Free Nobody Cries at Bingo by Dawn Dumont

and because he was the only boy, Mom always gave him an extra-large serving. Then David would eat it while I glared at him from across the table, silently planning future “accidents” for my accident-prone little brother.
    I started hanging out in the kitchen on meatloaf day. When Mom pulled it from the stove, I volunteered to set the table. Then I delivered it to the table with one serving already missing. My brother figured out my game and started hanging out in front of the stove with a fork in one hand and a bottle of ketchup in the other.
    I had a healthy appetite for a ten-year-old girl, healthy even for a thirty-year-old construction worker. I used to polish off two, sometimes three pork chops at the dinner table. My dad and I once fork-wrestled over the last one.
    â€œWhat’s with this girl?” he blustered. “She eats like a horse.”
    â€œShe’s ten, she’s growing,” Mom explained.
    â€œI’m growing,” I reiterated through a mouthful of meat.
    â€œAre you planning on being eight feet tall?”
    â€œThat would be awesome! Then I could play basketball!” I exclaimed. “These are good pork chops, Mom,” I added with a winsome smile.
    My mom never gave a moment’s thought to her weight. Taller than average, her hips had always been narrow and her waist, if not small, was never thick. “I’ve got better things to worry about than a few pounds.”
    One of our aunties left a Nutri-System shake at our house and Mom drank it more out of curiosity than anything else. “Damn thing tasted so bad I had to have a whole bowl of ice cream to get the taste out of my mouth.”
    If she did gain weight, she’d start wearing my dad’s jeans. “Women waste too much time worrying about what they look like,” she’d say as we watched a daytime TV heroine add another layer of lipstick to her face as she tried to seduce her sister’s husband.
    â€œTell me about it,” I’d add as I polished off a bag of chips on the couch beside her.

    Mom had twelve brothers and sisters. Most of them had families and most of these families averaged four children each. I tried counting them once and I always forgot someone. Nowadays trying to count the offspring of my cousins is beyond me. I hope one of us is up to the task before the next generation starts getting married.
    We labeled our cousins according to geography. We belonged to the Saskatchewan cousins, which included two other families in the Qu’Appelle Valley along with another family in Prince Albert. Then there were two families of Manitoba cousins who had a lot of kids around our age.
    The Manitoba cousins were frequent visitors. They were bigger, bolder and more numerous than us. Each summer their parents, Auntie Beth and Uncle Jack, opened the back of their camper truck and our cousins piled out in a clamber of legs, arms and insults. They descended upon us like passenger pigeons, blocking out the sun with their squawking.
    My siblings and I observed them curiously from behind our blanket of shyness. Everything about us was weird to them as well. “Why do you talk softly?” “Why do you read books?” “Why don’t you shoot more things?”
    They thought up all the fun things to do. “Let’s build a big fire. Then we’ll throw some kerosene on it. Then we’ll jump over it.”
    Their sense of fun permeated everything they did. They went from activity to activity, greedily sucking the enjoyment out of it. I envied their hedonism but I couldn’t tell them that. Mostly because uttering a word like hedonism guaranteed a pile driver.
    Thanks to the wonderful world of wrestling, my cousins learned a variety of wrestling moves like the pile driver, camel clutch and the suplex. My sister, girl cousins and I got to experience these moves firsthand. The pile driver is when someone much stronger than you — let’s call them