Page 17 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

Abby sits on the floor. There are chairs; she sits on the floor, cross-legged, chin propped on her fists, so the old woman gets to look down at her audience. I clocked that on day one as an accident of her being made of enthusiasm. It’s aim. Every ounce of her chaos, when you chart it, lands somewhere soft on somebody.

“And your young man,” Mrs. Pruitt says, mid-story, aiming her spoon at me without looking. “He wants soup too?”

“He’s on duty,” Abby says solemnly.

“Harold was on duty for thirty years. Never once turned down soup. That’s how I knew he had sense.” A pause. “He can watch my garden from the table.”

The sight lines are actually better from the table. That’s the reason I move.

The soup’s outstanding. I say so, once, and Mrs. Pruitt looks at me the way harbor pilots look at weather that might turn out fine after all, and says, “Hmph. He talks.”

“He’s bilingual,” Abby says from the floor. “English and silence.”

Both of them find this hilarious. I eat my soup, on duty, in the crossfire, while Harold grins at me from six different decades on the wall like he knows exactly what’s happening to me. He’d know. Man married the twentieth century’s loudest woman and kept her muffins on his mind for fifty years.

Tuesday, I find out what Flamingo Bingo is.

I’d been told, by God or somebody, that I’d be spared. Then Abby signs us up as Mrs. Pruitt’s ride, and that’s how I cometo be standing security in the Sunbreak Harbor community center at 1900 hours among forty-five senior citizens in neon pink flamingo hats, watching a retired dentist named Chuck call numbers with the gravity of a launch director.

The hats are mandatory. I want to be clear about the operational picture: the hats are mandatory, they had a spare, and it’s on my head right now, because the alternative was a conversation with the hat committee, and I’ve cleared buildings with less structure than the hat committee.

“B-9,” Chuck intones.

“He always starts with B,” Mrs. Pruitt mutters darkly, working four cards at once like a blackjack pro. “Man has no imagination. Harold used to say Chuck drilled teeth the same way. B-9 first, every time.”

Abby is three seats down, hatted, delighted beyond the reach of medicine, playing one card badly because she keeps leaving her post to fetch things for people—reading glasses, another lemonade, a dropped dauber rolling under the folding tables. Every trip back she catches my eye and grins at my hat, and every time, it lands somewhere the body armor doesn’t cover.

An eighty-year-old man named Walt leans over to me during the intermission. “You’re the fella watching over our Abby.”

Our Abby. Eight weeks. This town.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” He nods at the room, the hats, the whole pink circus of it. “You know she set this up? Not the bingo, bingo’s older than me. The Tuesday van. Half these folks couldn’t get here till she organized the pickup route with the church.” He taps his temple. “Girl runs more logistics than the Navy.”

“I believe it,” I say, and I do.

“Harold would’ve liked her,” Walt adds, like that settles a point in some long-running debate. “She reminds me of Eleanorat that age.” He resettles his hat. “Pruitt women and their strays. You’re in good hands, son.”

I letstraysgo unchallenged. Mostly because he’s right.

Somebody wins the blackout round. There’s a controversy about a smudged dauber. Mrs. Pruitt is robbed, allegedly. I stand my post in a flamingo hat, and when Abby looks over at me mid-laugh—hat crooked, cheeks flushed, the whole room orbiting her like she’s the harbor light—I run a systems check and find, to my professional alarm, that there is nowhere on the coast of Florida I would rather be standing.

The ride home is its own operation. Mrs. Pruitt rides shotgun—she called it with a look, no words needed—and provides a full intelligence debrief on everyone at bingo: who’s feuding, who’s courting, whose grandson is on a bad path, delivered with the crisp economy of a station chief. Abby, in the back with the bingo hauls, contributes color commentary and half a churro.

“You went easy on Walt tonight,” Mrs. Pruitt says, at the stop sign.

“Walt’s recovering from a hip replacement,” Abby says.

“Walt’s been recovering from that hip since March. He milks it for the good parking.” She points two fingers at the windshield without turning her head. “Left here, Noah. The propane truck parks on Dolphin after seven and you’ll want the width.”

She’s right about the propane truck. She’s right about the width. When we drop her at her door, she pauses halfway out of the truck, pats me once on the forearm—the same firm single pat Abby uses, or the one Abby learned, I’m no longer sure which direction the traditions flow around here—and says, “You’re a good egg, big man. Don’t let it go to waste standing in doorways.”

Then she’s gone up her walk, and Abby climbs over the console into the front seat instead of using the door like aperson, and neither of the women in my evening has left me any response time at all.

I keep the hat. It’s in the truck. That’s classified.

The list keeps itself now. I don’t sanction it. It runs anyway, background process, cataloging.