The Dollar on the Legion Bar

“Deal,” I said, and we shook on it, with the seed shells on the floor mat and the radio playing something by Shania Twain.

I can still feel how cold her hand was. That Buick never did have a good heater.

When we both turned twenty-one, the ticket moved to the Legion.

Lenny had already been tending bar there for years by then, and the Legion sells scratch-offs right behind the bar, next to the pull-tab box and the jar of beef sticks.

Friday nights became the night. A dollar from me, a dollar from her, one ticket.

We kept it through everything. Tammy married Rod Kranz at twenty-two, in the Lutheran church with the basement that always smelled like coffee and floor wax.

I married Mike Schmitz at twenty-five, and Tammy stood up for me in a dress the color of canned peaches that she still brings up whenever she wants to make me laugh.

We kept it through her boy, Tyler, deploying overseas with the National Guard, eleven months of Fridays where she sat on her stool and scratched with her jaw clenched and her phone face-up on the bar.

When he came home, she bought the ticket with a twenty and told Lenny to keep the change, and that was the only time in thirty years either of us broke the rule.

We kept it through my mother. Mom died at home, in the hospital bed we set up in her front room, on a Tuesday in February when the snow was blowing sideways across the road.

Mike was stuck at the elevator in Truman with the roads closed. Hospice had come and gone.

Tammy drove over in that storm in Rod’s pickup, with chains on, and she sat up with me the whole night.

She held my hand across Mom’s blanket and didn’t say one word she didn’t need to say. Around four in the morning she got up and made toast, and we ate it in the dark.

When Mom was gone, it was Tammy who called the funeral home, because I couldn’t make my voice work.

It was Tammy who washed Mom’s coffee cup and put it away so I wouldn’t have to look at it in the morning.

That was the friend who would not look at me at the Kwik Trip pump.

In thirty years we never won more than forty dollars. That was on a Friday in 2009, and we split it, twenty each, and went to the Pizza Ranch in Fairmont and spent most of it there.

Mostly we won two dollars, or four, and put it right back into the next ticket. Most weeks we won nothing at all.

It was never about the money. I want to say that plainly, because later people asked me, and I could see them wondering. It was about Friday.

It was about the two of us bent over a little piece of cardboard, scratching with a dime, saying “come on, come on” like the ticket could hear us.

The Friday it happened, I was working a double. Carla, the other evening girl, had called in with her daughter’s baby coming early, and Friday at the Legion is walleye night.

We put out sixty plates on a good Friday from a kitchen built for thirty, and that night it was more like seventy.

I came on at ten in the morning for the lunch crowd and the card club, and by five I had already walked what my phone said was eleven miles.