The Tent Game

I'm Liv Hall, fifty-two years old, and I want it stated up front that I did not plan any of this. I am a housekeeper. I clean three big houses a week and one small one, and I win things. That's my whole personality, more or less. I win the chili cook-off at work, I win the office pool, I win at bingo every single second Friday at the VFW hall back home. So when my ex-boyfriend's nephew Jeff, who is twenty-nine and supposedly my camping buddy for the weekend, texted me at two in the afternoon to say he had a date instead, well. I was already halfway to Pine Knot Meadow with a tent in my trunk and a grudge in my heart.

"Have fun without me!" he'd texted. The little thumbs-up emoji! Can you believe that? Twenty-nine years old and he bails on a fifty-two-year-old woman for a date he met on an app that morning.

So I pitched my tent alone at site fourteen, and I swore a little, and I sweated a lot, because it was a warm Friday evening in the Redwood National Forest and the poles did not want to cooperate. Then I dug out the little hand-drawn map the campground host had given me at the gate. Evening activity! Bingo! Seven o'clock! Community tent! There was even a little drawing of a bingo ball on it, which I appreciated, because I appreciate a man who commits to a theme.

The map said the community tent was up the main path, past the firepit, second turnoff on the left. I followed it in my flip-flops, past numbered tent pads, past a family roasting marshmallows, past two guys arguing about a guitar. Pine and woodsmoke in the air. Very nice. Very wholesome. I was practically humming.

Second turnoff on the left, and there was a tent, a good-sized dome thing with the flap half open. I saw a folding table through the gap. Tables mean community activities, right? Right.

I ducked my head in.

Okay, so. Not a community tent. A very small tent, actually, with a sleeping bag, a duffel bag, a thermos, and a man sitting cross-legged in the middle of it eating trail mix out of the bag.

And not just any man. Gabriel Fisher. From two houses down from me on Marigold Lane. Fifty-five years old, never married, keeps to himself, takes his trash cans in before sunrise like some kind of robot. I have lived next to him for six years and I think we have exchanged maybe forty words total, most of them about his hedge.

We stared at each other. He had a raisin halfway to his mouth.

"Oh my god," I said. "This is your tent, isn't it."

"It is, yeah."

"I followed the map! There was a drawing of a bingo ball on it! Who puts a bingo ball on a map that leads to a stranger's tent?"

"That's the community tent," he said slowly, like he was doing math in his head. "That's... I think that's the next turnoff. The one after the firepit with the big flag."

There was a pause. And then we both laughed, which surprised me, because I had him pegged like someone who did not laugh. He laughed like a car starting on the third try, kind of a cough and then running fine.

"You're the lady from Marigold," he said. "Liv. Hall. You're the one who reported my hedge to the county."

"I did not report your hedge. I trimmed the part that hung over my driveway, which is legal, and then you sulked about it for a year."

"I didn't sulk. I remarked on it. Once."

"Twice. At the mailbox and at the curb."

He put the bag of trail mix down like it was evidence. "Well. Want to sit? You're all bent over in the doorway and it looks uncomfortable."

Did I want to sit in a strange man's tent? A strange man I had mildly disliked for six years? Obviously yes, because it was cooler in there, and because my feet hurt, and because I am a curious person and curiosity has gotten me into trouble exactly as many times as it's gotten me out.

I sat. The tent smelled like pine needles and coffee, campfire coffee, the burnt kind. I should say here that I noticed he looked different out of the neighborhood. Out of his work clothes. He had gray coming in at the temples and forearms like somebody who does actual yard work, which, fine, credit where due.

"So what's a single guy doing at bingo night alone?" I asked.

"What's a single lady doing at bingo night alone?"

"I came with somebody. He bailed. Jeff, my ex's nephew. Long story, dumb story. Anyway I'm here for the competition, not the company. I win bingo. Ask anyone."

"Huh."

"What? Why 'huh'?"

"Nothing. Just didn't have you down as a bingo shark."

"I am a bingo shark, Gabriel. I have won the VFW pot eleven times. They know my face. One guy groans when I walk in."

He smiled at his trail mix. Then I saw it. His duffel bag, unzipped, and there, on top of a rolled flannel shirt, an actual old bingo board. The kind with the little sliding red windows. My whole body turned toward it as a dog turns at the sound of a can opener.

"Is that a bingo board?"

He looked down at the bag like he'd forgotten it existed. "Oh. Yeah. My dad's, I think. It was in with the camping stuff when I inherited the garage. I threw it in for no reason, honestly."

