It took a bit of time and thinking until Morris finally decided that calling bingo was like watching his customers in his family hardware store on Main Street. Wandering up and down the narrow aisles, digging in assorted bins, spotting a find with gleeful satisfaction.
Hit or miss. Certain or confused. Talkative or silent.
Senior residents at Pawpaw Tree Hill’s twice-weekly bingo game were just about the same, except they circled around linoleum-topped tables in seats and wheelchairs. Their eyes migrated from Morris to their cards and back.
They came with purpose.
“G 56,” he announced firmly, his voice full of grit and his right hand up high above his shoulder, showing a ball fallen from the rotating bingo cage.
He showed it slowly around the room full of mostly white and gray heads. The hard-of-hearing leaned in to get a better look. Other players’ attentions wandered. Probably diverted by a call they missed, Morris speculated, or eyeing nearby cards, or maybe even thinking about winning a chocolate prize. The residents sure talked enough about it.
Just like in his store. Patience was needed.
I’m waiting and listening, Sal, like you taught me. See? I’m counting down slowly from 8.
“B or G?” a high, stretched voice called out from somewhere in the room, the words bouncing off the walls and floor.
“G, like in gills,” Morris said a little louder, repeating the number once more while the last few residents hunched over their cards and searched for a match.
He watched as Evie, a gruff new resident who sat along the outside of the group, quickly inspected her two cards placed side by side neatly, smelling slightly of aging cardboard. Failing to find the number, she waited quietly, eyes casting about her table. Like Morris, she saw a match on her neighbor’s card. After she pointed it out, her neighbor picked up a chip and reached as far as her stiff shoulders allowed before putting it down. Evie nudged the chip into place, and the woman smiled and chirruped.
“’Bout time I get something. This card’s no good.”
Evie dipped her head, acknowledging the common complaint. “Yep,” she said. “Helps to get a lucky one.”
Tall and lanky, fit for his 63 years, Morris turned easily from observing the exchange. He bent over the table beside him and scanned the residents’ cards there. Eager eyes looked up at him expectantly, hoping not to have missed anything.
“Looks good,” he said, nodding with assurance before heading over to the other tables for a quick check, moving effortlessly and giving smiles freely.
“Don’t need help,” Evie said as Morris approached, pushing her glasses up against her nose and looking away.
“Oh, okay,” he said. “Maybe another time.”
He turned and walked back to the ball cage for the next number, wondering at Evie’s abrupt rebuff.
Morris took pride in being one of the more popular volunteers at the senior home, calling bingo and visiting residents who were on their own. Catching folks in their rooms or in public spaces, he found reminders of the parents he’d lost years ago, and he easily spilled well-honed stories about working on the water, oyster roasts, rising tides, crab picking, and wild bay weather.
He knew that some residents couldn’t always remember from one day to the next. But if prompted with his chatter, they often could retrieve decades-old memories of their own, like foraging ducks diving far below the waters’ surface. Searching, searching, and then up would pop a memory in the middle of a conversation.
He lifted another ball. “B 6.”
“I have 5 and 1,” a resident shouted. “Does that count?”
“Nope. Just B 6.”
Chuckling, head nodding, bafflement. Morris joined in the group’s amusement, but in the back of his mind was Evie pulling away.
#
The commotion during the game was why Evie came. Jokes and challenges floated across the room. She liked that no one was too serious and she marveled at how easily some of the residents became confused.
The most bewilderment happened—every time— during the final game of the
hour, she noticed. Filling the entire card as a finale always produced at least three mistaken bingo calls and lots of fuss before someone eventually covered all of their squares.
“Anything can happen,” Evie chortled to her neighbor at the table.
But these moments for her were just a distraction. These days, she mostly felt numb, no longer herself. Whenever she was on her own, in her room, or in the garden courtyard next to it, she would murmur to herself in fragile tones that would rise and fall as if traveling along a rocky path.
What is there to do now? I can’t sew anymore, my fingers hardly work anymore. Can’t even dress myself. Nothing moves the way it used to. So hard to get around. I miss Jay and the boys. How did I outlive them all? They were so good to me . . .
The recounted list of losses and struggles over her 87 years grew and spiraled endlessly for days. Jay had dropped dead of a heart attack on the bathroom floor, ending decades of a sometimes difficult but cherished marriage. Jim and Junior were only in their 50s when their truck ran into a tree while going home after a long day of fishing. Gaping holes in Evie’s heart, with little relief.
On these days, when the loss was unbearable, she would sit in her room and stare out the window, her mind adrift. Wandering through time, until she dozed. Until the next bingo day, marked in her spidery scrawl, appeared on her desk calendar.
#
Morris had a habit of observing Evie at the games, at least when he could. He was curious about the newcomer and wanted to figure her out.
He noticed that she listened intently and never missed a call. Every time she had a match, she placed the chip exactly where it belonged. Words rarely came out of her mouth. Not even to call “bingo,” though Morris figured out that she easily could have, many times.
He expected today would be much of the same.
“Hello, Mrs. Rock,” he called out, as she moved her wheelchair to the same spot in the activity room.
She nodded his way and then placed her two bingo cards on the table in front of her and stacked her chips beside them.
