The Potluck Dare

Al had been widowed for six years, and for most of those six years he had spent Wednesday nights alone in front of the television, eating whatever he could make in one pan. He was fifty-five now, worked at the printing press downtown, and had gotten good at not going places. So when Duane showed up at his door that evening, already wearing his coat, Al knew he was in trouble.

"It's potluck night," Duane said, standing on the porch like he had all the time in the world, which he did, being retired from the post office and proud of it. "St. Margaret's basement. Six o'clock. You're coming."

"I've got laundry," Al said.

"You've got laundry you were going to do at two in the morning, don't even lie to me. We've been friends since we were twenty-one years old, Al. I know your laundry habits better than my own wife does." Duane held the door open. "Get your coat."

So Al got his coat.

They drove over in Duane's old Buick, the one with the tape deck still in it, and Al spent the whole ride staring out the window at houses he'd driven past a thousand times. It wasn't that he didn't want to go, exactly. It was more that going places reminded him of everything that wasn't there anymore. Karen used to run the potluck circuit like a general. She'd have loved this. That was the problem.

The basement of St. Margaret's smelled like ham and coffee and floor wax, and it was loud, the good kind of loud, thirty or forty people all talking at once over folding tables covered in paper cloths. Ada spotted them from across the room before they even got their coats off. She ran the whole thing, had for years, and she was waving with her whole arm.

"There he is," Ada called out. "The famous Al. I was starting to think Duane made you up."

"He's real," Duane said. "Barely."

Al let himself be steered toward the food table, and that was where he saw Stella. She was fifty-two, a Black woman with her hair gone white and cropped short, which suited her, with reading glasses pushed up on top of her head like she'd just given up on them. He knew who she was. Ada had mentioned her. Stella had moved to town a few years back, after Karen died, and somehow they'd never crossed paths until now, which Al figured was just how small towns worked.

"You're Al," she said, holding out a bowl. "Try the coleslaw. I don't care if you like coleslaw or not, you're trying it."

He took a small spoonful onto his plate, mostly to be polite, then a bigger one after he tasted it. "Okay," he said. "That's good coleslaw."

"It's famous coleslaw. Ask anyone in this room. Ada, tell him it's famous."

"It's famous," Ada said, not looking up from her clipboard. "Now sit down before the bingo crowd takes all the good seats."

Stella ended up across from him at one of the long tables, and they talked the way people talk at potlucks, easy and sideways, about the food and the weather and how Ada's husband ran the catering side of things and never got to sit down at his own events. Al found himself laughing twice, which surprised him. He hadn't laughed much in six years. It felt strange in his chest, like a muscle he'd let go slack.

After the plates were cleared, the folding chairs came out and the bingo cage came down off the shelf, because that was the other half of Wednesday nights. Duane settled in next to his wife Myra, who had apparently driven herself over separately, and Al found a seat near the back. Stella dropped into the chair beside him.

"I play to win," she announced. "Just so you know what kind of woman you're sitting next to."

"Noted."

"And you look like someone who needs something to think about besides his own head, so I'm going to help you." She was shuffling her cards around on her knee, not looking at him directly. "Here's a dare."

Al turned. "A dare?"

"A dare. Hold my hand under the table. For the whole bingo round. Every number called." She said it plain, like she was ordering off a menu. "You can let go if you win, but not before. That's the deal."

"Why?"

"Because you've got that look. The look of a man who forgot he's allowed to have a good time, and I think if somebody just made you sit still and be a little ridiculous for twenty minutes, it might shake something loose." She shrugged. "Also I like holding hands and nobody around here ever offers."

Al looked at her. She was watching him now, and there was nothing tricky in her face, just an honest question waiting for an honest answer. He thought about saying no. He thought about the drive home and the laundry and the television, and how all of it would still be there tomorrow, exactly the same.

"Okay," he said. "But if I win, I'm letting go mid-number."

"Deal."

Ada started calling, and Al reached under the table with his right hand and found Stella's waiting there, open. Her hand was warm. What got him was how warm it was, and how she didn't grip, she just rested her fingers against his like they'd done this a hundred times before. He was fifty-five years old and his palms were sweating over a bingo game.

"Nineteen," Ada called. "Under B, nineteen."

Stella shifted in her seat and Al realized she was grinning at her card without moving her mouth, just her eyes. He moved a bean onto his nineteen.

"Sixty-eight. O, sixty-eight."

He hadn't held a woman's hand since Karen. He'd thought about it sometimes, in an abstract guilty way, and then he'd felt bad about thinking about it, and that whole loop had run so many times it wore a groove. But this wasn't anything. This was a dare, a silly thing, a game. Except her thumb moved once across the back of his hand, slow, like she was checking the time on a watch that wasn't there, and something in Al's chest unlocked a little.

"I, twenty-four," Ada called.

"You're not even paying attention to your card," Stella whispered.

"I'm paying attention to something."

"Careful. That almost sounded like fun."

"B, eleven. B, eleven, people, keep up."

The round went on. Stella lost first, obviously, because she was playing one card with her free hand and gossiping with her other one, and Al ended up one number short of the pot, which some retired teacher named Eleanor swept for the third week running. When Ada called the final number, Stella gave his hand one squeeze under the table and let go, clean, no lingering.

"You lost," Al said.

"You held a stranger's hand for twenty-two minutes and didn't run out the door. I'd call that a win." She stood and stretched. "Same time next week?"

"I don't know that I'll be here next week."

