“Donal,” she startled me by actually using my name, which I think was a first time ever, “do you play cards?”
“Only pitch, a real little bit,” I said very, very carefully. All I needed was gambling added to the rest of my reputation with her. “Gram and me at night sometimes when there’s nothing on the radio but preachers in Canada.”
“Mmm, I thought so.” She mustered the strength to nod her head. “When we were girls, Dorie was always one to haul out a deck of cards when nothing else was doing. I must have caught it from her.”
That’d be about the only thing she and Gram were alike in, I morosely thought to myself, minding my manners by nodding along in what I took to be her bid for sympathy while I kept at the jigsaw, nine hundred and fifty or so pieces to go, when all at once she swelled up and exhaled in relief.
“Good. Then you can learn canasta and fill in for Minnie.”
I don’t know if my hair stood straight on end at that or what.
Aunt Kate busily began dismissing my swarm of doubts before I could sputter them out, cranking her chairback higher with every burst of sentence. “There’s no way around it, we need a fourth for canasta and that’s that.”
Upright in the chair by now and facing me dead-on, she manufactured a sort of smile. “You needn’t look so alarmed, kitten. I’ll teach you the ins and outs of the game. We have an entire week for you to learn, isn’t that lucky? It will help take your mind off your imagination, mmm?”
Still speechless, I tried to think how to head her off in more ways than one as she heaved herself out of the recliner and quickstepped over to me. “Now then. It’s too bad, but we need the card table.”
Before I could come out of my stupor, she was crumbling the sky-blue edge and George Washington’s forehead and scooping the pieces along with the rest of the puzzle into its box. “Don’t worry, child, you can start over on it once you’ve learned canasta.”
12.
THE PUZZLE PIECES were barely settled in the box before Aunt Kate was pulling up across the table from me and had the cards flying as she dealt a stream to each of us and to our absent opponents. Herta and Gerda—even their names sounded mean. Helplessly watching her deliver the valentines, as the poker game regulars in the Double W bunkhouse termed it, I felt unsure of myself but all too certain that turning me into a Minnie Zettel for hen parties was going to test the limits of both of us. And this was before I had any inkling that a contest of hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades could become such a dangerous game.
While she was rifling the cards out, Herman wandered by the living room and took a peek at what was happening, which sent his eyebrows way up and quickened his step until he was safely past and out the back door. No rescue from that direction, so I cussed silently and kept stuffing cards into my overloaded hand.
Finishing dealing with a flourish, Aunt Kate slapped the deck down squarely in the middle of the table and sang out, “Now then, honeybun, the first thing is, you have to catch up a weensy bit by learning a few rules, mmm?”
? ? ?
THAT BEGAN a spell of time when the high point of my days was the sugar on my cereal.
Far from being the adventure I had been so excited about when I was met at the bus station by the living image of Kate Smith, my Wisconsin summer bogged down into the same old things day after day. Afternoons were canasta, canasta, canasta, and mornings veered from boredom when, after getting up hours earlier than anyone else and doctoring some puffed rice with enough spoonfuls of the white stuff, all I could find to do was to hole up in the living room reading an old National Geographic brought down from the attic, until the time came to tread carefully around the first of the battles of the Brinker household. Every day, Aunt Kate and Herman had a fight to go with breakfast. Generally it was her to start things off with a bang. “Can’t you quit that?” Her first salvo would make me jump, even though it was not aimed at me. “It’s childish and a nasty habit, how many times do I have to tell you?”
“Is not,” he would pop right back. “Toast is made for such things.”
“That is absolutely ridiculous. Why can’t you just eat?”
“Hah. It goes in my mouth, same as you push it in yours.”