The text on the telephone of my daughter Tammy read, “Forty eight thousand dollars by Easter, or I call your husband. And your mama.” I read it standing in the hallway of my house in Lynchburg on Easter morning, where Tammy had left her purse on the bench, and the screen had lit up as she went to help in the kitchen. I am Geraldine Parks, seventy eight years old, and I have never in my life snooped in a purse. I read it twice. Then I put the telephone back exactly as I had found it, and I went to set the table.
I knew what the message meant. Tammy, fifty one years old, had been going to the slot machines at the casino in Danville for six years, and she had lost everything she could borrow. She had not told her husband Doug, a deacon, or me. The game I had invented in 1996 at my kitchen table, Holy Dare, a Bible trivia board game, had been sold to a toy company for three point three million dollars, and Tammy believed that I would never learn where my money went. She had taken eleven thousand dollars already from my account.
At noon the doorbell rang, and I opened it to two men in good suits, vice presidents of the toy company, who had come from Ohio to present me with a commemorative copy of the game for its thirtieth anniversary. I had invited them myself, a month before. They stood on my porch holding a gift box tied with a gold ribbon, smiling, and behind them, parked at the curb, was a gray sedan with a man in it whom I had never seen, looking at my house through the windshield.
An Easter table set for fourteen gave one grandmother the afternoon to bring her daughter back to the family in Lynchburg.
I gave my terms to the two executives in the front hall, as quietly as I could. “Gentlemen, welcome. You will find that dinner is a little more eventful than you expected. I would ask you to sit at the table, eat my ham, and stay out of whatever happens. My husband Raymond, who passed in 2018, would have laughed. After dinner I will show you where the game was invented. But first, I must speak to my daughter. She has a dare of her own to answer.”
We sat down at the long dining room table, fourteen of us, with the good china. Doug said grace. The ham was passed. Tammy sat across from me, her hands trembling, and every time the telephone buzzed in her pocket she flinched. Halfway through the sweet potatoes, I put down my fork. “Tammy,” I said, in the voice that used to settle a classroom, “I read the message on your telephone this morning. I am not angry. I want you to tell your husband and your children, right now, what you owe, and to whom.”
Tammy burst into tears. She told them everything, in a rush, with her face in her napkin. The slot machines, the loans, the man named Vic who had given her a chance to repay and then threatened to tell Doug. Doug sat very still, his big hand over his mouth. Then, without a word, he reached across the table and took her hand. At that moment the doorbell rang again. I rose and opened it. The man from the gray sedan stood on the porch in a leather jacket, smiling pleasantly, and said, “I am here for Easter dinner. Tammy knows.”
He pushed past me into the hall. In the dining room he snatched the telephone out of the hand of Tammy, where she had been about to hand it to Doug, and ran toward the back door with it. He had not counted on my grandsons. The three of them, tall, polite boys of sixteen, nineteen and twenty one, in their church clothes, rose from the table without a word, and met him at the kitchen door in a line. The oldest took the telephone from him, gently, as one takes a toy from a child. Doug telephoned the police, and the man in the leather jacket sat down at the kitchen table, furious and silent, to wait for them. The toy company executives, who had stood up with their napkins in their hands, looked at each other. The elder of them cleared his throat. “Mrs. Parks,” he said, “in thirty years of business, I have never been to a more memorable Easter.” Tammy laid her head on her arms and sobbed. I came around the table and held her, and the whole family surrounded us.
The money consequences were gentle. The man in the leather jacket, Victor Mace, was arrested for extortion and unlawful lending, and the eleven thousand dollars was returned to my account by the court. Tammy entered a gambling treatment program in Roanoke the following week, and Doug drove her. The three point three million dollars from the game stayed in a trust, with Doug and me as co trustees. The toy company presented me with the commemorative game, and a plaque for the dining room wall.
In the name of Raymond, who passed in 2018, I started the Raymond Parks Fund. It pays for gambling treatment, family counseling and free legal help against loan sharks, in Lynchburg, Campbell and Amherst counties. In the first year we placed thirty seven people in treatment and recovered fifty one thousand dollars for families. One was a retired bus driver from Altavista who had been threatened by a man with a text message. He called the number on the card I handed him, and he told me it felt like waking up.
On the next Easter, Tammy sat across from me at the long table, one year clean, with a plate of ham and a small gold cross at her throat. Doug had said grace. Afterward, the grandsons set up the board game on the table, and the whole family played a round, with the old plastic tokens and the cards written in my own handwriting. Tammy drew the last dare card, and read it aloud with a smile: “Tell someone you love them.” She walked around the table and kissed my cheek.