"Sure you will. Duane will drag you. And I'll bring the coleslaw." She picked up her card and tucked it in her purse. "And Al? You laughed twice tonight. I counted."

He watched her go over to Ada's table and start in on the cleanup like she'd been doing it her whole life. Duane slid into the empty chair beside him with a grin Al didn't like one bit.

"So," Duane said. "You and Stella."

"Nothing. It was a dare. Bingo dare."

"A dare. From Stella. Who has been asking Ada for six months when you were going to show up." Duane shook his head, grinning wider. "Man, you have no idea what you just walked into."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that woman dares people. That's her whole thing. Ada told me. First week it's holding hands. Who knows what week three is." He stood up and grabbed his coat off the chair back. "You coming back Wednesday?"

Al thought about the warm hand, the thumb moving once across his knuckles, the laughing.

"Yeah," he said. "Probably."

The next Wednesday Al showed up before Duane's Buick even rolled into the lot. He told himself it was because the press let out early, which was a lie, and he figured the lie was fine since nobody was auditing it.

Stella had the coleslaw again, and a pie this time, a rhubarb one, set out at her usual table in the basement kitchen with a little card in front of it that said TAKE A SLICE. Ada had rearranged the folding tables into the same shape as always, a big hollow square, and the coffee urn was already hissing. The whole room smelled like ham and cheap coffee, and Al felt his shoulders drop before he even took his coat off.

"You came back," Stella said when he sat down across from her.

"You told me Duane would drag me. I figured I'd save him the gas."

"Smart man. Pie?"

"Maybe later."

"No. Now. That's your dare, by the way. I thought about it all week." She cut a slice and slid it onto a paper plate, then set a fork on the plate and pushed the whole thing toward the middle of the table. "You have to eat a bite of my pie. But I feed it to you. And I can't use my hands."

Al looked at the pie, then at her, then at Ada, who was suddenly very interested in the coffee urn across the room. "That's a trap. That's a trap wearing a dare costume."

"It's a dare. Traps are different. Traps have consequences."

"So what do I do, I hold the fork in my teeth or something?"

"Something like that." Stella picked up the fork, put the handle between her teeth, leaned across the table, and looked at him over her reading glasses. Her white hair was pinned up the same way it had been last week. "Well? You in or out?"

He should have said out. He was fifty-five years old, sitting in a church basement with forty other people over sixty, and he should have said out. Instead he leaned in, took the fork from her mouth with his own, and let her guide the bite of pie in. Rhubarb, a little too much sugar, crust from a box. It was the best pie he'd had in six years and he knew for a fact it wasn't the pie.

"Hm," Stella said, sitting back and setting the fork down. "Verdict?"

"You cheated on the crust."

"Store-bought. I'm fifty-two, I don't owe anybody homemade crust." She grinned at him and he felt it land somewhere under his ribs.

Across the table, Ada set down a fresh pot of coffee and looked at the two of them the way a person looks at a garden they planted. "Stella," she said. "You brought the pie AND the coleslaw. A man could get spoiled around here."

"A man could," Stella said, and poured him coffee without asking.

Duane showed up twenty minutes late with Myra and a crockpot of something called cowboy beans, and he took one look at Al, then at the pie plate between Al and Stella, and shook his head slowly like a man watching weather come in.

After dinner Stella found him by the drink table. She had her purse over her shoulder, which meant she was leaving, which meant it was dare time.

"My turn," Al said before she could open her mouth.

"Oh, this I have to hear."

"Walk you home. You live on Birch, right? Ada mentioned it. I'll walk you home after cleanup."

Stella tilted her head. "That's the dare? Walking?"

"That's the dare."

"Easy. Accepted." She stuck her hand out and he shook it, formal as a business deal, and she laughed at that, a real laugh, not the polite kind.

Cleanup took forty minutes because Ada ran cleanup like she ran bingo, with opinions about who stacked which chairs. Al stacked chairs. Stella wiped tables. Duane watched them both and said nothing, which for Duane was a lot of restraint.

The walk to Birch Street took eleven minutes. The evening had gone cool and the streetlights came on in that order streetlights do, one popping on down at the corner first. Stella walked slow, and Al matched her without deciding to.

"Karen ran the potluck circuit," Stella said, partway there. "Ada told me. I never met her. I moved here three years after the funeral."

"You know more about my wife than I know about you."

"Fair. So. Ask. Everybody did my first year, a Black woman with a bowl of coleslaw in a town this size. I came for a house I could afford and a quiet life, and it took Ada eleven months to decide I'd stay."

"Married once?" he said. "Or is that rude?"

"Married once, at twenty-eight. Divorced at thirty-one. His name was Clark and he liked being married less than he liked the idea of it. No kids, thank God, because he'd have been a terrible father. He wasn't a monster, Al. He was just somebody I married too fast because I was twenty-eight and panicking about being twenty-eight." She tucked her hands in her coat pockets. "Your turn. Karen."

"High school sweetheart. Married her at twenty-two. She was everything, and I don't mean that in a greeting card way, I mean she ran everything, the potlucks, the calendars, me. Six years ago this spring the doctors used the word stage four and fourteen months later I was eating dinner standing at the counter because sitting at the table alone felt stupid." He heard himself say it and was surprised at how easy it came out. "I watch TV on Wednesdays now. That's the whole routine."

"Was," Stella said. "Until last Wednesday."

They stopped at her gate. It was a small house with a wooden fence and a light on in the front window.

"You didn't cry," Al said.

"Did you?"

"No."

"Good. I did my crying at thirty-one, in a lawyer's office, which is an ugly place to cry.