The Gambler

by Molly O'Keefe

  I know, I thought. I broke your heart. I hurt you and hurt you again.

  Maybe it was shame, maybe it was her eyes, or maybe it was the overly optimistic vibe coming off the kid, but whatever it was my smart-ass joke died on my lips and I nodded.

  “I promise, Juliette. I really do.”

  She snorted, her doubt like a whole other person standing on the porch, shaking its head at me.

  “I’ll come here right after school tomorrow,” Miguel said. The kid was actually smiling—well, as much as he could without popping stitches.

  He thinks he’s won. But that old saying about conning a con was poignantly true in this situation, particularly when the con happened to involve a house in terrible need of fixing up.

  There would be no card playing, not even Go Fish. But the boy would work.

  “This is totally nuts,” Juliette muttered. “I’m gonna lose my job over this garbage.”

  “Everything will be cool,” Miguel said.

  “It will be,” I added my own weak assurances.

  Her eyes bounced between us and I tried to project responsible adult in her direction. “I’m crazy. I’m absolutely out of my mind,” she said, and turned, walking across the lawn to her car.

  I stood next to the kid, watching her go, marvelling at the way the world worked, how in Bonne Terre, the joke was always on me.

  I’d kill a cactus, I thought, flabbergasted. I live in a hotel for crying out loud.

  I looked at the kid.

  What am I going to do with you?

  “So?” Miguel said once Juliette’s taillights vanished down the road. The boy rubbed his hands together as if he was about to sit down to a feast of gambling delights. “Where do we start? Five card? Texas hold ’em?”

  I made a big point of looking at the front of the house. I flicked off some of the peeling white paint, examined the sad and neglected windowsills and bounced on a few of the sagging floorboards on the porch.

  Dad was going to blow a gasket, no doubt about it, but I didn’t see a way around this.

  “The porch,” I said, grinning at the kid’s crestfallen expression. “I do believe we’ll start with the porch.”

  “What are you talking about?” the kid asked, following me through the red door into the shadowed foyer. “I’m here to learn how to play cards.”

  “Yeah, but I liked my idea better.”

  “I’m not going to fix up your house,” Miguel said, stopping and crossing his arms in the hallway. I turned.

  “Then maybe I should call Juliette and tell her it’s off? You can wash cars at the station.”

  “No way, man, a deal is a deal.”

  “What the hell is going on here?” Richard demanded, stepping into the hallway from the dark library.

  “Dad, don’t freak out—”

  “Don’t freak out? There’s a kid in this house, and from what it sounds like, he’s going to be here a while.”

  “Who the hell is this guy?” Miguel asked, suddenly a little gangster.

  “No one,” I said, “ignore him.”

  “He’s not staying,” Richard insisted.

  I looked steadily at my father, balancing all my impulses to strangle him. “I don’t have a choice,” I bit out, “You called the cops.”

  “Maybe I should just tell the chief that your dad don’t want me here,” Miguel said.

  I rubbed my eyes, my face, ran my fingers through my hair, wishing I were back at the Bellagio with nothing more stressful than a massage to schedule.

  “Miguel,” I sighed, putting my cards on the table, “you can’t tell Juliette about my dad. This whole thing will blow up if you do.”

  “Then maybe you should teach me some cards—”

  “Oh,” Richard said, brightening at the idea of an enthusiastic young pupil. “If this is about poker—”

  “It’s not,” I said to my father. “We’re not teaching him the game. Ever.”

  “Fine,” Richard said, heading into the kitchen, “but you better keep him out of the house and out of our way.”

  Miguel’s face was all but glowing, the prospect of blackmail no doubt warming the little cockles of his devious heart.

  “Let me stop you before you even get started.” I chuckled and put my hand on Miguel’s stiff shoulder. “You don’t want to be at that station. Even if I’m not teaching you cards, you’d rather be here. You tipped your hand, kid. I’ve seen every card you’ve got.”

  I watched the kid digest it, the wheels turning behind those bright eyes.

  “Now,” I said, my throat suddenly dry, my hands wet. Bluffing was nothing—I did it in my sleep, ordering breakfast, every single conversation with every other person in my life was mostly a bluff—but with Juliette in the mix, I wasn’t on my game. I couldn’t keep a clear head.

  But Juliette could not know about my father.

  “We can call Juliette and we can both of us tell her what’s happening. I’ll tell her you just want to learn to gamble and you can tell her about my dad. But she already expects the worst of me. She’s driving away right now pretty sure I’m lying to her. But if I’m forced to tell her that you’re making all this up—it’ll hurt her.”

  The boy swallowed, swore under his breath and I could see that the idea of hurting Juliette bothered him.

  So young, that kid, still so many people to disappoint and hurt. Years of doling out pain to people who might trust him, or God forbid love him, stretched out ahead of Miguel.

  But it was obvious Miguel wasn’t going to start today, and he wasn’t going to start with Juliette.

  Points to Miguel. He was way up on me.

  There was a stab of pain in my chest, a wish that I could go back and feel that way again. Clean. Redeemable. I could barely remember what doing the right thing felt like.

  “So, what?” Miguel asked. “I’m just gonna clean up your porch?”

