Page 156

Six months ago Pastor Jack dared me to show up and see what God would do.

I’m looking at what He did.

I’ve been to bingo enough times now that Ruth and Carol and Fran treat me like one of their own, which mostly means they insult me with great affection and steal my chips.

Delores runs the caller’s mic like she’s reading a verdict. Dottie plays four cards at once and trash-talks under her breath. Luke, the only person in the room under seventy besides me, has fully embraced his role as the muscle, fetching coffee and settling disputes about whether somebody’s dauber crossed a line.

Tonight I’m terrible, and I don’t care, which is the most growth I’ve done all year, and that’s saying something given the year. I’ve got a dud of a card and Luke keeps leaning over to tell me I’m one number away from things I am not one number away from, and I keep elbowing him, and Dottie keeps shushing us both.

I got baptized. I closed the oldest wound I have about four hours ago on the floor of my apartment. And now I’m losing at bingo to a table of widows who love me, next to a firefighter’s grandmother who took me in like I was always hers, and I keep having to blink hard, and Fran notices, because Fran notices everything.

“You crying over bingo, sugar?”

“A little,” I admit.

“That’s the spirit,” Fran says. “It gets us all eventually.”

Between games, while Delores refills the hopper, Carol leans across the table and points her dauber at me and Luke.

“So. When are you two going to hurry up and put a ring on it?”

“Carol,” Dottie says.

“I’m just saying. We’ve got a one-bedroom opening on the second floor, west side, best light in the building, and Dottie won’t take it, and we all know why. She won’t leave that boy until somebody else is there to run the house.” Carol looks at Luke, dead serious under the teasing. “So put a ring on it, and let this woman come live where she belongs, with us, where there’s bingo four nights a week and no children to raise.”

“One day, Carol,” Dottie says, in the voice she uses to close subjects, but she’s gone a little pink, and she doesn’t quite meet my eye, and I understand, all at once, what everyone at this table already knows and has apparently been waiting on.

Dottie is ready to go. She’s been ready a while. She has stayed, this whole time, in a house she was more than owed the right to leave, for one reason only, which is that she will not walk out until there’s someone to walk in.

And there’s someone. Sitting right here. Losing at bingo. Ready.

I look at Luke across the table.

I’m ready.

Not ready-with-conditions. Not ready-once-I’ve-checked-the-exits. Just ready, all the way through, ready to move into that loud house and run it and be the reason a grandmother finally gets to go live where there’s good light and bad coffee and her whole crowd.

Ready to marry a firefighter I met because I typed one wrong digit into a phone.

He catches me looking. Raises an eyebrow. Mouths, you okay?

I nod. I am so much more than okay.

Surely, I think, watching him. Surely he’s close.

“O-sixty-eight,” Delores calls, and Dottie shrieks “BINGO” loud enough to rattle the hall, and the moment breaks open into chaos and laughter, and I sit in the middle of it, at long last a woman with people, and I let myself want the thing I want.

Chapter 36

Luke

I’ve got a secret the size of a house, and I’m carrying it around all week like a man trying not to spill a full cup of coffee.

Nobody knows. Well, Dottie knows, because Dottie knew before I did, the way she knows weather. And Bo knows the broad strokes, because I need him for the plan, and because a secret’s safer with Bo than people think as long as you never tell him the date. But Olivia doesn’t know. She has no idea that in a matter of days I’m going to get down on one knee in my own backyard and ask her to never leave.

I’m getting away with it, barely, and then she calls me on a Tuesday so excited she forgets to say hello.

“They’re opening a counseling center.” No preamble. “At the church, New Chapter. A whole faith-integrated practice, licensed therapists, the works. There’s a posting on the board at my office, I’ve walked past it three times, and I just, Luke. I keep thinking about it.”