RALEIGH – On Saturday night, three days after the word was out that someone from Stanly County had won $2 million in a Powerball drawing, Jacque Kendrick walked back into the store where she had bought her ticket and used a lottery ticket checker to check her luck.

Up popped a message, “Winner. Claim at lottery headquarters.”

Kendrick, a server at a restaurant, plays Powerball and Mega Millions weekly. She has a rule, just buy one ticket per drawing, and she never really expected to win. So she turned to the clerk at the Alco on U.S. 52 in Albemarle, and asked what the message meant. “The lady’s face turned white,” Kendrick recalled Monday at lottery headquarters. “She said, ‘Honey, you need to put that up for safekeeping. That’s worth a substantial amount of money.’”

Kendrick, who lives in New London, signed her ticket, left the store and told her husband, Eddie, the good news. But they still didn’t know how much they had won. Then, a daughter emailed a news story from WXII-TV in Winston-Salem about the $2 million win in Stanly County in the Nov. 18 Powerball drawing. The five winning numbers needed for the $2 million win were all on Kendrick’s Quick Pick ticket, beating odds of 1 in 11.7 million.

“I dropped to my knees,” Kendrick said, “and started thanking the Good Lord. That’s exactly how it was.”

Because she bought a $3 Power Play ticket, the regular $1 million prize for matching all five white balls was automatically doubled. After the required tax withholdings, she received $1,385,000. Kendrick said she and her husband planned to help their daughters, but that most of the money would be saved and invested for retirement.

“We’re not rich,” she said. “We’re not poor, but we work for everything we’ve got. And we’ve worked hard. We need to be set, whenever we are old and retired.”

Powerball drawings are held Wednesdays and Saturdays. Wednesday’s jackpot is an estimated $90 million as an annuity and $55.1 million as a lump sum.

Ticket sales made it possible for the lottery to raise more than half a billion dollars for the state last year. For details on how $23.6 million in lottery funds have made a difference in Stanly County, click on the “Where the Money Goes” section of the lottery’s website.