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Purple Dauber
Episode 1 of 3 of Purple Dauber by Beth Callahan · free to read
“Cap the dauber, Nicky. You’re bleeding on my card.”
I capped it. The purple ink had already spread across a free space that did not need it.
“It’s a free space,” I said. “It’s free.”
“It’s free because you don’t daub it,” she said. “Looks like a crime scene.”
Friday night bingo ran in the church hall on Fourth Street, thirty folding tables and a caller named Rudy who read the numbers like he was reading a will. A six-face pack was twelve dollars. Regular games paid fifty, and the coverall at the end paid two hundred and fifty if somebody covered in fifty-five numbers or less. Nobody ever did.
My grandmother, Bev Turcotte, had played here thirty-one years and kept three daubers in her purse.
“Purple is lucky,” she said. “Green is for Tuesdays, and we don’t come Tuesdays.”
“What’s the orange one for?”
“Loaning to people I don’t like.”
Rudy called under the I, twenty-two. She daubed four cards without looking at the board. I was twenty-eight and I drove her here every Friday because she did not drive after dark anymore. I got a plate of hall spaghetti out of it, and I got her, which was the part I did not say to anyone.
Between the third game and the fourth she took out her checkbook.
It was the fat kind with carbon copies, the kind nobody under sixty owns anymore. She wrote a check, tore it clean, folded it once, and walked it two tables over to a woman in a red cardigan.
The woman’s name was Connie Herrera. I knew because Connie shook her head, said “Bev, no,” loud enough for our table, and put the check in her pocket anyway.
She came back and picked up the purple dauber.
“Who’s Connie?” I said.
“Under the B, nine. Daub.”
I read the carbon upside down before she closed the book. Two hundred dollars. On the memo line she had written one word, in her tall church handwriting: Gene.
Gene was my grandfather. He had been dead eleven years.
“I want the checkbook, Mom.”
My mother stood in my grandmother’s kitchen on Sunday with her car keys still in her hand. Janet Gagnon did not sit down in a room until she had said the thing she came to say.
“It’s in my purse,” my grandmother said. “Where it lives.”
“The bank called me Thursday,” my mother said. “A courtesy call. They wanted to know if I was aware of the activity.”
“Why would they call you? It’s my account.”
“Because you put me on it in January. Your idea, so I could pay your bills if you were in the hospital. Not so you could write a roofer three hundred and fifty dollars. Twice.”
“Duane Lisle does gutters,” my grandmother said. “He doesn’t do roofs.”
“Mom.”
“He did a beautiful job. Come look. Not a leaf in them.”
My mother put her keys on the counter. She never did that. “The bank says four checks to a charity. A hundred dollars each.”
“It’s the food pantry. They call the house. They’re very polite about it.”
“There’s a woman at bingo,” my mother said. “Nick told me about the woman at bingo.”
She looked at me. I had told her Saturday because I thought it was a small thing. I had not mentioned the memo line.
“Connie Herrera plays the nine-face pack and wins twice a year,” my grandmother said. “If I’m being conned, I’m being conned slowly.”
“Just the book, Mom. Until we understand what’s going on.”
“What’s going on is I’m eighty-one and I can write my own name. Sit down. I made a coffee cake.”
My mother did not sit down. She took her keys. At the door she said, to me, “Watch her Friday.”
“Hold my purse. Don’t let that girl sell you pull-tabs.”
She went to the ladies’ room at intermission the next Friday and left me the purse. I opened the checkbook.
The carbons went back to May. Connie Herrera, two hundred, Gene, five times. Duane Lisle, three hundred and fifty, Gene, twice. The food pantry, one hundred, Gene, four times. Eleven checks, three names, every memo line the same word.
When she came back the book was closed under my hand. She looked at my hand and then at me.
“Well,” she said. “You’re a Turcotte after all. We snoop.”
“Grandma,” I said. “What is Gene paying for?”
She sat. Rudy tested the microphone. She uncapped the purple dauber and set it on the free space of her first card, dead center, and did not press.
“Your grandfather closed the shop the winter your mother was sixteen,” she said. “He closed it owing people. Your mother remembers a lot of casseroles that winter. She thinks I was a good cook.”
“Did Mom know?” I said.
“She knew her father hung the moon. I’d like to keep it that way.”
Rudy called the first number. She pressed down and the ink went where it was supposed to.
“It’s not charity, Nicky, it’s your grandfather’s tab.”