Sometimes there was no sign up outside the community center, so everyone in town knew that Mrs. Golch had one of her headaches. Mr. Golch maintained that Mrs. Golch simply got the headaches to keep from having to teach after-school classes, but she steadfastly insisted that they were hereditary and that nothing could be done about them. So on the days when Mrs. Golch had headaches, the community center stayed closed.

The community center was really less of a community center and more of a building, donated to the town by the Rotarians after they moved their meetings to the next town over. I always had the impression that Rotarians were like hermit crabs: they took over a building, stayed until they got too big, then moved on. At any rate, the center was an old structure, built in the Thirties by the New Deal, which had a concrete floor, no fire exits, no plumbing, and two windows. I could understand why the Rotarians didn’t want it; why the town wanted it was another question entirely.

For ten years the town owned the building but did nothing with it, until a group of well-to-do citizens, led by Mrs. Golch in her capacity as Treasurer of the Development Committee, started a putsch which climaxed in the declaration of "the Old Rotary Building," to be "the New Community Center." Posters were made, votes held, and all the other petty bureaucracy on which governments thrive, and eventually it became plain that, having made the bed, Mrs. Golch and her compatriots were going to have to lie in it. It was around about that time that Mrs. Golch’s headaches became steadily worse.

On non-headache days, the community center was host to a variety of activities ranging from young children running around inside the big, dark building to slightly older children running around inside the big, dark building. Mrs. Golch was a wizard at finance, but she was not prepared to be a surrogate mother to the entire town.

I came to be associated with the community center rather by accident; I was walking down Keller Avenue, on which the community center stood, when Mrs. Golch came running out of the door screaming her head off. Once I got her calmed down enough to speak sensibly, I learned my first fact about the community center and its patron: Mrs. Golch was terrified of spiders.

One might think that a building of this type would be a veritable nirvana for arachnids, but apparently either the spiders had been slow on the uptake or Mrs. Golch had never noticed them before. Suffice to say that she had noticed them just in time to run into me. Being the non-arachnophobe that I am, I dispatched the spider, and in return I became Mrs. Golch’s go-to when it came to the community center.

The particular day I had in mind, she called me at six o’clock in the morning. "Whiste, Whiste, I’m going on vacation and I need someone to teach the kids sign language while I’m away."

One might suppose that, being roused from my slumber by this, I might have been confused. Since Mrs. Golch invariably addressed me like that, and since she invariably called me at strange hours, I knew exactly what was going on even as my eyes were still opening. "Ma’am, you know I’d be happy to help," I said, knowing resistance was useless. In the beginning I had tried to back away from what Mrs. Golch saw as my sacred duty, but she was not an easy woman to back away from even in minor matters, and sacred duties were certainly not minor. "When will you be leaving?"

"I’m on the road now," she said, and I heard for the first time the rumble of traffic in the background. "I just stopped to call you and let you know. I’ll be back in a week or two. Just hold down the fort."

"But I don’t know anything about sign language," I protested.

"Neither do the kids," she said, with a degree of truth, even if it were not a useful degree. "Just teach them sign language, and if you get through that, start in on papier-mâché horses for the county fair next month. Those are always popular." There was a click and the line went dead, leaving me to ponder sign language for papier-mâché horses until I realized my alarm was going off.