"Gabriel. Fisher. There are no accidents in this world. There is fate, and there is a bingo board in your duffel bag, and those are the same thing."

"You want to play bingo. In a tent. With no caller and no numbers."

"I have a dry-erase marker in my fanny pack and I can draw numbers out of your trail mix bag. Raisins get their own pile. This is doable."

"You carry a marker in your fanny pack?"

"Of course I carry a marker. What kind of woman doesn't carry a marker?" I was already pulling the board out. It was beautiful. Red windows, worn spots on B and N from years of somebody's thumb. "Come on. One round. Winner takes something."

"Like what? We don't have anything to bet."

"Breakfast. Loser makes breakfast. I saw a little camp stove by your thermos, don't act helpless."

He thought about it. He actually thought about it, chewing a peanut, looking at the ceiling of the tent like the answer was written up there. "Fine. But I get to draw the raisins, because if you shuffle them yourself you'll palm the good ones. I've seen you eye my hedge for years, Liv. You have shifty eyes."

"I have winning eyes. There's a difference."

He tipped the trail mix onto his sleeping bag, picked out the raisins with surgical focus, and lined them up. I drew a grid in the margin of the board with my marker. He called out numbers while I daubed, or rather while I slid the little red windows with the intense care of a woman defending a title, and he watched me with an expression I couldn't read. Not annoyed. Something more like amused, which frankly was new information about Gabriel Fisher.

"B-9," he said.

"Got it."

"O-71."

"Got it. God, you're a slow reader."

"I'm savoring it. This is the most fun I've had on a camping trip in twenty years, and we've been playing for four minutes."

"I-19."

"That's your line, isn't it."

"It is, and you knew that, and you called it anyway, which means you wanted me to win, which means you're a worse competitor than I thought."

"Or I want breakfast made for me," he said, and shrugged, and I laughed so hard the raisin pile shifted.

Then I needed N-34. One window. I was breathing like I'd run a mile. He drew the next raisin out of the pile, took his sweet time, looked at it.

"Gabriel. What is it. Don't do this to me."

"N-34," he said, and I shouted so loud that somebody two sites over yelled back "congrats." through the trees, and I had to put my hand over my mouth.

"Breakfast," I said. "You're making me breakfast. Pancakes. I hope you brought pancake mix, because if you brought only trail mix I'm going to be very disappointed in your camping skills."

"Pancake mix," he admitted. "And real coffee. And bacon, because I don't mess around."

I sat back, glowing, clutching a bingo board older than both of us put together, in a tent that smelled like pine and coffee, having just beaten my neighbor at a game nobody was watching. And I want to know, honestly, how a woman goes from that to what happened later, and the answer is: gradually, then all at once. But that part comes later.

First, we played a second round. Because I'm not a shark for nothing.

The second round was a disaster, and I mean that in the best way. I lost. Badly. Gabriel didn't even gloat, he just slid his little red windows shut one at a time with the patience of a man defusing... no, not that, with the patience of a man pouring coffee, which is its own kind of smug. One round each, which meant breakfast stayed his, on account of owning the stove.

"Pancakes in the morning," he said. "You want blueberries in them or not?"

"Where would you even get blueberries out here?"

"I brought dried ones. I plan my camping trips, Liv. I'm not an animal."

"See, that's exactly what I always thought about you. That you were fussy. Snobby, even." I said it before my brain caught up with my mouth, and he looked up from the board. "Sorry. That came out ruder than it lived in my head."

"No, tell me. Six years of neighbors, I'd like to know what I've been accused of."

"Well. You never said hi first. You never waved. You trimmed that hedge like it owed you money. And that one time you had a party and didn't invite the whole street, which, fine, it was your yard, but Marigold Lane runs on invitations, Gabriel, that's the whole economy of the street."

He laughed, that slow car-starting laugh, and shook his head. "That party was my retirement thing. Fourteen people from the water department. You would have been bored to tears. And I didn't wave because I figured you didn't like me, so I didn't want to bother you."

"Bother me? Why would you think that?"

"Because you reported my hedge to the county."

"I did NOT report your hedge to the county!"

"Kenny said..."

"Kenny? Kenny Delgado? Kenny would say anything, that man once told me the city was going to pave our backyards for a bike lane. I trim that hedge myself, the part over my driveway, because you let it hang out like a lazy dog. That's not a complaint, that's maintenance," I was so worked up I had to fan myself with the bingo board. "I have never once reported anything to the county. I don't even know who you report a hedge to. Do you?"

"Apparently not," he said, and he was grinning now, this whole