The Casino Sign My Mother Read
“I know, Mama.”
“I didn’t even try to. It just, it just came.”
She put her hand flat on her chest, over her coat, over her heart, and she looked back up at that sign like it was the burning bush.
“Two years,” she said, quiet now. “Two years I been faking it in church. Holding the hymnal open to about the right place and singing from memory and praying nobody’d ask me to read. Two years.”
I had to put the car in park and put my own hand over my own mouth and let it come, because I had not known that part. The faking it in church. She had never told me that. She was that proud. She had stood up in the house of God every Sunday for two years and pretended she could see the page.
What she did next
I thought the gut punch was the sign. I thought that was the whole of it, that reading the sign was the top of the mountain and we would go in and eat our steaks.
My mother had one more thing in her.
She sat there a minute with her hand on her chest. Then she dug in her purse, the big soft one she has carried for fifteen years, and she came out with her flip phone, the one with the big buttons that I set up for her, and she opened it and she held it out to the sign light so she could see the numbers, and she dialed.
“Who are you calling?”
“Hush,” she said.
It rang twice. I could hear it. She had it turned up all the way because of her ears, so I heard his voice answer, cautious, the way a man answers his mother-in-law at five thirty when his wife is not home.
“Nita? Everything all right?”
“Greg,” my mother said. And her voice was not angry. That is what I need you to understand. There was not one drop of ugliness in it. It was bright. It was the brightest I had heard her in two years.
“Greg, I’m sitting in the parking lot of that casino you like. The one in Tunica. And I just read the big sign out front. Out loud. The whole thing. Prime rib is nine ninety-nine.”
Quiet on his end.
“I couldn’t read anything for two years, Greg. Did you know that? I couldn’t read my own pill bottles. I couldn’t read my Bible. And your wife, she took that turbine money, that eight thousand dollars, and she bought me a pair of eyes with it. So I’m looking at your casino right now, Greg, and I can see it just fine. Every light on it. I can see it real good.”
She listened a second. Whatever he said was short.
“No,” she said, gentle as anything. “No, I don’t need a thing. I just wanted you to know what your money got spent on this year. I wanted you to hear it from me. You have a good night now.”
And she closed the flip phone with one hand, the way you snap a coin purse shut, and she put it back in her bag, and she turned to me and she said, “Now. Let’s go eat. I want to see the prices on the menu with my own eyes.”