Which after tonight she will probably think is a good thing. Especially if things get dramatic.
Or, knowing the people in this room like I do, when things get dramatic.
I hear a laugh and my eyes automatically dart past Dad to the back corner table, where familiar long fingers comb through a familiar mess of brown hair.
Matt.
My stomach sinks straight through the floor as a sea of eyes returns my stare. Jake, Ryan, and Olivia, my former friend group, are shooting daggers at me from across the room, expressions angry enough to pronounce me guilty of first-degree murder.
But I guess after prom, all the evidence would suggest, that’s… a pretty fair verdict.
Matt doesn’t look over, though. His gaze stays fixed on the table in front of him, his dark eyebrows knit together in concentration as he shifts his body to face pointedly away from me. Which is somehow a million times worse than the glares.
I’m surprised to see they’re here tonight. In the summer we’d usually all be hanging out at the Huckabee Pool after close or playing Ping-Pong in Olivia’s enormous basement.
Then again, I guess I was the only thing stopping them from going to bingo night. I guess this is what summer nights can look like without me.
I pull my eyes away as my dad slides card number 505 in front of me. “I’m not going to play,” I say. This whole thing is already starting to feel out of control. This is one thing I can decide.
“How about you play for me then?” he says as he shakes a bunch of red chips out of a white Styrofoam cup. I watch as they shower down in front of me, forming a small pile. “If that card happens to win, I keep the prize basket.”
I stare at him, unamused. Why he even wants to play is beyond me.
Although, I guess this has kind of been his thing lately. Pretending things don’t have meaning when they actually do.
Talk about my mom? Never in a million years.
Get rid of her stuff? Definitely.
Go to the monthly bingo fundraiser she religiously attended as if she didn’t? Absolutely.
“The ‘Football Fan Fiesta’ basket, preferably,” he adds, giving me a big wink as Olivia’s mom, Donna Taylor, the head of the PTA and former prom queen (rumored to have literally bought the vote for both those elections) finally comes trotting onto the stage.
You know what? Fine. The sooner we start playing, the sooner I can get out of here.
“All righty! Everybody ready to get started?” she calls into the microphone before flashing a practiced pageant smile to the crowd.
“Fuck yeah!” Jim Donovan shouts from two tables over, causing a wave of laughter to travel around the room.
“A couple more of those out of old Jim over there, and Donna’s gonna purse the lip filler right out of those babies,” my dad whispers to me, his dark brown eyes crinkling at the corners as he gives me one of his smirking grins.
I shake my head, stifling a real laugh for the first time all night.
Huckabee has a weird disconnect, and Donna Taylor and Jim Donovan are the perfect examples of it. You’ve got the Donnas, in their McMansions, or “newly renovated farmhouses” as they like to call them, their husbands working nine to five in the city while they watch the kids and meet their mom gang at Pilates five days a week. And then you’ve got the Jim Donovans, living just a few miles south on farms that’ve been passed down since Betsy Ross first started messing around with designs for the American flag.
My dad is a slightly less yeehaw Jim Donovan. Born and raised in Huckabee, with the four generations before him sharing the “Joseph Clark” name. This town is so embedded in his blood, he’d probably crumble to dust if he crossed the limits. So, I guess it’s good Johnny’s moving back or Dad’d never see him.
“Will you man Blake’s card for me?” my dad asks, sliding yet another card across the table at me.
“For real?” For someone who didn’t want to play bingo, I sure was about to play a lot of it.
“They’ll be here in a few minutes,” he says, distracted, as he nods to his beat-up cell phone, the cracked screen opened to a text from Johnny. “They just found a spot.”
I’m about to say I’d rather watch old Jim over there win the tractor pull for the fifth straight year at the county fair, but the familiar sound of the tiny yellow balls rattling around the ball cage stops me. I look up at the stage, and for a lingering moment I’m transported back by the sea of numbers just waiting to be called.
I learned how to count in this very room, sliding red chips over numbers as I sat on my mom’s lap, rattling off the number of spaces we needed to win. My mom and I came every month for as long as I can remember, and we won nearly every time. We used to bask on a throne of wicker baskets and cellophane. All our winnings, Mom always said, were thanks to card number 505 and my lucky quarter.
The gossip was endless. Half the room was convinced we were cheating, while the other half was convinced we were just the luckiest two people in all of Huckabee township, my mom’s charm making it pretty difficult for anyone to think bad of her. Even when the odds would suggest it.
I couldn’t set foot in the convenience
