The $20-Million Question: What to Do With Jackpot?

Lottery winner and new millionaire Heredia Maria Rodriguez now deals with the type of nagging questions that always seem to pop up when you suddenly have $20 million to burn.

Should she quit her job? Should she and her husband take a long vacation? Should she make some investments on Wall Street?

For Rodriguez, who will split a $46.56-million Super Lotto jackpot with a Northridge woman, the answers are yes, probably and don’t know.

“I still don’t believe it,” Rodriguez said. “I told myself one day a little bit of money, in order to pay bills, buy things and get along, that would be OK. Maybe $5,000. But to be a millionaire overnight is incredible,” she said from her Anaheim home Tuesday after returning from the Sacramento district office to claim her prize.

Rodriguez and Caroline Tio, 22, each will receive $1,164,000, before taxes, each year for 20 years, lottery officials said. The pot is the state’s seventh-largest lottery windfall since it began six years ago, officials said.

But along with toying with where to vacation, the 41-year-old former food packer for Carl Karcher Enterprises in Anaheim said she realizes that with the wads of money comes responsibility.

“What I want most is security for my children,” said Rodriguez, who has a 5-year-old daughter and a 9-year-old son.

Rodriguez, who moved to Orange County from her native Canary Islands three years ago, said her husband, Roberto, 45, is still shocked about winning and is considering quitting his job as a waiter in Irvine.

She said that after learning that she was a winner Sunday morning, she flipped over her ticket and saw a Sacramento address where she could claim her prize. Not knowing that she could have gone to a closer office in Orange County, she loaded the family into a car, she said.

“ ‘Let’s go to Sacramento,’ I said. It doesn’t matter.”

She has heard from friends and acquaintances at work who marvel at her luck. “I say if you can’t believe it, I can believe it even less,” she said.

But, Rodriguez said, “I don’t believe that (the money) is going to change who I am or what I believe or my character.”

Times staff writer Bob Elston contributed to this story.