She made as if to pick it back up, which Aunt Kate headed off so fast her hand was a blur as she protected the pile.
“Oh no you don’t. Against the rules, Hertie, you know perfectly well.” Tossing down her natural pair of aces, she gobbled up the whopping number of cards and began melding, the black aces side bet and rainbows of other high-scoring combinations across half the table, canastas following canastas, while Gerda squirmed as if enduring torture and Herta tried to look remorseful, although with little glances sideways at me marking our secret. I pressed my cards to my chest with one hand, nervously rubbing the arrowhead in its sheath with the other to summon all the luck I could. It must have worked. Finally done laying down cards, Aunt Kate looked around the table with a smile that spread her chins.
“Guess what, girls. Donny and I seem to have fifty-one hundred points, also known as out.” She reached for the stream of silver Gerda was unhappily providing by yielding up quantities of quarters while Biggie screamed as if celebrating our triumph.
? ? ?
I FELT LIKE a winner in every way as my triumphant partner, humming away as pleased as could be, started to drive us back to the house. Victory over the canasta hens! Herman would get a great kick out of that. And winnings, actual money, the first gain of that kind since I had alit in Manitowoc. Manitou’s town itself was even showing a more kindly face, leafy streets and nice houses surounding us as Aunt Kate took a different way than we had come because of the “nasty traffic” of the shift change at the shipyard.
So I was caught by surprise when my attention, racing ahead of the DeSoto’s leisurely pace, suddenly had to do a U-turn when I heard the words “Donal, I have something to say to you, don’t take it wrong.”
In my experience as a kid, there wasn’t much other way to take something that started like that. I waited warily for whatever was coming next.
She provided it with a look at me that took her eyes off the road dangerously long. “Has your grandmother ever, ever suggested circumstances in which you should”—she paused for breath and emphasis and maybe just to think over whether there was any hope of changing my behavior—“hold your tongue?”
Was I going to admit to her that frequent warning of Gram’s, Don’t be a handful? Not ever. “Naw, you know how Gram is. She calls a spade a shovel, dirt on it or not, like she says, and I guess I’m the same.”
From her pained expression, she apparently thought that described her sister all too well and me along with it. She drew a breath that swelled her to the limit of the driver’s seat and began. “I’m not laying blame on your grandmother, I know she’s done the best she could under the”—she very carefully picked the word—“circumstances.”
That could only mean Gram putting up with my redheaded behavior, and now I was really wary of where this was heading. Once more Aunt Kate took her eyes off the road to make sure I got the message. “So this is for your own benefit”—which was right up there in the badlands of being a kid with don’t take this wrong—“when I say you are a very forward youngster.”
I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what that meant, but I risked: “Better than backward, I guess?”
She stiffened a bit at that retort, but a lot more when I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “And I can’t help it I’m a youngster.”
“There’s the sort of thing I mean,” she emphasized. “You’re Dorie, all over again. Chatter, chatter, chatter.” She took a hand off the wheel to imitate with her arched fingers and thumb something like Biggie the budgie’s nonstop beak. “One uncalled-for remark after another.”
Ooh, that stung. Was my imagination, as she seemed to be saying, nothing more than a gift of gab?
I was getting mad, but not so mad I couldn’t see from her expression that I had better retreat a little. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry if Herta and Mrs. Horssstetter took the testicle festival the wrong way. I thought they’d be interested in how we do things in Montana.” Figuring a change of topic would help, I went directly to “Anyhow, we beat their pants off, didn’t we. How much did we win?”
“Mm? Ten dollars.” She reached down to her purse between us on the seat and shook it so it jingled. “Music to the ears, isn’t it,” she said with a dimpled smile that would have done credit to Kate Smith.
“And how!” I couldn’t wait one more second to ask. “When do I get my half?”
“Sweetheart, it is time we had a talk about money.” The smile was gone that fast. “To start with, I was the one who put up our stake, wasn’t I. By rights, then, the winnings come to me, don’t they.”