How Do I Hate Thee? His Ex Counts 5.1 Million Ways : Fortune: Ex-husband may be unlucky in love, but not in the lottery. Now the wife he left in ’46 wants pay-back.

Marie Hines earned $7 per week in the years she was cleaning houses in order to support her three sons by John Gonsalves Jr. She gave $5 per week to her mother, with whom the family lived, and gave very little thought to the husband who had left her in 1946.

Recently, a friend handed Hines a clipping from a newspaper in nearby New Bedford, Mass. The caption read “A Happy Man.” The picture showed Gonsalves, now 71, beaming and making a thumbs-up sign because in March he became the winner of a $5.1-million Massachusetts Megabucks lottery ticket.

“He left me to suffer a lot,” Hines said Wednesday, explaining why on Monday she filed suit to recover back alimony and support for children who are now 54, 53 and 50. “I felt like I deserve this, for all the suffering.”

Frail and beset with hearing difficulties, Hines boiled when she read that with his lottery winnings, her former husband stood to take in $170,000 after taxes each year for the next 20 years. Gonsalves had quit his job as a janitor, she read, moved out of the housing project where he had lived for many years and bought a new home--free and clear.

Meanwhile, Marie and Arthur Hines, her husband of 39 years, were living in a tiny house here, far from the fabled estates that hug the Newport coastline. They squeeze by each month on combined pension and benefit packages of about $1,300.

“All the hardship I went through,” said Hines, who at one time went on welfare, was a galley worker at the naval base here, and later held a low-paying job at General Electric.

“Not a penny did he ever give me. Not a penny, nothing,” she said, repeating, “I felt like I deserve this.”

Gonsalves, for his part, branded his ex-wife a “gold digger” and said her vindictiveness was taking all the fun out of his new riches.

In an interview in the East Providence office of his attorney, David Bazar, Gonsalves said: “I don’t think this is right.”

Hines’ attorney, Thomas Kelly of Providence, admitted that the action he has filed on behalf of his 73-year-old client is “not an easy case, legally.” For one thing, Kelly said, “we’re 43 years late” in claiming alimony and retroactive child support payments through her sons’ 21st birthdays.

But because Gonsalves failed to appear at a 1951 divorce hearing in which a judge left unresolved “the question of alimony and support for said minor children,” Kelly contends that “the case is as open today, in 1994, as it was in 1951.” By moving to southeast Massachusetts, just a half an hour away, Gonsalves “stopped the clock” on proceedings in Rhode Island.

In Kelly’s view, the 43-year hiatus makes Gonsalves “the king of deadbeat dads, in terms of time.”

Hines said that for almost 50 years, she and her ex-husband did not exchange a word--never mind a penny. But Gonsalves said that from the time they were “10, 11, 12 years old,” he often took his sons for summer vacations at the beach.

Hines said he and his former wife exchanged friendly greetings at the recent weddings of two of their grandchildren and that he often saw her and her second husband at the social club where they and others from the large Cape Verdean community go to play cards.

In the kind of ugly insults that often pop up when former spouses argue about money, Gonsalves also charged his ex-wife with infidelity, explaining, “You know, Newport was a big Navy town in those days.”

He added that in celebration of his lottery winnings, he has given each of his sons $5,000 and that he has vowed to give each man $10,000 per year for the next 20 years. He said he offered his former wife the same amount.

But Kelly said Hines regarded that figure as an affront. When the case returns to court in Providence on Aug. 22, Kelly said, “I’m not going to disclose the figure that I’m asking for, but it’s a lot.”

Gonsalves has been separated from his second wife for 31 years, but they have never divorced. They had two children. His second wife has not filed a claim for any portion of his windfall.

Bazar, Gonsalves’ lawyer, called the lawsuit “something less than a nuisance, legally.”

But Hines said she saw no reason why some of her former husband’s good fortune should not be passed on to her and her children. He skipped out on her a long time ago, and now it’s time to make amends.

“I think he’s got the money now,” she said. “Now it’s time for him to help me and help his kids.”

Hines said she planned to muster all the fury of a woman financially scorned.

“When I think about how hard I had it and how the boys never had anything growing up,” she said, “it makes me so mad.”