squeak.”
Agnes Barkley laughed out loud. Gretchen Dixon was the most outrageous friend she had ever had. Agnes liked to listen to Gretchen just to hear what words would pop out of her mouth next. Even so, Agnes couldn’t let Gretchen’s attack on Oscar go unchallenged. After all, he was her husband.
“You shouldn’t be so hard on him,” she chided. “You’d like him if you ever spent any time with him.”
“How can I spend time with the man?” Gretchen returned sar-castically. “Whenever I’m around him, all he does is grouse about how it isn’t ladylike for women to smoke.”
“Oscar was raised a Southern Baptist,” Agnes countered.
“Oscar Barkley was raised under a rock.”
Agnes changed the subject. “Would you like some lemonade? A cup of coffee?”
“Aggie Barkley, I’m not your husband. I didn’t come over here to have you wait on me hand and foot the way you do him. I came to ask you a question. The senior citizens in town have chartered a bus to go up to Phoenix to the Heard Museum day after tomorrow. Me and Dolly Ann Parker and Lola Carlson are going to go. We were wondering if you’d like to come along.”
“You mean Oscar and me?”
“No, I mean you, silly. Aggie Barkley by her own little lone-some.
It’s an overnight. We’ll be staying someplace inexpensive, especially if we all four bunk in a single room. So you see, there wouldn’t be any place for Oscar to sleep. Besides, it’ll be fun. Just us girls. Think about it. It’ll be like an old-fashioned slumber party. Remember those?”
Agnes was already shaking her head. “Oscar would never let me go. Never in a million years.”
“Let?” Gretchen yelped, as though the very word wounded her.
“Do you mean to tell me that at your age you have to ask that man for permission to be away from home overnight?”
“Not really. It’s just that…”
“Say you’ll go, then. The bus is filling up fast, and Dolly Ann needs to call in our reservation by five this afternoon.”
“Where did you say it’s going?”
Gretchen grinned triumphantly and ground out her cigarette in the ashtray Agnes had unobtrusively slipped in front of her. “The Heard Museum. In Phoenix. It’s supposed to be full of all kinds of Indian stuff. Artifacts and baskets and all like that. I’m not that wild about Indians myself — I can take them or leave them — but the trip should be fun.”
Agnes thought about it for a minute. She didn’t want Gretchen to think she was a complete stick-in-the-mud. “If it’s only overnight, I suppose I could go.”
“That’s my girl,” Gretchen said. “I’ll go right home and call Dolly Ann.” She stood up and started briskly toward the door, then paused and turned back to Agnes. “By the way, have you ever played strip poker?”
“Me?” Agnes Barkley croaked. “Strip poker? Never!”
“Hold your breath, honey, because you’re going to learn. The trick is to start out wearing plenty of clothes to begin with, so if you lose some it doesn’t matter.”
With that Gretchen Dixon was out the door, her flip-flops slapping noisily on the loose gravel as she headed down the hill toward her own mobile, parked two doors away. Agnes sat at the table, stunned.
They would be playing strip poker? What on earth had she let herself in for?
Agnes wasn’t so sure she had said yes outright, but she certainly had implied that she would go. She could have jumped up right then, swung the door open, and called out to Gretchen that she’d changed her mind, but she didn’t. Instead she just sat there like a lump until she heard Gretchen’s screen door slam shut behind her.
In the silence that followed, Agnes wondered what Oscar would say. It wasn’t as though she had never left him alone. For years, she had spent one weekend in May — three whole days — at a Women’s Bible Study retreat held each year at the YMCA camp at Lake Zurich, north of Buffalo Grove. And always, before she left, she had cooked and frozen and labeled enough food to last two weeks rather than three days. All Oscar and the girls ever had to do was thaw it out and heat it up.
Well, a Bible study retreat at a YMCA camp and four old ladies sitting around playing strip poker in a cheap hotel room weren’t exactly the same thing, but Oscar didn’t need to know about the poker part of it. Actually, the idea of Agnes going off someplace with Gretchen Dixon and her pals might be enough to set Oscar off all by itself.
And what if it did? Agnes Barkley asked herself, with a sudden jolt of self-determination. Sauce for the goose and sauce for the gander, right? After all, she never balked at the idea of him going off and spending hours on end wandering all over the desert with Jimmy Rathbone, that windy old crony of his, did she? So if Oscar Barkley didn’t like the idea of her going to Phoenix with Gretchen, he could just as well lump it.
That was what Agnes thought at two o’clock in the afternoon, but by evening she had softened up some. Not that she’d changed her mind. She was still determined to go, but she’d figured out a way to ease it past Oscar.
As always her first line of attack was food. She made his favorite dinner — Italian meat loaf with baked potatoes and frozen French-cut green beans; a tossed salad with her own homemade Thousand Island dressing; and a lemon meringue pie for dessert. Agnes never failed to be amazed by the amount of food she could coax out of that little galley-sized kitchen with its tiny oven and stove. All it took was a little talent for both cooking and timing.
Dinner was ready at six, but Oscar wasn’t home. He still wasn’t there at six thirty or seven o’clock, either. Finally, at seven fifteen, with the meat loaf tough and dry in the cooling oven and with the baked potatoes shrivelled to death in their wrinkled, crusty skins, Agnes heard Oscar’s Honda crunch to a stop outside the RV. By then, Agnes had pushed the plates and silverware aside and was playing a game of solitaire on the kitchen-nook table.
When Oscar stepped in through the door, Agnes didn’t even glance up at him. “Sorry I’m so late, Aggie,” he said, pausing long enough to hang his jacket and John Deere cap in the closet. “I guess we just got a little carried away with what we were doing.”
“I just guess you did,” she returned coolly.
With an apprehensive glance in her direction, Oscar hurried to the kitchen sink, rolled up his sleeves, and began washing his hands.
“It smells good,” he said.
“It probably was once,” she replied. “I expect it’ll be a little past its’prime by the time I get it on the table.”
“Sorry,” he muttered again.
Deliberately, one line of cards at a time, she folded the solitaire hand away and then moved the dishes and silverware back to their respective places.
“Sit down and get out of the way,” she ordered. “There isn’t enough room for both of us to be milling around between the stove and the table while I’m trying to put food on the table.”
Obediently, Oscar sank into the bench. While Agnes shifted the lukewarm food from the stove to the table, he struggled his way out of the nylon fanny pack he customarily wore on his walking jaunts. Agnes wasn’t paying that much attention to what he was doing, but when she finished putting the last serving bowl on the table and went to sit down, she found a small earthen pot sitting next to her plate.
Agnes had seen Mexican
“What’s that?” she asked, sitting down at her place and leaning over so she could get a better view of the pot.
“Aggie, honey,” Oscar said, “I believe you are looking at a winning lottery ticket.”
Agnes Barkley sat up and stared across the tiny tabletop at her husband. It wasn’t like Oscar to make jokes. Working in the post office all those years had pretty well wrung all the humor out of the man.-But when she saw his face, Agnes was startled. Oscar was actually beaming. He reminded her of the grinning young man who had been waiting beside the altar for her forty-six years earlier.
