Chapter 1: The Bingo Body

The fluorescent lights hummed overhead like a hive of mechanical bees, casting their flat, unforgiving glare across the Randolph Bingo Hall. The ceiling tiles were the kind that absorbed sound and stained easily—decades of coffee spills, cigarette smoke from before the ban, and the particular grime that accumulates when a building has been standing since 1948. The carpet was a symphony of geometric patterns in burgundy, gold, and forest green, so aggressively patterned that it hid spills, stains, and probably a few small animals that had wandered in and never wandered out. It was the kind of carpet that had seen everything and judged nothing.

I loved it. I loved every worn-down, fluorescent-lit, coffee-stained inch of it.

The electronic bingo board on the far wall flickered through its sequence of numbers, a digital heartbeat for the seventy-eight seniors packed into the folding chairs that night. The board was newer than everything else in the hall—a donation from the Coquille tribal casino, a gesture of goodwill that had turned into a surprisingly lucrative source of players who’d come to practice before hitting the real tables. Above it, a faded banner declared “$500 BINGO” in letters that had once been bright red and were now the color of dried blood. Another banner advertised “100 POINTS” and “BINGO JACKPOT,” and in the corner, near the snack bar where Floras Boice presided over a hot dog roller that had been hissing since the Carter administration, a poster announced “RAT PACK NIGHT” with a blurry photograph of a Sinatra impersonator who’d died in 2009.

It was Tuesday. It was 7:04 PM. The first game was about to start. And I was completely, entirely, utterly naked.

I sat at the center table, the one with the best sightlines to the electronic board and the worst sightlines to the drafty front door. My usual seat. My name wasn’t on it, but it might as well have been. I’d been sitting there every Tuesday and Thursday for the better part of a year now, first with clothes, then without. The transition had been seamless, really. One night I’d been wearing a lavender cardigan and sensible slacks; the next night I’d shown up with nothing but my dauber and my coffee cup, and the regulars had blinked, adjusted, and gone back to their cards. That was the beauty of a bingo hall filled with people who’d survived World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the collapse of the timber industry: they’d seen stranger things. A naked woman was just another Tuesday.

My hand rested near my chin, fingers curled in a pose that was half-consideration, half-performance. I’d been told I had a “knowing” expression, the kind that made people think I was about to share a secret. The truth was, I was usually thinking about dinner. Tonight, it was whether I’d have time to stop at Flora’s deli after the game for one of her world-famous hot dogs, or whether I’d have to settle for the sad leftover casserole I’d made three days ago and hadn’t yet summoned the courage to finish. The knowing expression was just my face. I couldn’t help it.

On the table in front of me, I had arranged my supplies with the precision of a brain surgeon: three bingo cards, each daubed in a different color—red for the first, blue for the second, green for the third. My dauber collection was legendary; I had thirty-seven of them at home, arranged by color and scent. The ones with the fruity smells were my favorites. I had a cup of coffee that had gone cold twenty minutes ago and a plate of crackers that Whisky Tichenor had brought me from the snack bar. Whisky was sixty-seven years old, a retired fisherman with hands like cracked leather, and he’d been bringing me crackers every Tuesday and Thursday for eleven months now. He’d never once commented on my nudity. He’d never once commented on anything. He just brought me crackers and nodded, and I nodded back, and we understood each other completely.

To my left, Cape Blanco Jensen was settling into his seat with the careful deliberation of a man who’d learned to move slowly after decades of blueberry farming. He was forty-nine, give or take—I’d never asked, and he’d never offered—with the kind of weathered face that came from working outdoors in the Oregon coastal fog. His hands were calloused, his eyes were kind, and he had a way of not looking at me that was somehow more intimate than staring. He looked at my face. He always looked at my face. That was how I knew.

Cape had been coming to bingo for nearly a year now, ever since his wife died. He’d shown up one Tuesday night, a ghost in a flannel shirt, and he’d sat at the far table near the back, where the numbers were harder to see, and the draft was worse. I’d watched him that first night, watched the way he’d stared at his cards like they held the secrets of the universe, watched the way he hadn’t flinched when I’d called BINGO in a voice that could carry across a football field. He’d looked up, looked at me, and looked back down at his cards. He’d returned the next Tuesday. And the next. And the next.

After six months, he’d moved to the table nearest mine. After eight months, he’d started nodding at me when he sat down. After ten months, he’d spoken to me for the first time—”You’re going to win tonight, Rill. I can feel it.” And he’d been right. I’d won the jackpot. I’d split it with him, because that was the kind of thing you did when a man looked at you like you were a person instead of a spectacle.

Tonight, he was wearing a blue plaid shirt and a pair of jeans that had seen better decades. His cap—a faded Jensen’s Blueberry Farm cap with the logo barely visible—was pulled low over his eyes, but I could see him watching the electronic board, his jaw set with the kind of concentration that suggested he was mentally calculating odds. He always did that. He’d never told me he was a numbers guy, but I could tell. The way he tracked the numbers, the way he knew when to daub and when to wait—he was a strategist. I found that deeply attractive.

To my right, Floras Boice had taken her position behind the snack bar. Floras was forty-seven, built like a fireplug, with a cloud of white hair and the kind of no-nonsense attitude that came from running a small business in a town where everyone knew your coffee order. She was the owner of the Langlois Market & Deli, the purveyor of the “world famous” hot dogs that I’d been craving all week, and the closest thing I had to a best friend. She was also the one who’d call the numbers tonight—she did Thursdays, and Whisky Tichenor did Tuesdays—and she had a voice like a foghorn, which was perfect for a room full of seniors with hearing aids.

“All right, all right, settle down,” Floras called out, her voice cutting through the chatter like a hot knife through butter. “We’re starting in two minutes. Get your cards ready. No talking during the games—you know the rules. And if anyone spills coffee on the carpet again, I’m personally handing you a mop.”

A ripple of laughter went through the room. The carpet had seen worse things than coffee. It had seen the entire contents of Myrtle Broadbent’s purse when she’d upended it looking for her reading glasses, which had turned out to be on her head. It had seen Sixes Parrott fall off his chair after a particularly vigorous BINGO call and take three tables down with him. It had seen the time Whisky Tichenor had tried to do a little victory dance and had thrown out his hip so badly that the EMTs had to carry him out on a stretcher, still clutching his winning card. The carpet was a survivor. We all were.

I took a sip of my cold coffee and grimaced. The coffee was terrible—it always was, because Floras made it in a forty-cup percolator that had last been cleaned during the Carter administration—but it was my terrible coffee. I’d been drinking it for nearly a year. I’d developed an immunity to the bitterness, or maybe a taste for it. Either way, I wasn’t going to stop now.