“Yeah, well, read the sign,” said the cleaner with a nasty grin. He gestured to the yellow folding safety sign that said, ‘Caution. Floor may be slippery when wet.’
The sign depicted a person slipping on a slippery floor, and looked exactly like Henry right now, so the reference was apt, even though a little mean-spirited.
“And now buzz off, you fool,” the cleaner growled unpleasantly. “Unlike you, I gotta work for a living. And you’re not making it any easier, you know.” And with these words, he returned to mopping the floor with an admittedly dirty mop.
“Henry is right. He’s simply pushing the dirt around,” Dooley said after we had watched him for a few moments.
Henry himself had grumbled something about filing an official complaint with the manager and had retreated into his room, this time closing the door for good measure.
“Yeah, he’s not doing a very good job,” I agreed.
“Maybe it’s a special technique? A technique us laycats don’t know about?”
“I think he’s just being lazy,” I said. “And he simply can’t be bothered to refill his bucket every once in a while and squirt in some fresh detergent.”
The water was very dirty, I saw, with not a hint of soapy suds at this point.
“I wouldn’t want to see his bathroom,” said Dooley with an expression of utter distaste. “I’ll bet it smells.”
I had the impression that this wasn’t the first run-in Henry had with this cleaner, and I wondered what the man’s name was. But I saw Gran had returned from her interview with Bob, and that Harriet and Brutus had returned from their quest to check in on Gladys’s mother. Even Scarlett had returned from her personal mission to bring together two sundered hearts, even though one of those hearts didn’t even realize it was sundered. And so we all headed into the room the ‘Corr sisters’ shared, and talked turkey.
15
The evening had come, and the six of us were attending something called‘bingo night.’
“This is so exciting, Max,” said Dooley. “I’ve never played bingo before. How does it work?”
Honestly I had no clue how bingo worked, never having played the game either. But when I saw the expression of displeasure on Gran’s face, I had the feeling it wasn’t as much fun as Dooley anticipated. Scarlett looked more enthusiastic, though that could have had something to do with the fact that Isaac was picking the balls, an essential part of bingo, apparently, and was standing in front of a room filled with dozens ofresidents, looking nervous—Isaac, not the residents, who all looked very excited.
And when I followed the young man’s gaze, I could tell why he was nervous: Kirsten was in the room, assisting residents to their tables and onto their chairs.
Apparently Scarlett had given Isaac strict instructions on how to behave in front of Kirsten, and now was the time to show us if her coaching had paid off.
“Bingo consists of a number of balls being drawn from that bingo spinner over there,” Harriet explained. “The caller, in this case Isaac, will pick a ball from the spinner and call out the combination—always a letter and a number. The players will check if they have that combination on their scorecard, and if they have, they will place a chip on that space. The caller will keep on calling out these letter-number combinations until one of the players—or several—manage to get five chips in a row on their scorecard. This could be a horizontal line, a vertical one or a diagonal row.”
Dooley had been listening with bated breath.“You have played bingo before!”
“No, I haven’t, but Shanille’s human has. Father Reilly loves bingo, and has been organizing games at the community center for years. Gran used to be a regular, but she gave up at some point. Too boring is what she said.”
“She does look bored,” Dooley determined.
“Probably because she reckons it’s a distraction from our mission,” said Brutus. “For your true spy the mission is everything, and anything that distracts from the successful completion of the mission is a nuisance.”
“But doesn’t James Bond get distracted all the time?” asked Dooley. “James Bond should be focusing on the bad guy, but instead he’s sitting at the bar of a casino drinking and looking at the ladies. That’s not part of his mission, is it?”
Brutus had to admit there was some truth in what our friend was saying. James Bond gets distracted all the time, and it often involves alcohol or women or both. And still he somehow manages to successfully complete his missions. It’s a mystery where he finds the time.
Gran was seated between the Murphy sisters and Bob Sankiewicz, and before long the show began. I had to admit that Gran may have had a point. There wasn’t a whole lot going on. Isaac kept spinning that spinner as if his life depended on it, picking out balls and reading out the combinations. Whereupon there was some rustling and murmuring as the residents placed their chips on their scorecards. From time to time someone would yell, ‘Bingo!’ and the whole thing would start from the beginning.