Chapter 8
EIGHT
“Falling in love with your best friend is the hardest easy thing in the world.”
—excerpt from the unpublished memoir,
Darling, I Must Say by Gloria Hayes
My best friend cheated at poker.
She was also eighty-seven years old. I figured if anyone had earned the right to cheat at poker, it was her.
The other players were not as forgiving.
“Gloria, you’re cheating. I know it,” one of them said as he threw his cards down. Jonathan Clark. Age: Eighty-one. Formerly a bank president. Currently glaring at Gloria across the table. “Four of a kind? For the second time in an hour?”
If he’d taken a moment to look closely, he may have found that two of her four kings were clubs. Gloria banked on dodgy eyesight when she came up with her poker strategy. That strategy being: cheat and don’t get caught. It was working for her.
Gloria laughed, a deep, low sound that spoke of her two pack a day smoking habit from her younger years.
I liked to imagine her draped over a chair with a long, thin cigarette holder held delicately between her fingers.
Full makeup and heels, too. Because this was Gloria Hayes, after all. “Guess I’m just lucky today.”
“Quit your whining,” the fourth member of our game said as she gathered up the cards. Name: Elizabeth Clark. Age: She refused to say. A retired nurse without a drop of silver in her red hair. Also, wife to Jonathan. “Even if she is cheating, it’s not like you could see it. Where are your glasses?”
“I don’t need glasses,” Jonathan said. “I can see just fine. Watch this.” He pointed at the flyer pinned to the bulletin board across the room. “See? Right there. Someone has a hog for sale.”
“You mean that one with a picture of a miniature poodle on it that says DOG FOR SALE.”
“Dog for sale. That’s what I said.”
“You’re an idiot.” The Clarks had been married for fifty-five years. Happily, of course.
This was how I was spending my Friday night—a poker game at Shady Cove Long Term Care Facility.
I spent a lot of my evenings here. Tuesday night was BINGO night, Friday was occasionally poker night, Saturday was movie night (where I’d discovered my love of classic movies), and every month, there was a themed dance.
Back in high school, I’d had to complete twenty-four service-to-community hours to graduate.
Like any responsible teenager, I’d waited until January of my senior year to even start.
Shady Cove was about the only place in need of volunteers because, as Kathy, the facility’s social worker, said, “People don’t like to be reminded that one day they’ll get old, too. ”
Maybe it was because I’d been so close to Grammie, but I’d enjoyed hanging out with these people more than I had expected. After I finished my required hours, I kept coming back.
I shouldn’t have had anything in common with people six decades my senior, but I liked listening to them when they told their stories.
I’ve heard sad stories and happy ones, heartbreaking and hilarious.
It struck me, even in high school, that we were all made up of our stories.
Those events, big or small, that strung together to make up our lives and who we were.
If we couldn’t share those with someone, were the stories forgotten? Were the people those stories were about forgotten, too? I guess somewhere along the way I’d decided I wanted to be a person they could share their stories with.
“My grandson sent me a text.” The fifth person at the table was currently staring at her cellphone.
She was Mary Scoffield. Age: Eight-four.
Mother of eight, grandmother to twenty-one, great-grandmother to twelve and counting.
She was terrible at poker. In fact, I wasn’t even convinced she knew how to play.
“The one who’s in Europe, finding himself?” Jonathan asked, his voice dripping with disapproval.
“Yes, that’s him.” Mary frowned down at her phone. “He’s working, too.”
“Doing what?”
“He’s a…” She paused, searching for the words. “Well, he takes pictures and makes videos and puts them on the internet.”
Jonathan’s eyebrows shot straight. “That’s a job?”
“It’s called a content creator,” I said, not for the first time.
We’d had variations of this same conversation several times.
Over the last year, Jonathan’s memory had declined.
I knew, despite her bluster, that it worried Elizabeth.
She’d never admit to it, but I saw the concern in her eyes when she thought no one was looking.
Shady Cove had three floors. The bottom floor was for residents who were fairly self-sufficient, mobile, and healthy (you know, besides being antiques).
The top floor was reserved for residents who were bedridden, needed constant care, or comfort care (which was the nice way of saying, the end was near).
