Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 07 - Vague Images (22 page)

“I heard Lester got a bunch of twenty-somethings to play with him.”

“I wonder how he did that?” I mused.

She grinned
. “Burger King gift certificates.”

“Ah.”  I checked out the bake sale table where Monica had finally agreed to have helpers
. Daphne and Jennifer Stenner, who owns the other appraisal firm in town, were hard at work. Jennifer was unpacking a box of the over-sized chocolate chip cookies she makes. They would probably sell in two minutes. Monica had her perpetually puzzled look and walked up and down behind the table, stopping now and then to rearrange a basket of apples and bananas.

I was wiped out already, but got a spurt of energy when I saw Kim and Lucas walking toward me
. Kim looked relaxed and happy, and Lucas had told me earlier that he wasn’t going to mention going to a doctor.

As angry as I had been with Scoobie for his promise to help Kim in a year, I was beginning to understand that she saw Scoobie as an ally
. It might have made her feel less alone. I supposed, for now, I’d have to trust Scoobie.

Lucas had accepted a ride from Harry, which I took as admission that he knew his head injury, while a bit better, was not something to take lightly
. As I waved to the two of them, Lucas sat on a bench and Kim took a bottle of water from a nearby ice chest and handed it to him.
Good for her to have to help someone.

I had not told anyone that Kim thought someone had been following her
. It didn’t seem like a conversation to have in a hurry. If I told Morehouse, he’d make her go to the station on a day when she could be having fun, something I though Kim really needed. I rationalized that today Lucas and Kim would be not only with us but a whole bunch of police officers. They’d be safe.

“You guys ready for some fun?” I asked.

“Kim is,” Lucas said. “I don’t want to be a wimp, but I’m still in chill out mode.”

Kim looked around
. “Can I be on a team?”

Before I could answer I heard Scoobie calling to both of them, and I told Kim I’d try to watch if she played.

She walked away and Father Teehan hailed her. By name. She gave a broad wave and kept walking.
That’s where she stayed!
  I should have guessed that one of the churches helped her. Kim looked too good to have been sleeping outside. I wondered why Father Teehan hadn’t mentioned her to me.  Then I heard Scoobie’s voice saying I, and my issues, were not the center of the universe.  Father Teehan didn’t know who Lucas was to me, and if the priest helped Kim it was probably confidential, anyway.

My thoughts turned from Kim to someone else calling my name
. It was Ramona. “Hurry up!  I want you to practice.”

There wasn’t anything I needed to check on at the moment, so I joined her and the other two women
. I’d waved at them when I occasionally dropped off Ramona at her yoga class, but I didn’t really know them.

“Feel the weight of the bag,” Ramona said
. She handed me one and the shortest of her friends laughed at the expression on my face.

“It’s heavy.”

“You didn’t help sew them?” the friend asked.

“Jolie, this is Suzie.” Ramona nodded at the woman who was maybe in her mid-twenties and, like Ramona, in top shape
. “And this is Serena.”

“I didn’t sew any
. I’m kind of all thumbs.”  I hefted it from one hand to another. “It’s not all that heavy, I was just surprised.”

Suzie and Serena nodded as they moved a few feet away and began tossing corn bags to one of the boxes.

Ramona took the bag from me. “Since you haven’t done this, we’ve put you as the third thrower. You can watch what we do, but you won’t have the pressure of being last.”

“Why is that pressure?”

“If we’re down by just a point or two, you won’t feel like you blew it if you miss.”

“I probably will,” I said, aware that I was starting to perspire just thinking of being the one to cause the team to lose.

It didn’t take me long to realize why most people threw underhanded. I did several tosses, and one actually hit the box. Then I realized I needed to pay my five dollars, so I walked to the picnic table where Lance and Dr. Welby were collecting donations. Two huge cardboard boxes held donated food, and a metal money box on the table between them looked pretty full when Lance opened it to deposit an entry fee.

I pulled a couple of crumpled bills from the pocket of my shorts and handed one to Lance as I looked at Dr. Welby
. “Does this cover insurance if I trip?”

Lance shook his head as he took the bill and put it in the money box
. “You wish. As long as you aren’t driving you’re fine.”

You can’t make rude comments to people in their nineties.

Dr. Welby pressed the hand stamp onto the ink pad. “Let me have your hand, Jolie.”

“What’s on the stamp?”

“Same as for everyone else,” Lance said, and smiled.

Dr. Welby carefully stamped my hand, making sure that all parts of the ink would show
. I looked at it. It was an ear of corn that appeared to be sitting on a round black circle. A corn hole.

“Great
. If you guys don’t need me, I thought I’d play a round with Ramona and her friends. And then I need to go kill Scoobie.”

It was getting close to start time, and I saw Father Teehan and Reverend Jamison talking as they looked at writing on a clipboard Reverend Jamison held
. I walked toward them. “You guys are officiating?  I didn’t know that.”

Father Teehan grinned
. “We heard that impartial scorekeepers were needed. But officiating?  No.”

“That would be Lieutenant Tortino.”  Reverend Jamison nodded toward the tall police officer, whom I hadn’t noticed in his painter’s pants and a dark blue tee-shirt.

“I thought the police were going to do the scoring, too.” I said.

“Apparently there is a four-person team of rank-and-file, and another one of officers,” Reverend Jamison said.

“Rumor has it scoring might not be…impartial.”  Father Teehan looked as if he was having the time of his life. I remembered that half of the police force sold Christmas trees at Saint Anthony’s each year, so he probably knew most of them well.

“And I’m monitoring these two,” a man’s voice said.

I turned to see the Unitarian Minister, Reverend Gibson. His group has just started doing quarterly food drives for Harvest for All. “Gee, thanks.”

