic—and I ended up on a page that was all bright colors and animated graphics. I stared at it for a minute, trying to figure out what I was looking at, and then I realized it was an online gaming platform. I’d never done anything like that before. I’m not a gambler. The closest I’ve ever come is buying a scratch-off ticket at the gas station when I was twenty-two and feeling so embarrassed about it that I never did it again. But something about this caught my attention. Maybe it was the colors. Maybe it was the fact that I was so tired I couldn’t process anything more complicated than watching little symbols spin around. Maybe it was just that the goat video had put me in a weirdly good mood and I wanted to keep that feeling going.

I spent about twenty minutes just browsing, reading the descriptions of different games, watching the little demo animations that played when you hovered over them. There was one with a grumpy goat that made me laugh out loud because it reminded me of the video I’d just watched. The goat was sitting on a pile of treasure, looking deeply unimpressed, and the background was some kind of cartoon mountain landscape. I clicked on it just to see what happened, and the game loaded with this ridiculous country-western soundtrack that included a goat bleating every time you won something. It was absurd. It was perfect. I decided I’d deposit a small amount, just to see what the fuss was about, and I went through the quick registration process for Vavada because it was the one I’d landed on and I didn’t have the energy to comparison shop.

I put in fifty dollars. That was my number. Fifty dollars was what I’d budgeted for a new pair of work sneakers that I was definitely going to buy eventually but hadn’t gotten around to yet. The sneakers could wait. I needed something that wasn’t work, wasn’t Grandma, wasn’t the scratch on my arm or the leftover pasta or the stack of invoices I’d been ignoring on my kitchen counter. I needed to watch a grumpy goat spin around on a cartoon mountain while a banjo played in the background.

I played for about an hour. The goat game was surprisingly fun—there were different treasure chests that opened up when you hit certain combinations, and the goat’s expressions changed depending on whether you were winning or losing. He looked disgusted when you lost, which somehow made losing feel less annoying. I lost the first thirty dollars in small increments, won back about fifteen on a bonus round, lost another ten. I was down to twenty-five dollars when I switched to a different game, something with a detective theme and a saxophone soundtrack that made me feel like I was in a noir film about a cat who solved murders. I lost another ten on that one. Fifteen dollars left. I was okay with it. Fifty dollars for an hour and a half of entertainment, plus the goat, plus the jazz cat, plus the fact that I hadn’t thought about work once since I started. That was a good deal.

I went back to the goat game because I missed his stupid face. I set my bet to fifty cents, the smallest option, and I just let it run. I wasn’t trying to win anything. I was just watching the reels spin, letting the banjo music wash over me, waiting for the goat to bleat. I did that for about fifteen minutes, watching my balance slowly tick down from fifteen to twelve to nine to seven. I was down to six dollars when the screen changed.

I didn’t understand what was happening at first. The goat stopped looking grumpy and started glowing. Gold coins started raining down from the top of the screen. The treasure chest at the bottom of the reels opened up and kept opening, each chest revealing a multiplier, and the multipliers started stacking. I watched my balance go from six dollars to sixty dollars in about ten seconds. Then it kept going. One hundred twenty. Two hundred forty. I stopped breathing. The goat was doing this little dance now, still looking grumpy about it, which made the whole thing even more surreal. The cascades kept coming. When it finally stopped, my balance was $1,460.

I sat there for a long time, just staring at the screen. The goat was back to his normal expression, sitting on his treasure pile, looking at me like he couldn’t believe I was making such a big deal out of this. I withdrew the whole thing immediately, watching the confirmation screen like I was watching a hostage negotiation. I didn’t trust it until I saw the email. Even then, I checked my bank account three times over the next two days, waiting for someone to tell me it was a mistake.

It wasn’t a mistake.

The money hit my account on Saturday morning. I spent Saturday afternoon on the phone with my grandmother, pretending I was just calling to chat, asking her about her week, listening to her complain about the neighbor’s dog and the price of eggs and the fact that her favorite show had been canceled. I waited for a pause, and then I said, as casually as I could, that I’d had a little windfall at work—a bonus I wasn’t expecting—and I wanted to use it to take her to get her eyes checked. She started to argue, the way she always does, but I cut her off. I told her it would make me happy. I told her I needed her to be able to see my face when I came over for Sunday dinner. I told her I loved her and this was what I wanted to do with the money.

She was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “Fine. But I’m picking the frames.”

She picked frames that were purple and cat-eyed and absolutely ridiculous, and she looks incredible in them. The total came to six hundred and eighty dollars, which left me with enough to buy a new pair of work sneakers and take myself out for a nice dinner. I didn’t tell her where the money really came from. I didn’t tell anyone, for a while. It felt like a secret between me and a grumpy cartoon goat, which is not something I ever expected to have in my life but which I have come to cherish.

I still play sometimes, on the nights when the work week has been too long and my brain is too full and I need something that requires nothing from me except a willingness to watch pretty colors spin around. I always start with the goat game, just to see his face. Sometimes I win a little, sometimes I lose a little, but I always set a budget and I always stick to it. It’s not about the money. It never was. It’s about having a space that’s just mine, where the stakes are low and the decisions are simple and the only thing I have to focus on is whether the next spin will make the goat bleat. I’ve told my grandmother about it now, actually. She called me last Sunday and asked what I’d been up to, and I told her I’d spent the previous night playing some silly game with a goat on a website called Vavada. She laughed and said that was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard, and then she asked if the goat had won anything. I told her the goat was doing just fine. She said to tell him she said hello. I told her I would.