The Spelling Bee Josie Almost Missed

Four months of Tuesdays and Thursdays

She told me about the bee in October. She said it into the dish drainer, to the plates.

“Miss Lanier says everybody in fifth grade is in the class bee. In January. And the winner goes to the school finals.”

I dried a glass.

“Are you going to try?”

“Everybody has to. It’s not a try.”

“That’s not what I asked, Josie.”

She let go of a long breath, and her thumb started on the edge of the sink.

“I w-w-want to win it,” she said. “I just want to win one thing, Grandma. One. And have somebody say my name for it.”

I found my reading glasses and the study list every fifth grader gets in a stapled packet, eleven hundred words long, and said, “Well, then, we had better get started.”

Tuesdays and Thursdays, when her mother was working nights at the Calder Care Center and her father was out with the rural electric co-op, Josie came to my kitchen from the bus at ten past three. I took the word list, and she stood in the middle of my kitchen floor, and she spelled.

Out loud. With her thumb going.

We did it in the pickup on the gravel road out past the Hendersons’ soybean field, and for our old beagle Biscuit, who lay on the linoleum with his chin on his paws and heard every word on that list at least twice.

A stutter and a spelling bee are a hard match. A word spelled out loud is a string of small words, one letter at a time, and each letter is a door that can stick. But Josie can see a word in her head the way some people see a face. She never forgot one. She had the letters. All she needed was time.

By Christmas she could spell anything on that list. By the middle of January she was getting the letters out two times in three without a tap, and the third time she tapped and they came.