“You don’t believe me? It’s true. You couldn’t beat me if you tried.”
“Doubtful,” I murmured, and he tilted his head, cupping one hand around his ear.
“Huh? Gotta speak up. I’m an old man.”
I lowered my soda. “I said it’s doubtful that you could beat me.”
Slowly his mouth turned up into a smile. “Think so, eh?”
“I know so. It’s sort of my thing,” I said. “I learned at camp. I can play pretty much anything.”
He shuffled the deck. “Oh, really? Have you ever played Humbug?”
“I told you. Cards are my thing. Deal.”
He dealt all of the cards, flipping the last one face-up, and we started playing, my TV plans on hold for the moment. I’d forgotten how good it felt to play cards with an opponent.
The best thing about playing cards is that you can play them with anyone. Friends, enemies, even perfect strangers. In some ways, I liked playing with strangers the best, because there were fewer distractions, less posturing.
“Learned at camp, huh?” my grandfather asked.
“My counselor had a book full of them. I always won.” I took the trick as if to prove the point.
He made an approving noise. “My mother—she was your great-grandma Elora; you never met her—was something else with a deck of cards,” he said. We laid down our cards and he took the trick, surprising me. “She always had a deck in her purse.” I thought about the deck I had stashed in Marin’s purse. “She taught me a lot of games, but I learned this one in the service.”
We played along silently for a few minutes. I won the game and gathered up the cards to start a new one.
“Rummy?”
He wiggled his eyebrows in you’re-making-a-mistake style and nodded. I shuffled and dealt.
“Patty’s a hell of a gal,” he said at last, pulling his cards together and fanning them out. “She tries too hard sometimes, but she doesn’t mean any harm by it.”
“I’m not going to church,” I mumbled, knowing where this was heading. I slapped my discard down pointedly, and he drew without missing a beat.
“No, no, me either,” he said. “It’s her church, not mine.”
I glanced up, but he wasn’t looking at me. “I didn’t know my mom ever went,” I said.
He nodded. “Oh, yeah. It was a big deal to her for a while there. Your grandma and I are pretty surprised she never took you. That’s why your grandma thinks it’ll help you to go. Might make you feel closer to your mom somehow. Might help you to pray for her a little. Or, hell, pray for yourself. Lord knows I’ve done my fair share of that in my lifetime. You don’t have to go to church to pray.”
“I don’t know how to pray,” I said, and once I’d admitted it, I realized that this was what had been keeping me from going all along. Not that I’d never gone to church or that I hated my grandmother or any other excuse. I’d been so freaked out when they died, and then I’d missed the funerals, and had gotten immersed in my problems in Caster City. I’d learned about the lies, about how I didn’t really know Mom at all, and I’d gotten angry. And I don’t know if the real problem was any of those things or all of them, but the truth was I didn’t know how to talk to my mom now that she was gone. I didn’t know what to say. And I felt so guilty about not saying anything. My mom and sister had died more than a month ago and I had never talked to them since. Had never told them how much I missed them or how I was feeling about everything or that I was fine and that I wasn’t mad that they weren’t home when the tornado hit or that I didn’t hate Ronnie. I had never even tried.
I laid my cards facedown, suddenly too tired to concentrate. My grandfather still held his, rooted through them with his forefinger, choosing one and laying it on the discard pile.
“Well, I’m nobody’s man of the cloth, but I believe you just pray by saying what’s in your heart,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any special formula for it. But your grandma’d know a lot more about that than I do. You should ask her.”
But that was the problem. I had so much going on in my heart, and it didn’t often go together or make sense or even stay the same from moment to moment. How did I speak from a heart that didn’t understand itself? What did I say?
When the garage door rattled open, I was surprised that an hour had gone by so quickly.
My grandmother came in and for a moment just stood and watched our game, her light-brown old-lady purse dangling from her wrist, a pair of giant sunglasses on her face.
“Lunch?” she finally asked, peeling the glasses from her face and setting the purse on the counter.
“You betcha!” my grandfather cried, laying down his cards to win the game. I slapped down my remaining cards in frustration. “My belly button’s rubbing my backbone.”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I need some fresh air.”
I could see it, the bewilderment, as it crossed her face. Surely she had come in and seen me playing with him and thought I’d turned some big corner. Maybe she even thought this was the mark of a great beginning for us. A breakthrough.
But it was too much. All of it was too much. I didn’t know what I was feeling, but I knew I needed some time alone, some space to think about everything.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
The day had turned sort of cloudy but was still warm. Someone nearby was mowing a lawn and I breathed in deep as the scent of lawn mower, gasoline, and cut grass reached me. The smell made me nearly double over with memories.
Marin, outside with her plastic lawn mower, following Kolby around as he worked the real lawn mower in lines across his front yard. Her feet were bare in my memory, her toes painted pale pink and glittery. She was wearing a leotard—the one with the ladybug appliquéd to the front from a spring preschool recital—and was singing, though her song was drowned out by the noise.
Mom was kneeling in the flower bed, her hands in a pair of blue-and-gray-striped gardening gloves too big for her fingers. She gripped weeds in her left hand, using a trowel with her right to dig up stubborn roots, while at the same time asking me questions about school.
“How is Jane doing?”
“Fine. She got some award at the Model UN thing last weekend.”
“Oh, wonderful! Tell her congratulations from me. What about you? What do you have coming up?”
“Not much. Drama club is doing monologues. Dani’s performing a scene from Alice in Wonderland. You should hear it. It’s really good. She made Mrs. Robb cry.”
“What play is yours from?”
“I’m just doing the lighting. I don’t have to do a monologue if I don’t want to.”
“Oh, but why don’t you?”
I was drinking lemonade Mom had made that day because she’d gotten off work early. She’d even bought fresh raspberries—something we couldn’t often afford—to sink in the bottom of the glass. The front door was open, the house dark behind the screen. Everyone was outside, playing or working, soaking up the cool early-evening air.
It was the best. It was a random day and could have been swapped with so many other days that were similar to it, yet it was the best.
And now I was walking through a strange neighborhood, alone, knowing I would never be outside with Mom, Marin, and Kolby again. I passed several neighbors, who all seemed to be eyeing me funny, and wondered how many of them knew my story. In a small town like Waverly, probably most of them did. Stories tended to be the favorite pastime in places like this. Stories about scandal or death or destruction even more so. And my story had all of the above.
Is that Patty and Barry’s granddaughter?