  “Yeah.” I grinned. “And maybe my windowsills.”

  I led the boy through the old house, listening to him whistle under his breath as we stepped under the giant chandelier.

  “What is this place?” Miguel asked.

  “A relic,” I answered. I led the boy through the inner courtyard, manicured and pristine as a golf course.

  “Whoa,” the kid breathed and I smiled. Shabby on the outside, but the old girl still had it where it counted. “This is like a mansion or something?”

  “It was,” I answered. We stepped through the second set of doors, into the back part of the house, and I rested my hand on the brass doorknob leading to the back courtyard. “This place used to be a brothel,” I said and the kid snorted. “I’m not kidding. My great-great-great-grandfather built it. It’s been in my family for hundreds of years.”

  Miguel nodded. “That’s cool.”

  “It is. It is very cool, so you can imagine how I’d feel if anything happened to this place—”

  “What are you saying?” Miguel asked, hot and bothered.

  “I’m saying—to the kid who tried to steal my car—” I arched my eyebrow and let that sink in “—don’t get any ideas.”

  “My idea was learning how to play cards so I could make some money, now I’m free labor—”

  “I’ll pay you,” I said, because that thing about the money bothered me. I knew the kid needed out, needed a way to take care of his sister, and I remembered feeling that way all too well. “But that’s between you and me. Juliette doesn’t need to know.”

  Miguel nodded in agreement and I felt a shimmery satisfaction at doing the right thing.

  “Now,” I said, opening the door to the rear courtyard—the one that was truly magical, even to a jade like me. “Let’s get some tools and go to work.”

  But the kid barely heard me. He stared wide-eyed and slack jawed at the maze and the whirling fountain, the glittering glass roof of the greenhouse.

  I walked past him, smiling, to the toolshed in the back corner. I swung open the wooden door to the dusty interior of the shed and the sm
ell of grass and dirt flooded out, giving me the weird desire to actually get my hands dirty.

  Miguel caught up and took the tools I started to hand him. A couple of scrappers, a crowbar, a sledgehammer. I tucked a few pairs of dirty canvas gloves into my back pocket.

  “Hey, how come you’ve got such a nice yard and your house looks like crap?”

  “An excellent question,” I said. “I think we were just waiting for the right extortionist to come along.”

  “You think you’re funny, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “What’s the story with you and the chief?” Miguel asked.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, playing dumb as I stepped back out into the sunshine.

  “Why does she expect the worst from you?”

  I kicked the door shut behind us.

  “Because that’s all I’ve ever given her.”

  8

  JULIETTE

  * * *

  Driving from the station to The Manor on Monday afternoon, I had no idea what I was going to find. Maybe Miguel didn’t even show up. Or maybe Tyler picked up and left over the weekend and just didn’t let me know. It brought me a weird satisfaction thinking this. Like believing the worst of him was just so cozy. And look, I’d gotten over Tyler leaving the way that he did. My heart repaired itself and maybe it didn’t work the way it used to but it worked.

  I was fine.

  To my total surprise when I slowed down to a stop in front of The Manor I was happy to see Miguel was there, crowbar in hand trying to take off the boards of the porch. And there was Tyler, sitting in a lawn chair, looking like some bayou prince all gilded and sleek.

  And my heart responded not even a little bit. I wouldn’t let it.

  But the questions I’d put away for so long, they were back.

  Why? Why did you leave like that? What went wrong? Was it all a lie?

  Completely irrelevant, but I wasn’t going to lie, I wanted the answers. I wanted the answers bad.

  I stepped out of the car to the sounds of them arguing.

  “This is bullshit,” Miguel said when he caught sight of me. He held out the end of the crowbar towards Tyler. “He just sits there. While I’m breaking my back on this porch.”

  “It’s community service,” I said.

  “You’re taking his side!” Miguel could not believe it.

  “Looks like we’re done.” Tyler said, folding up his paper. “Go ahead, Miguel and take the tools back to the shed in back.” He stood, his tee shirt and jeans shifting over his tall lean body. He had more shoulders than he used to. More size all around.

  He was a man.

  The thought sent an absolute flood of memories through my brain. Since he came back, I’d been fixated in my unguarded moments on our first kiss that summer. I’d walked right up to him at JJ’s and told him he needed to kiss me.

  “For science,” I said.

  “What kind of science?” He asked in that sun-licked drawl.

  “Comparative studies.”

  “Oh, honey, there’s no point in comparing me to anyone.” But he stood and the second he slipped the wide palm around my waist my body lit up like a flare. And kiss or not, his touch was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.

  The kiss, looking back, had changed my life. That was how he kissed. Like the future was in the balance.

  “What are you thinking about, Jules?” Tyler asked, grinning at me like he knew.

  “How was Miguel today?” I asked, skipping over his question.

  “Fine. Surly.”

  I smiled.

  “Juliette,” he breathed and against my better judgement I looked at him. And I realized he was playing our greatest hits back in his head like I was.

  “Don’t,” I said. “You don’t get to look at me like that.”

  “I know. But I don’t know how to stop.”

  “Well, you could leave. Just up and leave. You know how to do that.”

