The Tuesday Night Bingo Ban That Backfired
I laid all forty-three out on the kitchen table like a hand of solitaire. I thought about each of them at their own kitchen table, writing in pencil, and somebody driving the box to my porch while I was in the bath. Not one had called to tell me. They simply did it.
On Saturday evening my phone rang, and it was Orville. “Be in the Legion lot at a quarter after six on Tuesday,” he said, in a voice like a gravel road. “Wear your good coat. And read that paper of yours again, slowly. Just the part about where.” Then he hung up.
I read it that night at the kitchen table, with my finger. It said I was suspended from bingo at Post 318. Not in the building. Not on the premises. A Post, as any Legion wife will tell you, is not a building. It is a charter, and a flagpole, and a pavilion, and an acre and a quarter of gravel at the corner of Second and Mulberry. I want to tell you I did not smile.
I smiled.
On Tuesday at a quarter after six, I parked the Buick at the far end of the Legion lot, under the old pin oak, and sat in my good coat, the navy wool with the brooch, with my hands on the wheel.
It was a cold, clear evening, and the air smelled like woodsmoke and cut corn. There was a vinyl banner on the front of the hall that said “Sip and Swirl: Opening Night,” and balloons on the door, and through the windows I could see rows of white canvases and Darla in a smock, adjusting each easel by an inch.
For a moment I felt the hot knees again. I thought, I could still drive home.
Then I saw the headlights.
They were coming in a line off Second Street, one after another, bobbing over the gravel. Rudy’s Ford with the hay hooks still in the back. Tommy’s Silverado with the oxygen tank belted into the middle seat like a passenger. Bev’s Lincoln. The Burkes’ little Honda. Dot Mueller’s Buick, and Dot is seventy-nine and had not driven after dark since her cataract surgery.
They did not turn toward the front doors. They went straight past the balloons and around the side of the building to the old Post pavilion, the one Walt helped pour in 1998, the open-sided shelter with the concrete floor and the picnic tables and the flagpole. I lost count at twenty.
Someone knocked on my window.
It was Orville, in his good Navy cap, carrying something large wrapped in a bedsheet, in both arms, like a man carrying a sleeping child.
“Evening, Maxine. Read your notice?”
“I did.”
“Where does it say you can’t be?”
“It says Post 318,” I said. “It doesn’t say pavilion.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say.” His eyes were bright in the dark. He shifted the bundle, and something inside it rumbled, low and round and unmistakable, the sound of forty wooden balls rolling against one another in a cage.
I would have known that sound at the bottom of a lake.
“Orville,” I said. “Is that Walt’s cage?”
“Maxine,” he said, and pulled back the corner of the bedsheet so the brass handle caught the light from the lot lamp like a coin, “how do you feel about the great outdoors?”
My knees had stopped shaking, by the way. I don’t know when.