But the second floor was called Memory Care. It was the floor everyone was afraid of. “No one wants to forget the people they love,” Gloria told me once. “In the end, that’s all you have and when you can’t remember them, what’s left?”
“Content creator? Sounds fake. You should tell him to get a real job, a nine to five with good benefits. By the time I was his age, I had a wife, two kids, a mortgage, and I’d been promoted at work.” He flashed two slightly arthritic fingers. “Twice.”
Ignoring his rant, Mary held her phone out to Elizabeth. “Look at these lovely photos he sent.”
“Content creator,” he muttered, craning his neck to see the pictures. “Next you’ll tell me people get paid to film themselves opening their mail.”
I opened my mouth but thought better of it. Some discussions were just not worth the effort.
“I think your grandson sounds delightful,” Gloria said while she happily slipped another card under the table. With everyone distracted, she could have done it while doing an interpretive dance on the table and no one would have noticed. “Young adults should take time to explore the world.”
“Young adults should act like adults.” Jonathan crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair.
Mary’s phone dinged with a text notification. She pulled it back to look at the message.
Gloria patted the stack of coins in front of her. “Well, are we playing again?”
Jonathan wagged a finger at Gloria. “You’re not getting any more of my pennies.”
“Jonathan Clark, knock it off,” Elizabeth snapped and pushed his hand down none too gently. “Pointing at someone like you’ve had no home training.”
“Iris, sweetie, will you look at this?” Mary held her phone out to me, her expression concerned. “Did I do something wrong again?”
As the designated “young person,” it had become my job to explain anything remotely techy.
But Mary was making this especially difficult.
Anything she saw online was fair game and that was dangerous in innocent hands.
Once, after finding out her granddaughter’s dog died, she texted: I’m so sorry about your dog.
LOL. She’d thought it meant “lots of love.” Then there was the eggplant incident.
That conversation had ended up with her blushing and me praying I could wash the whole situation from my brain.
Bracing myself, I took the phone and read the screen.
MARY: Hi, sweetie. It’s grandma. I haven’t heard from you. I hope you’re having fun. It’s been a good day today. for breakfast. So ripe and juicy. My favorite, you know.
GRANDSON: Grandma, no…
With a deep breath, I smiled at Mary. “That peach does not mean what you think it means.”
Mary frowned down at her phone. “It’s a peach. What in the world could a peach be besides a peach?”
“You remember the taco incident?”
“No,” she gasped, looking downright scandalized. “A peach means that? Next you’ll tell me I can’t talk about bananas and cherries.”
“It doesn’t mean exactly that, but you get the idea.” I gently took her phone from her and pulled up the notes app where I’d made her a list of emojis she should avoid. “No bananas. No cherries. No peaches. No eggplant. You should probably just avoid all fruit. And food. How about no emojis?”
“Well, since all of you old, boring people have done nothing but complain, I’m leaving.” Gloria stood, a bit slower these days but with no less grace. “Iris, come.”
“You forgot to snap your fingers,” I said drily.
“I know, darling,” she said, looking down her nose at me. “It’s the arthritis. You’ll have to excuse the oversight.”
With a grin, I stood up and linked arms with her. We walked down the hallway toward one of the “premium” rooms where Gloria lived. Only the best for her.
“Have you ever played poker without cheating?” I asked, waving at a resident as we passed.
“Why do things the hard way when you can do them the easy way?” she said, patting her hair. The silver strands hung in a stylish bob and accentuated the cheekbones set in her thin face. Over the last year or so, she’d been losing weight, but when I asked, I never got a straight answer.
“Oh, I don’t know. Honesty? Integrity? The satisfaction of knowing you won on your own skill?”
Gloria harrumphed. “All of those things are very overrated.”
“You are not a good influence on me.”
She patted my hand. “Of course I’m not, darling. That’s why you like me so much.”
I grinned. She wasn’t wrong. I’d met Gloria my second day volunteering at Shady Cove.
Back then, I’d been deep in my emo phase—blonde hair dyed black, thick black eyeliner, My Chemical Romance t-shirts, combat boots, and an expression of general disdain for everyone and everything.
I was a real peach, a walking billboard for birth control.
People in town whispered about how I was “going through so much and that explained it all.”