There’s something there, Sal. Don’t know what it is. In-de-pen-dent. And alone.
“O 62,” he called, his silent conversation with his older brother still in the back of his head.
Evie placed a chip on the square, completing her second bingo on the card for that game. Two rows entirely filled. She could have called bingo four plays ago for the first finished row, but her lips remained firmly shut.
Morris spotted it also and caught her eye. He raised his eyebrows expectantly, waiting for her to announce the win. Instead, she gestured, fingers wagging low over her card. He paused, then looked out across the room. Wondering faces began to look up. He checked with her again and then cranked the cage once more, numbered balls inside rattling and tumbling over one another.
Evie covered her bingos surreptitiously with both hands, he noticed, waiting for the next ball to fall.
#
“How are you, Mrs. Rock?” Morris leaned inside Evie’s open door a week later. She knew he wanted to stay and visit. He had been trying to catch her eye for some time, poking his head in her room with a short greeting, calling out to her in the halls, helloing her at bingo. So far, she had mostly looked away.
This time, she lifted her head from daydreaming, pushed her glasses up her nose, and stared at him.
What is he doing here, again?
“How about coming to the porch with me today and watching the bay? It’s pretty exciting. The water’s choppy, and the clouds are flying across the sky.”
Evie took a moment to consider the offer. She liked that he looked presentable, shaved and tidy, and that he had been bringing her what he called “smackerels,” leaving the small chocolate bars on her bedside table when she wasn’t in the room. She hadn’t been to the porch yet, even though she arrived two months ago; it would be a nice change.
“Okay,” she said reluctantly, hoping that she wouldn’t regret it.
Guess it won’t hurt for a bit. Not certain why he wants to, though. Certainly, he has better things to do.
“Been around the bay my whole life,” Morris told her, as they went down the hall that led to the porch sitting high above the shoreline.
“That so,” Evie said, as she rolled carefully onto the porch’s weathered wooden floor, found a spot she liked—even slats that didn’t groan as her wheelchair shifted—and
settled in. As she surveyed this part of the Victorian home, she quietly admired how the second-floor structure wrapped around the back of the building, making it possible to see far out across the bay.
Morris sat next to her and talked. His voice carried stories of his childhood, his parents, his time as a waterman before working in the family store—a gravelly river of sound, almost without pause.
Evie found it soothing as she breathed in the lush, water-scented air. Her mind emptied as she focused on the wind traveling through the leaves on the nearby trees and the waves slapping gently against the shoreline. In the distance, she could see a raft of ducks dipping into the water and dodging each other. Almost like a dance.
“And that’s when we lost Sal.”
Evie startled.
“I’m sorry. What was that?”
#
“That’s when my big brother Sal died,” said Morris quietly, a realization unfolding that he hadn’t really talked much about Sal’s death in decades.
Why talk about this now? Sal is still with me. No need to pick at the loss again, questioning and wondering.
“I’m so sorry you lost your brother,” Evie said in a voice softer than he had ever heard her use, almost a whisper. “That must have been very difficult.”
“I was young, 12. He was 17 and working on the water, crabbing on his own.” Morris looked down at his feet. Toes on his right foot rubbed at an imperfection in the porch’s wooden planks.
“I wanted to go with him, but Sal said not this time.” Morris cleared his throat and wiped his nose with the back of a hand. “He never came back. All they found was his boat floating about a half mile from the dock, empty ’cept for some crab traps.”
“You never found out what happened?” Evie asked gently. “Seems like that would make it even harder.”
Morris nodded. He looked at the bay again, squinting as he searched the horizon.
“Funny how certain people somehow become a part of you,” Evie said. “With you all the time, tied to your being. Same with my husband and boys. Never really left me. ”
She gazed at the view, then spun her wheelchair around and headed for the doorway to the hall. Morris opened it for her and then returned to the porch railing, where he studied a flock of geese flying overhead, their raucous calls cutting
through the air. He breathed deeply and sighed.
Why did I bring up Sal’s death?
He fidgeted with a snag on his thumbnail. Maybe because I sense him out there on the water, fishing on his boat for crabs. The hardware store keeps me inside, distracted. But I feel so much more when I’m outside here, where we are the closest.
#
“B 11,” Morris called out later that afternoon.
Part of him was still with Evie on the porch, uncertain about what exactly had happened. He scanned the edges of the room unsuccessfully for her among the tables. He asked a few of the residents whether they had seen her or heard that she was coming.
But no one knew.
She’s here all the time. Maybe the porch visit was too much.
He promised himself to check on her after the game.
#
Evie sat in her room, her aching, hunched shoulders covered with a bright crocheted wrap, a multicolored gift made by a friend many years back. No bingo this afternoon, she decided. For some reason, she didn’t have it in her, but she was uncertain why.
Perhaps because she couldn’t drive out the cold that had her shivering. She had closed her door, so no one would bother her, and turned up the heat. She waited for the warmth. Her head dipped and her eyes closed.
Poor Morris, losing his brother like that. I can’t imagine. So young, too. I miss Jay and the boys, but I had them for so much longer. So much longer.
I had a good life.
I did.
Evie’s thoughts slowly ebbed.
In her mind, a sea of sky-blue water emerged, stretching to the horizon.
Enveloping her in its vastness.