  He glanced away, his jaw tight. And I felt righteous.

  “Look,” he said. “I fucked that up and I know it. I mean, I live with it every day. But…” he stopped and again, because I was weak and foolish I looked over at him. Watched him lick his lips and shake his head like he had some kind of internal war.

  “You know if you didn’t want to go to New Orleans with me, you could have just said. If I was just a summer thing, you could have just said.” The words slipped out of my mouth.

  “Is that what you think?” he asked and took a step towards me. I put my hand up, not backing down but hell if I was gonna let this man crowd me. “You think I left because I didn’t want you?”

  “Tyler,” I laughed. “What else was I supposed to think? You didn’t want a future with me so instead of being a man and telling me to my face, you walked.”

  “No. Never.”

  “Stop. Stop this bullshit right now. I’m serious, Tyler, you don’t get to rewrite the past.”

  Miguel came stomping out the door and I spun away from Tyler, sucking down huge gulps of air. My stomach was in knots. “Let’s go, Miguel,” I said, aware that he was watching to two of us carefully. The air around us seemed to smoke. Miguel walked off to the car, waving over his shoulder at Tyler as he went. I didn’t wave.

  I just barely resisted giving the man the finger.

  “Jules,” he said and there was something in his voice. Some deep pain that I wanted to reject but I couldn’t. it spoke to the deep pain that lived in me. I stopped and turned.

  “I’m not…” he shook his head. “I’m not saying I’m not responsible. I own it. But I thought your Dad would have said something to you.”

  “What?”

  “Just…talk to your dad.”

  * * *

  TYLER

  * * *

  “This is pointless,” I sighed, squirting a mountain of soap into my hands at the kitchen sink. There was a reason why there were so few basements in Louisiana—everything got wet and never ever dried out. Half the boxes down there were black with mold, the other half were practically disintegrating. Truth was, I spent most of the time I was supposed to be searching for gems just cleaning the place out.

  But it was Thursday night, and after three days of searching for the gems, I was getting tired of pretending to care.

  I heard my dad clomping up the stairs.

  “The gems aren’t down there, Dad,” I said before he could start complaining that I was giving up.

  “I think you’re right,” Richard said as he stepped up from the basement stairs into the hallway outside the kitchen. Spiderwebs dusted his hair. “But we haven’t checked the attic. Or Margot’s room—”

  “You’re not going in Margot’s room,” I insisted, the very idea giving me the creeps. I could only humor my father so far.

  Richard rolled his eyes and pulled open the fridge. “What we need is to recruit that Miguel kid—”

  “Not an option.”

  “Come on. He’d be better put to use inside the house.”

  I leaned over the door of the fridge, making eye contact with my dad. “Stay away from him, Dad.”

  “Oh, I’m a bad influence? And you’re what… Mother Teresa? What would be worse, teaching the kid poker or having him look for the gems?”

  I laughed. “They’re about equal,” I said. “Juliette would kill me either way.”

  Richard stood up in the open V of the fridge door. “This Juliette…who the hell is she?”

  I reached around the old man and grabbed a beer. “She’s the police chief—I think that’s enough reason not to get her angry.”

  “Cut the bullshit,” Richard said, shutting the door and leaning up against the far counter with a beer of his own. A sly grin crawled across his face. “Who is she to you? I watch every day when she comes and picks up that kid, and you don’t act like she’s no one. She gets out of that car and you look like the only woman left in the world just stepped onto the grass. So, son, who is she to you?”
/>
  I twisted the cap off the beer before taking a long slug of it, trying to swallow down the strange urge to tell Richard. To confide in someone, anyone, my father, for crying out loud—the pain I felt every damn day when Juliette showed up to pick up Miguel.

  How when I looked at her, the weight of the mistakes I’d made nearly crushed me. And worse, infinitely painfully worse, was the way possibilities hung in the air around her like fireflies in tall grass.

  “We…ah…we had a thing. A long time ago.”

  “Ah,” Dad said, as if he was a daytime talk show host. “A thing?”

  “It was nothing.”

  “She what sent you to Las Vegas?”

  I felt that stab of memory, the pain no less intense ten years down the road. I’d loved her and I’d left her and it had been like tearing apart my body.

  “In a way,” I said. “But nothing’s there anymore.”

  “Oh!” Richard said, laughing long and hard. “Oh, son, that’s a good one. Try selling it to some other sucker.”

  “Didn’t you ever want something normal, Dad?” I asked, knowing it would get me nowhere. “A home?”

  “Home?” Richard said. “I tried that,” he said, and shuddered dramatically.

  “Aren’t you ever tired of being alone?”

  “I’m not alone,” Richard said, his grin wide and white and perfect, a man with no cares in the world. “I am never, ever alone, I’ve got friends—”

  “Friends who implicate you in credit-card fraud,” I said. “Are they really your friends? Can you count on them? Do they know you?”

  “No,” Richard said, the answer apparently needed no thought, no contemplation. “I have you for that. Just like you have me. We know each other because we’re the same. You know, maybe we should go back to Vegas. I knew having that boy around was going to cause trouble.”

  I shook my head. “This has nothing to do with Miguel. Trust me.”