Sheepshead Cards
I drove over the next morning before work. It had snowed four inches overnight.
I could tell from the tracks in her driveway that the neighbor boy had already shoveled her out, because she paid him five dollars and a canning jar of soup every time.
She was at the kitchen table in her housecoat, playing out practice hands of sheepshead against nobody, the way she did most mornings. The radio was on low, the polka hour out of Stevens Point.
“You’re early,” she said, without looking up. “Something’s wrong. Sit.”
I sat. I didn’t know how to start, so I just put the folded papers on the table between us, and she looked at me over her reading glasses for a long moment before she set down her cards to read them.
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She read every line. She has never in her life skipped a line of anything, not a recipe, not a church bulletin, not the fine print on a coupon. When she got to the end she turned back to the first page and read it again.
“Kowalczyk’s Corner Tap,” she said.
“Russ gave it to Gil. All of it. Since November.”
I told her everything Russ had told me. The cooler, the taxes, the distributor, the truck in the mill parking lot. Their father and the oak back bar. I even told her that Russ had cried, because I didn’t want her to think worse of him than he deserved.
She listened with her sheepshead hand still fanned out face up in her other hand, and when I finished, she very slowly laid the cards face down on the table and squared them with her fingertips.
“Does Gil know it was mine?”
“Russ told him it was family money and that I was fine with it.”
“Hm.” She took off her glasses and folded them. “So Gil doesn’t know it was an old widow’s land money. He thinks it’s just his brother being a soft touch.”
“I don’t know what Gil thinks, Grandma.”
“Well,” she said. “Let’s find out.”
I stared at her. “What does that mean?”
“It means Friday.” She picked her cards back up. “Fish fry. You’ll drive me. I’ll wear my good coat.”
“Grandma, you can’t. Not in front of everybody.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s his bar. Because it’ll embarrass him. Because people will talk.”
“People are going to talk anyway, honey. This is a town of four thousand people and three of them are related to the woman at the credit union.” She laid a card down.
“The question is whether they talk about a man who took an old woman’s money behind her back, or about a man who stood up and answered for it. I’d like to give Gilbert the chance to be the second one.”