The Tuesday I Walked Into Card Club

I did not say anything. Greta was at the table, eighteen and nervous about everything, and I did not want to start something over her own college money in front of her. I passed the beans and let it go.

What I did not know was that Vonda walked Lance out to his pickup after dinner and kept talking.

She told him she would open a savings account at her bank in Mayville, in her own name, so it would be out of reach when the fuel bill came and we got tempted.

“She said it would just be sitting there earning a little,” Lance told me later. “She said when the tuition came, she’d write the check herself, same day.”

On Tuesday he drove to Mayville. The teller there had known Vonda, and Lance, and me, for twenty years.

With both our names already signed on the back, and Lance standing right there, she let Vonda deposit it.

Lance told me that night. I was angry, and I let him see it, but I did not fight him.

It was his mother, it was in a bank, and the bill would not come until August. I told myself the money was safe, and I told myself that was what mattered.

It was a good summer. Greta worked mornings at the nursing home in Hatton, helping in the kitchen and sitting with the residents in the afternoons.

Every Tuesday that summer, she drove up to her grandma’s before the card club started.

Vonda’s card club has met in her living room every Tuesday afternoon for thirty years, two tables set up by the side window, eight women playing five hundred.

Greta would pull a kitchen chair up to the card table and take her grandma’s blood pressure with her new cuff.

Then the other ladies would line up with their sleeves pushed up, while Greta wrote every number in a little notebook.

“One twenty-eight over eighty-two,” Greta would say to Vonda, very serious. “That’s good, Grandma. That’s real good for your age.”

And Vonda would laugh and say she would like to see what Greta’s numbers looked like after thirty years of Ron.

Joanne told me later that Vonda bragged about Greta every single Tuesday, before Greta got there and after she left.

“That girl is going to be the best nurse in the state,” Vonda would say, dealing the cards. “You watch. You just watch her.”

I want people to understand that about Vonda. She loved that girl with her whole heart. Whatever happened with the money, it never happened because she did not love Greta.

The fall bill came on a Thursday in the middle of August.

After the scholarship and the grants, the balance due for the semester was six thousand one hundred and forty dollars, due the following Friday, eight days out.

Greta, wearing the stethoscope she had bought with her own nursing home money, brought it in from the mailbox and set it on the counter.

“It’s okay, right?” she asked. “You said it’s okay.” She was trying to sound grown up about it, and her voice cracked anyway.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “That’s what Grandpa and Grandma Thorsrud have been keeping it for.”

I held down the bill with the salt shaker, and I told myself I would call Vonda on the weekend, when she was not so busy with harvest meals.

Lance came in from the field after ten that night. I told him what his mother said.