“Goodness, we’ve gone through the nibbles, haven’t we.” Herta immediately noticed the empty plate and felt her hostess duty. “What do you say we take a wee little break and I’ll fix some more.”
“And a little wee break,” said Aunt Kate, surprisingly reckless, as she pronto headed out to what in these circumstances seemed to be called the powder room. Gerda called dibs on the next visit, and went over to wait by cooing to the parakeet.
Here was my chance, slim as it was. As if merely looking around, I wandered into the kitchen, where Herta was industriously dipping a table knife into a freshly opened jar of pimento cheese spread and daubing some on cracker after cracker to build a pyramid on the plate. She glanced around at me with an eyebrow raised, humorously maybe. “After all that talk of oysters, too hungry to wait, are we?”
“Huh-uh. It’s not that.” I peeked back into the living room to make sure we couldn’t be overheard. Gerda was babytalking to the parakeet, which answered her with unending screeches of “Big-ee, Big-ee.” “Those stamps you were talking about, the green ones? You know what? I’ve got some that aren’t doing me any good.”
“Oh, do you?” A glob of cheese spread had smeared onto the edge of the plate and she cleaned it off with her finger and ate it, with a wrinkle of her nose at me that said it would be just our secret, wouldn’t it. Thinking I was making too much of too little, she kept her voice low in saying, “You must have been with Kitty or that husband of hers at one of those gas stations where they give out a few for a fill-up, is that it?”
“Uh-uh. I have a whole book, pasted in and everything.”
She sucked her finger while studying me with deepened interest. “What’s a boy like you doing with all those?”
Sixteen hundred and one hard-earned miles on the bus, that was what. But I only said, “I got them with my ticket here. So I was wondering if we could sort of make a trade, since they’re called trading stamps, right?”
“A trade, you say,” she inquired in a lowered voice, nibbles forgotten now. “Such as?”
“Well, see, I know how much you’d like to have that lawn chair. And you know how much Aunt Kate likes to win. If you could help that along a little, so she and I come out on top today, I could bring you my book of Green Stamps next time we play. That way, you get your free lawn chair and I don’t get my fanny chewed about canasta all week.”
“Goodness gracious, you do have a way of putting things.” She thought for a couple of seconds, calculating what she would lose in the kitty against the fierce price tag on the lawn chair, then craned her neck to check on the living room, with me doing the same. Gerda was taking her turn in the powder room, and Aunt Kate now was stationed at the birdcage, whistling at Biggie and receiving squeaks and scratchy chirrups in return.
Clucking to herself as clicking onto a decision, Herta leaned all the way down to my nearest ear and murmured:
“It would be a good joke on Kittycat, wouldn’t it.”
“A real funnybone tickler, you bet.”
“Just between us, of course.”
“Cross our hearts and hope to die.”
She giggled and whispered. “We’ll do it.”
? ? ?
SINCE THERE WASN’T much time to waste before Herta and Gerda would reach a winning score just in the ordinary way of things, at the first chance I had when the discard pile grew good and fat and all three women were waiting like tigers to pounce and pick it up, I discarded a deuce, the wild card under Manitowoc rules, crosswise onto the pile.
Aunt Kate leaned over the table toward me. “Honeybunch, that freezes the pile, you know.”
“I know.”
“You are sure that is the card you want to play, that way.”
“You betcha.” The spirit of Herman must have got into me to sass her that way.
“Mmm hmm.” Stuck for any way to dislodge me from my stubborn maneuver, she tried to make the best of it by shaking her head as if I were beyond grown-up understanding. “Girls, it appears we have a frozen deck.”
“Doesn’t it, though,” Gerda said through tight lips. “Someone has been putting ideas in this boy’s head.” Aunt Kate sat there looking like she couldn’t imagine what got into me, nor could she. “Well, we have no choice, do we,” Gerda reluctantly conceded. “Your draw, Hertie.”
The pile built and built more temptingly as we all drew and discarded several more times, until Herta drew, stuck the card away and as if distracted by Biggie’s latest rant of chirrups, discarded an ace of spades. Immediately she went into flutters and the full act of “Oh, did I play that card? I didn’t mean to!”