The Tuesday Night Bingo Ban That Backfired
I couldn’t say anything.
“So I’m going to go on sitting there,” Alma said. “And when I’m behind, there won’t be anyone to tap. I thought somebody ought to tell you that you were holding up more than a table. Tommy, hang it up. I can’t find the thing.”
There was a muffled “Grandma, you push the red one,” and she was gone.
I sat there with the phone in my hand. After a while I noticed my other hand was on the table, tapping, twice, the way it did at the hall. I hadn’t known I did that, either.
I did cry then. Only a little. Somebody has to be allowed to.
At nine o’clock sharp on Wednesday morning, Bev Tanner was on my porch holding a sugar cream pie in both hands.
“I didn’t bring it to the hall,” she said. “She’d have charged me for the pan.”
Bev has known me exactly long enough to tell me the truth. She cut the pie with my own knife and told me what I had missed.
“Orville held the first ball a full minute and a half,” Bev said. “Then he called B-seven and said into the microphone, ‘That’s for Maxine.’ Rudy said, ‘Hear, hear.’ And he called every number after that like molasses. Max, you ought to know something. That Sip and Swirl thing? She’s moving bingo to Thursday mornings at ten, starting November. That’s what the paper on the board is for.” She pointed her fork at me. “Nobody can come at ten on a Thursday. Alma can’t. Rudy has the cattle sale. She put it on Thursday morning because she wants it to die quiet. Then she gets the room.”
“And I was the wheel she had to pull first.”
“I’d say she miscalculated.”
“How so?”
Bev looked at me with great pity. “Honey,” she said, “you think we come for the numbers?”
On Thursday, when I went out for the mail, there was a shoebox on my porch.
It was a Dollar General shoebox, tied up with baling twine. Inside were forty-three index cards, each handwritten, each signed. The first was from Rudy Pfeiffer, in pencil, in the tidy block letters of a man who has filled out a lot of seed orders. “To whom it may concern. I, Rudy Pfeiffer, state that Maxine Teller has never intimidated me. I am six foot two and weigh two hundred and forty pounds. She is five foot one. I have been unable to be intimidated by her for twenty-two years, though she has tried to get me to eat vegetables.”
Orville’s was in a shaky Navy hand. “I have called numbers for her for twenty-five years and have never once been told to hurry. That is not intimidation. That is manners.”
Tommy Kessler, who writes in all lowercase, tried a joke. “i have never been intimidated by maxine but i was once intimidated by her lemon bars because of how good they were.”
And the last, at the bottom, was in a pale and unsteady ballpoint. Alma had dictated it to Tommy and then signed it herself, with a long wavering line that went partly off the card. “I am ninety-one years old. I have outlived two husbands and a dog. It is the only place I go. I do not wish to go anywhere else. Signed, Alma Kessler, and I know what day it is.”