The Tuesday I Walked Into Card Club

At one o’clock, Lance came in from the field. He told his dad he had an errand to run for me and he would be back in an hour. Ron just waved. Ron trusts Lance with everything.

I put on my mother’s old denim jacket, faded nearly white at the elbows, far too warm for the day.

But my hands were cold, and it was hers, and I wanted something of hers on me when I walked through that door.

I wore a plain white T-shirt under it. I pulled my hair back, then took it down again.

My hair is dark blonde and straight as a board, and I have never known what to do with it. I left it down.

Lance drove. Neither of us talked. He parked behind the card ladies’ cars along Vonda’s fence line.

The front door was open behind the screen, the way it always is in summer. I could hear cards slapping down and smell coffee.

I opened the screen door, and I walked through the front hall, and I stopped in the doorway of Vonda’s living room.

It was the same room I had walked into a thousand times, the August afternoon light coming hot and yellow through the big front window.

Two tables pushed together by the side window, the old chrome table from the back porch and a card table under a flowered cloth. Eight women. Coffee mugs by every elbow, and a plate of Doris’s oatmeal bars in the middle.

Most of them had a hand of cards up.

Vonda sat at the near end of the chrome table, closest to the doorway.

She had on her coral blouse, the one she saves for card club, and her short gray permanent looked freshly set.

She had just bid seven hearts. I heard her say it as I came in.

Then the room went still. It happened table by table.

One woman looked up, then the next, and the next, until all seven of them had turned in their chairs toward the doorway.

I stood there, calm on the outside. I felt Lance come up behind me and stop just at my shoulder, in the doorway.

He had his seed cap on, and his face was tanned dark from a month on the combine.

Vonda looked up last. She looked at me, and at my mother’s jacket, and at her son behind me, and I watched her understand exactly why we had come.

“Robyn,” she said. “We are in the middle of a hand.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry to walk in on it. I won’t stay long.”

I did not sit down. Nobody offered me a chair, and I would not have taken one.

I folded my hands in front of me the way I do when I am waiting on a kid who will not take his seat on the bus.

“Vonda,” I said. “Greta’s tuition is due on Friday. Six thousand one hundred and forty dollars. I came for it.”

Nobody played a card. Down at the far end, Irene Haugen set her coffee mug down so carefully it did not make a sound.

Doris sat with a bar halfway to her mouth and did not take a bite.

Vonda looked down at her hand of cards. She looked at it a long time, the way you look at a hand when you are trying to decide if you can make your bid. Then she looked past me, at her son.