This one’s for you, Mom. I love you.
1
I brought the lucky quarter.
I don’t know why I did. I’d walked past it hundreds and hundreds of times without a second thought while a thin layer of dust formed around the edges. But there was just something about the way it was sitting there tonight, on the same bookshelf where it had sat untouched for three years.
Tonight I swear it looked…
Lucky.
I cringe as that word pops into my head, an image of blue eyes and long brown hair following it, never too far behind. Luck was my mom’s thing. Not mine. But I still reach my hand into my pocket to feel the smooth metal, my thumbnail finding that familiar nick on the edge just above George Washington’s head.
“This’ll be fun,” my dad whispers to me, turning around in the card-buying line to give me a big, blindingly hopeful smile. A smile that acts like we didn’t just spend the past three years before tonight avoiding absolutely every possible reminder of her.
I snort. “ ‘Fun’ is definitely not the first word that comes to mind,” I whisper back to him as I scan the room, taking in the absolute zoo that is the Huckabee School District monthly bingo fundraiser. Even after all this time away, almost nothing has changed. My eyes move past two old ladies locked in a heated arm-wrestle battle over a premium spot near the speaker, over to Tyler Poland with his collection of rocks, each one laid carefully out in size order on top of his five coveted bingo cards.
“Chaotic,” maybe. “Chaotic” would be a good word to use.
But not even the chaos of elderly people arm wrestling and prized rock collections can distract me from my uneasiness at being back here. And not just because of what this place meant to me and my mom.
For someone who just succeeded in blowing up her entire social life three weeks ago at junior prom, there is literally no worse place to be. Unfortunately, with said social life in shambles, that also means there wasn’t a single thing I could claim to be doing to get out of coming.
And I can’t talk to my dad about what happened, or about pretty much anything for that matter, so here I am. Stuck Scarlet Lettering my way around, while Dad shamelessly uses this fundraiser as a mini–high school reunion. Because tonight is “conveniently” the night his best friend, Johnny Carter, is moving back into town after twenty years away.
I say conveniently because if you want to jump straight back into the deep end of Huckabee society, this is certainly the splashiest way to do it. I mean, half their graduating class is probably still sitting in this room.
Once a month the elementary school cafetorium is turned into a group audition for a rural-Pennsylvania mash-up of My Strange Addiction and WWE SmackDown. Don’t believe me? Back in fifth grade, Mrs. Long, the sweetest little angel of a kindergarten teacher, decked Sue Patterson square in the face because she thought Sue was intentionally not calling any B numbers.
What’s even more unbelievable is that she was right.
“I’m going to get Johnny’s and Blake’s cards for them,” my dad says, choosing to ignore my skepticism, as he pulls out his billfold. “You know how hard it is to find parking.”
He’s acting like I was just here last week, instead of three whole years ago.
I shrug as nonchalantly as I can muster, watching him buy three cards off Principal Nelson, the whiskery middle school principal, and the only one trusted enough for the past ten years to hand out the bingo cards without need for suspicion. There was a whole series of town council meetings and six months of rigorous debate before he was approved for the position.
“Emily! Glad to see you here,” Principal Nelson says to me, that all-too-familiar sympathetic glint in his eyes. I grimace internally since “Glad to see you here” automatically translates to some variation of “We haven’t seen you since your mom died!” He begins rifling through the massive deck of bingo cards and pulls out a small worn card, holding it out to me. “You want you and your mom’s card? Number 505! I still remember!”
I wince slightly as my eyes trace the familiar crease straight down the center of the card, landing finally on the red splotch in the upper right-hand corner, where I spilled fruit punch when I was six. I hate these moments the most. The moments when you think you are healed just enough, and then something as simple as a bingo card makes every fiber feel raw.
Number 505.
When I was born on the fifth day of the fifth month, Mom’s superstitious mind lit up like a Christmas tree, and she swore five was our lucky number. So that number became intertwined with everything in our lives, from the number of times I had to scrub behind my ears, to my sports-team jerseys when I attempted one spring’s worth of T-ball and one fall’s worth of soccer, to lucky quarters she pressed into my palm, whispering about how it was “extra special” since twenty-five was five squared.
Extra-special lucky quarters that would one day collect dust on a bookshelf. Until tonight.
But I shake my head at him. “No thanks.”
There’s a long, uncomfortable pause, and my dad glances at me before quickly pulling another wrinkled five out of his billfold and holding it out to Principal Nelson. “I’ll take it. Thanks, Bill.”
“You shouldn’t have done that,” I mumble to my dad as we walk away, Principal Nelson shooting me an even more sympathetic look now.
“It’s just bingo, Em,” he says to me as we zigzag our way to a free table and sit down across from each other. “Blake can take it if you don’t want it.” He looks down at the cards as he says it, though, refusing to meet my gaze.
As if this all wasn’t awkward enough,
