Chapter 23: Opening Day

On the first Saturday in April, I walked into the Elks Lodge with my son's hand in mine, and nobody turned around.

They were too busy with the pancakes.

Opening Day for the Bandits started with a breakfast in the banquet room.

A hundred and forty people sat at the same round tables, with syrup on every surface.

The woman with the cash box stood up when she saw me.

"Carrie Nash," she said. "Your table's by the stage. Becca saved it."

This time I knew exactly who had saved me a seat.

"Thank you," I said.

"Anytime, hon."

Over the stage, where a glitter banner had once said KENT + BECCA, a long sheet of butcher paper hung from the same two hooks.

It said CARRIE + KENT in green crayon, with a plus sign made of four bottle caps, glued on crooked.

The R was backward.

"I did the letters," Eli said. "Rhonda did the glue. Becca did the hooks. Grandpa held the ladder, and Daddy didn't know."

"Daddy didn't know what?"

"That it was for him."

Becca sat at the head table with a gavel and a clipboard, in a Lodge sweatshirt.

She was twenty-eight, the youngest chair in the Auxiliary's history.

The bingo ladies had elected her in January by sixteen votes to none.

Joyce's sister had abstained.

"Order," Becca said, tapping once, and the whole room laughed.

I looked around for Kent and didn't see him.

The green card had come back to me in January.

It had Joyce's signature on the line, and the letters had wandered off the edge of the box.

She had written nothing else.

I kept it in the kitchen drawer with the grocery lists, and I hadn't answered it.

I thought about that card more than I wanted to.

"Mama," Eli said. "Go find the syrup. Rhonda says we're out."

"Where's the syrup?"

"In the back room, with the paper plates. Daddy's looking for it."

He gave me a very serious look and ran off to sit on Rhonda's lap.

I was thirty and a half years old, and I knew when I was being steered.

I went anyway.

The storeroom at the end of the hall was long, narrow and cold.

Metal shelves held paper plates, plastic tablecloths, folded Christmas trees and a pyramid of syrup bottles.

Kent stood at the far end in a clean flannel shirt, holding a bottle in each hand.