As the three men walked toward the eight sets of corn toss boxes, I heard Father Teehan say, “I’m not sure you’re holy enough.”

I had to smile. Sylvia and Monica still weren’t sure we should consider the Unitarians a church group.

Lieutenant Tortino picked up the megaphone that was on the table where Lance and Dr. Welby were sitting
. “Okay folks, I think we have all the teams registered. Are you ready to play?”

It was a rhetorical question, which was greeted with a mix of
cheers and good-natured threats from the Lions to the Kiwanis. At least they seemed good-natured.

There were sixteen teams
. That would go to eight, then four, and finally a playoff between the top two teams. I could see it going on for a couple of hours, and was glad it was warm rather than really hot. I grabbed a cup of water from a First Prez volunteer, whose name I couldn’t remember, and walked to Ramona and her friends.

Lieutenant Tortino introduced Reverend Jamison to explain the scoring.

“It sounds a little complicated, but it’s really, not,” Reverend Jamison began. “Each team member throws their four bags, then a player on the other team throws theirs. After all players on both teams have thrown their four bags, we score the round. A bag remaining on the box is worth one point. A bag that went in the hole counts for three points. If it’s next to a box…”

“Or five feet in front of it,” George yelled.

“Or anywhere else,” Reverend Jamison continued, “no points. The first team to get to twenty-one wins that game. If they are two points ahead of the other team, I should say.” I listened to him explain that each player would probably throw more than one set of four bags to get a team got to twenty-one points, with the opponent having nineteen or less.

Father Teehan took over the scoring explanation
. “We aren’t going to score exactly as they do in tournaments, because it would take more time than we have today. But the basic principal is the same, you want to get to twenty-one points—and be at least two points ahead of your opponent at that time.”

Lieutenant Tortino added, “Usually, it takes two games to win a match, but we aren’t going to do it that way.”

There was a light chorus of boos, and I could tell Lester was among the cat-callers.

Reverend Jamison yelled, “You know who issues parking tickets, right?”  A bunch of people laughed.

“Seriously,” Lieutenant Tortino said, “We’d be here for hours, and for a lot of us that would take the fun out of it.”

“And we’d run out of brownies.”  Aunt Madge said this
. It hadn’t occurred to me that she would play, which was silly, because she is more fit than I am. She and Harry were standing with a couple who owned one of the other B&Bs in Ocean Alley.

I looked around and saw
Lucas with Scoobie with George. Scoobie saluted and pointed to the back of his hand. I raised my hand and barely stopped myself from giving him a rude hand gesture.

Lieutenant Tortino went on to describe first-round pairings
. Ramona’s group, which is how I thought of our impromptu team, would face a group of friends who played bridge together. They looked to be in their mid-fifties, and I felt kind of sorry for them until about ten seconds after we started playing. Then the tallest man of the mixed-gender group threw four bags in quick succession. Two went in a hole and two sat on the box.

We were alternating throws between the teams
. Suzie was first on our team, then Selena then me. I did get one to hit the box. The next time it was my turn I got one in the hole and one on the box, and was as excited as if I’d won the lottery. Ramona, as our closer, usually got three in the hole.

It took almost thirty minutes, but our team finally beat out the bridge players
. Little credit to me.

“It’ll be at least ten minutes before the next round,” Ramona said
. “You probably have things to check on.”

The bake sale table was swamped
. Several games had just ended and watchers and contestants were celebrating. It looked as if we might run out of food. I was about to either beg off my team or find someone to run to the store when Mr. Markle pulled into the part of the parking lot that was not roped off. He was in his store’s small pick-up truck, which had “In Town Market” in big letters on the door and bed cover.

Alicia’s friend
Clark jumped out and grabbed two boxes from the back end. He got to the bake sale table and Sylvia almost fell on the boxes to open them. I figured she had sent Clark to get more food.

I walked over to unpack, but Sylvia waved me away
. “You need to rest.”  Her cheeks were pink and she looked, well, happy.
That’s a first.

Mr. Markle walked to me
. “Jolie. I can’t donate this much, but I’ll sell it to you at cost.”

“I can’t thank you enough.”

He gave one of his rare smiles. “You have already. I think it was this publicity,” he nodded toward the game area, “that brought a lot of people back to the store.”

I was all sweaty, so I didn’t kiss him
. As I walked back toward Ramona and the Corn Toss boxes, I glanced at what Sylvia and Clark were unpacking. Cupcakes, bags of potato chips and kid-size boxes of juice.
Who says food pantries can’t serve junk food?

The eight teams in the second round were a varied mix of skills
. Both police teams had survived, as had the team George and Scoobie put together, which was the two of them, Alicia, and Kim. That made me feel good.

For a moment I thought Lester’s team had been eliminated, but his unique bark of laughter reached me
. “Like I said, the teams that were all women are gone.”

“Except one,” I said, as I walked by.

“What?”  He stared at me, and then his gaze must have met Ramona’s, because he looked almost stricken.

I glanced her way to see her rubbing her nose with her middle finger, and laughed.

As luck would have it, our team played Lester’s, which was composed of two other male realtors and a tall woman I didn’t know but thought worked at the Wal-Mart on the highway leading out of town. The cynic in me figured that Lester picked her because of her height, which definitely could be an advantage. Longer arms, longer throws.

I was feeling more confident, though my foot wasn’t, so I sat on the grass while Suzie and Selena threw their first four bags each
. As I was about to get up, Scoobie’s voice said, “Coming through for invalid assistance.”

Before I could wave them off, he and George each grabbed me under one armpit and hauled me up
. I knew how sweaty I was, so I figured I didn’t need to worry about them doing that again. They ran off, fists in the air, pretending to be doing some kind of a victory run. There was a smattering of applause, but most people were viewing the match between the Lions and Kiwanis, which involved more cross-team taunts than the other groups.