? ? ?
“NO, NO, NO!” She put a hand to her brow as if her mind needed support, a familiar gesture by this third or fourth day—I was losing track—of card game torture. “What did I tell you about needing to meld a full canasta before you can go out?”
“I was thinking about something else, excuse me all to pieces. What do I do now?”
“For a start, pay attention, pretty please.”
I suppose I should have, but nothing was really penetrating me except the something else I kept thinking about. My money. The disastrous shirt-in-the-garbage episode that left me broke as a bum. No mad money meant no going to a show, no comic books, not even a Mounds bar the whole summer, for crying out loud. But that wasn’t nearly the worst. It bothered me no end that if I went back to Montana in the fall without the school clothes Gram had expressly told me to stock up on, I would have to go to class looking like something the cat dragged in. People noticed when a kid was too shabby, and it could lead to official snooping that brought on foster care—next thing to being sentenced to the orphanage—on grounds of neglect. Gram would never neglect me on purpose, but if she simply couldn’t work and draw wages after her operation, how was she supposed to keep me looking decent? With all that on my mind, here was a case where I could use some help from across the card table, and I didn’t mean canasta. The one time I had managed to broach the subject of school clothes and so on between her morning loafing at the breakfast table and soap opera time, Aunt Kate flapped her fingers at me and said, “Shoo now. We’ll figure out what to do about that later.” But when?
? ? ?
BY EVERY SIGN, not while I was stuck with a mittful of canasta cards. Back to brooding, I sucked on my chipped tooth as draw-and-discard drearily continued.
A little of that and Aunt Kate was grimacing in annoyance. “Don’t they have dentists in Montana? What happened to that tooth, anyway?”
“Nothing much.” I sat up straight as a charge went through me, my imagination taking off in the opposite direction from those modest words. “I got bucked off in the roundup, is all.”
“From a horse?” She made it sound like she had never heard of such a thing.
“You betcha,” I echoed Herman, pouring it on more than I had to, but a person gets carried away. “See, everybody’s on horseback for the roundup, even Sparrowhead,” I stretched the matter further. “I was riding drag, that’s at the rear end of the herd, where what you do is whoop the slowpoke cows and calves along to catch up with the others. Sort of like HYAH HYAH HYAH,” I gave her a hollering sample that made her jerk back and spill a few cards.
“Things were going good until this one old mossie cow broke off from the bunch”—the story was really rolling in me now—“and away she went with her calf at her heels. I took out after them, spurring Snipper—he’s a cutting horse, see—and we about got the herd quitters headed off when Snipper hit an alkali boghole and started bucking out of it so’s not to sink up to his, uhm, tail. I’m usually a real good rider”—modesty had to bow out of this part—“but I blew a stirrup and got thrown out of the saddle. I guess I hit the ground hard enough that tooth couldn’t take it. I was fine otherwise, though.” I couldn’t resist grinning at her with the snag fully showing.
“Good grief,” my listener finally found her voice. “That’s uncivilized! Poor child, you might have been damaged any number of ways!”
“Aw, things like that happen on the ranch a lot.”
That put the huff back into Aunt Kate in a hurry. “Whatever has gotten into Dorie?” she lamented, catching me off guard. “That sister of mine is raising you to be a wild cowboy, it sounds like. Tsk,” that tail end of the remark the kind of sound that says way more than words.
“Oh, it’s not that bad,” I tried to backtrack. “Gram sees me with my nose in a book so much she says my freckles are liable to turn into inkspots.”
“Does she.” As if looking me over for that possibility, she scanned my earnest expression for a good long moment, with what might have been the slightest smile making her jowls twitch.
“All right then, toothums. Let’s see if that studious attitude can turn you into a canasta player.” Laying her cards facedown, she scooped up those of the phantom Gerda, drew from the deck, hummed a note of discovery, then discarded with a flourish, saying, “My, my, look at that.”
A fourspot, what else. I perked up, ready to show her that I knew what was what in this damn game. With a flourish I melded some fours and other combinations to get on the board, and then as she watched with that pinched expression for some reason deepening between her eyes, I flashed the one fourspot I’d held back and a joker to scoop in the pile when the voice across the table rose like a siren.
“No, no, no! Wake up, child. You can’t take that without a natural pair.”