← Stories

The Caller · The First Evening: Seven in Ten

Hạnh had come home for Tết expecting to sleep until noon and eat her mother's pickled leeks. Instead, on the second morning, her uncle had knocked on her door with a wooden cage under his arm.

"Thirty years," said Ông Sáu, setting the cage on her desk, where it took up most of the room. "Thirty years I have called lô tô at the fair. This year my voice is going, and next year it will be gone. You have a good voice. You sang at your cousin's wedding."

"That was one song," said Hạnh.

"Ninety numbers," said her uncle. "Ninety songs. Short ones."

So now it was the first evening of the fair, half past five, and she was standing in the lô tô tent at the edge of the Green with a list of rhymes in her pocket and a feeling in her stomach like the one before an exam. The tent was not grand. A long trestle table, three rows of folding chairs, a chalkboard on an easel, strings of paper lanterns overhead, red and gold. The cage sat on the table, ninety wooden balls inside it, each painted with a number in white.

The committee was there too. The committee was four people from the Green: a woman who ran the noodle stall, a man from the hardware shop, the head of the lantern fund, and Ông Sáu, who had been on it for longer than anyone could remember. They were standing at the tent flap looking up at the sky.

The sky was the colour of a wet slate.

"Seventy per cent," said the noodle woman, holding up her phone. "Seventy per cent chance of rain this evening."

Hạnh looked at the phone, and at the sky, and at the four faces. She knew what they wanted. They wanted somebody to say it, so they would not have to.

"Then it's going to rain," said Hạnh. "We should call it off. Better tonight than half way through."

The hardware man nodded with relief. The lantern woman sighed. Hạnh went to the end of the trestle table and began to fold back the legs, because it seemed the useful thing to do, and because folding a table is easier than standing in front of eighty people with a cage.

"What does seventy per cent mean?" said her uncle.

He had not raised his voice. He never did. He had been a maths teacher for thirty-one years, in the school behind the market, and he had a way of asking a question as if he had just thought of it, though he had almost certainly thought of it in 1987.

"It means it'll rain," said Hạnh, with a table leg in her hand.

"Does it?" said Ông Sáu. He took the noodle woman's phone, politely, and looked at it. "When they say seventy, they mean: of ten evenings that look like this one, with this sky and this wind, about seven had rain." He gave the phone back. "And three did not."

The committee was quiet.

"Three in ten is not nothing," said Ông Sáu. "If I told you that you had three chances in ten of winning tonight, you would buy a card."

Hạnh put the table leg down.

She thought about it, which was what he wanted, though he would never say so. Seven in ten. It was likely, the way it was likely that the bus would be late, or that her mother would ask about her marks. Likely was a strong word. But it was not the same word as will.

And then there was the other half of it. If they cancelled, there would certainly be no lô tô tonight. Eighty people who had walked to the Green would walk home. The lantern fund would take nothing. If they played, and it rained, the people would get wet, or they would sit under the tarp, the big blue one the hardware man had in the back of his van.

"It's likely," said Hạnh slowly, to the committee, "not certain. We could put up the tarp and play under it. If it rains, we're dry. If it doesn't, we've lost nothing but ten minutes putting it up."

The hardware man looked at the sky. Then he looked at his van.

"A tarp is cheaper than a cancelled evening," said the lantern woman, who had a calculator in her head the way some people have a song.

They put up the tarp. It took fifteen minutes, not ten, and the noodle woman held a pole the whole time and complained about it. By six the chairs were full. By half past six there were people standing at the back.

Hạnh stood at the trestle table with her list of rhymes in one hand and the handle of the cage in the other. Her uncle sat beside her, on a folding chair, with a flask of tea.

"Turn it three times," he said. "Then take the one that comes to the door."

She turned it. The balls clattered. One rolled into the little wooden doorway at the front of the cage, and she took it out. Twenty-three.

She looked at her list, found the rhyme for twenty-three, and sang it. Her voice came out thin and high, nothing like her uncle's. Somebody near the front laughed, not unkindly. Somebody at the back called out, "Again!" She sang it again, louder, and eighty people looked down at their cards.

By the time she had called fifteen numbers, she had stopped hearing her own voice.

At eight o'clock, the rain came.

It came all at once, the way Tết rain does, hard and loud on the blue tarp, a sound like a thousand small fingers on a drum. People looked up. A child shrieked happily. Nobody left. They were dry, and they were three numbers from a full row, some of them, and nobody leaves a lô tô table three numbers from a full row.

Ông Sáu put down his tea and took the cage from her for a minute. He turned it three times, took the ball from the door, and sang the number into the noise of the rain, deep and steady, the way he had sung it for thirty years. The rain did not stop him. It seemed, if anything, to keep time.

It rained for ten minutes. Then it stopped, as suddenly as it had begun, and the lanterns dripped.

A woman in the second row filled a row and stood up shouting. The prize that night was a box of mandarins, donated by the fruit stall, and she held it over her head like a cup.

Afterwards, when the chairs were stacked and the tarp was sagging with water, Hạnh sat on the edge of the trestle table and drank the last of her uncle's tea.

"It rained," she said.

"It did," said Ông Sáu.

"So I was right."

He thought about that. "You were right that it was likely," he said. "You were wrong that we should go home." He picked up the cage and tucked it under his arm. "Tomorrow there is a different sky."

The question for your own table

When someone in your house says something "will" happen, how often do they mean it is likely? What would you do differently if you said "seven in ten" out loud?

Something to do

Next time the forecast gives a chance of rain, say it as "out of ten days like this one", and decide what you would do on the three that stay dry.

Shared under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. More stories