Dating Kosher Read Online Free Page B

picture a million times but it still made me smile.
    He’d been gone for over ten years, but my memories of him were still fresh, especially all the games of blackjack we played when I was a child. Begging him to play whenever I saw him, he indulged me most of the time, always having a deck of cards in his back pocket. I thought I was such a talented card player; the reigning twenty-one champion of the family. It wasn’t until many years later, after I lost a huge amount at the tables in Vegas, that I learned the truth: I was indeed not a talented blackjack player but the victim of a longstanding hoax perpetuated by my well-meaning grandfather. But by then it didn’t matter that he had let me win almost every game. In fact, it just made me love and miss him more.
    Bubby sighed. “Oh, well, Shoshie, you know. I’m getting my hair done at noon and then Mah Jongg with the girls at two.” It didn’t matter that ‘the girls’ were all over eighty, the ladies in her Mah Jongg group would always be ‘the girls.’
    I replaced the picture and turned back toward my grandmother. She had creases around her eyes and deep lines in her cheeks, but she didn’t seem old to me. Although she had trouble walking and sometimes complained that the Mah Jongg tiles fell from her hands because of her arthritis, she was still one of the most active people at Beth Shalom, her seniors’ home. She swam most mornings in the complex’s heated pool and walked most evenings with bridge, gin (the game, not the drink) and Mah Jongg slotted in between. Last year she’d even been in the center’s production of Fiddler on the Roof , playing the part of Tzeitel. It was one of the sweetest things I’d ever seen: a bunch of seniors acting out the parts of teenaged girls, my own bubby up on stage, wistfully singing “Matchmaker…matchmaker…make me a match…”
    “You should learn to play Mahj, Shoshie. That Barbara Solly isn’t what she used to be. We don’t have the heart to kick her out of the group, but she just can’t keep up anymore.” She shook her head, pursing her lips. It was hard on her, watching her friends deteriorate. Many of them had passed on in the last few years, forcing ‘the girls’ to constantly be on the watch for new recruits for their Mah Jongg group. “We could use a new fourth. And we love hearing your stories, dear,” she winked.
    “Oh Bubby, you’re terrible,” I scolded, the smile on my face tempering my words. I’d made the mistake of telling my grandmother and a couple of her cronies about a particularly wild party I had gone to once. They were just so mesmerized by what the single life was like these days, that I found myself telling them things I never would have dreamed of telling a group of senior citizens. They really got a kick out of it. Maybe I felt like I was doing them a service: educating them on the ways of the modern world. Now whenever I saw them, they would all wink and smile at me. It was pretty embarrassing having them think I was some sort of hero. And I would never live down telling them about that time I’d had a quickie with a stranger at a party in a front hall closet, standing up between all the guests’ coats.
    “What? We aren’t allowed to have a little excitement?” she shrugged. “None of the alter kockers around here are willing to spend the money on Viagra, so what are we supposed to do?”
    “Oh my God, Bubby!” Eww! I didn’t need to hear about my grandmother’s sex life. Or lack of one. Please, God, let it be a lack of one.
    She rocked her weight back and forth a couple times and then pushed herself up from the couch, waving me off when I offered my hand. “You should be so lucky that you find yourself a husband like my Bernie; he never needed Viagra.” She walked over to the mantle, looking at the picture I had replaced only moments before.
    “I don’t think Viagra was around back then,” I pointed out.
    She didn’t seem to hear me.
    “He was a good man.