Seventeen Against the Dealer

by Cynthia Voigt

  “A percentage of what?”

  “What I win. If I win.”

  Dicey couldn’t help it. He made her laugh. “No,” she said, laughing.

  “You ever gamble?” Cisco asked.

  “I can’t afford to lose.”

  “But that’s the time when you should,” Cisco told her.

  CHAPTER 12

  It took Dicey most of the day to move the rowboats around. Before she got down to sanding, she wrote out the bill for Claude, put in the receipts for the cost of replacing the broken glass and a reminder to deduct the next month’s rent from his check, addressed it, and walked into town to mail it. If it took four days to get down to Florida, and four days to get back, then she’d have the money by the end of next week.

  Dicey had expected to feel the difference when she was hauling boats alone, but she hadn’t expected to hear the silence in the shop so loudly. It was pretty funny, she thought, with the only sound the rasp of sandpaper on painted plywood, the way she had had to get used to the constant talk and now she was having to get used to the constant quiet. She hadn’t realized how quickly she’d adjusted to having someone else around, occupying her attention, while she got tedious work done. She wondered if Cisco would be back, and she thought he might. But she figured, probably he wouldn’t, and especially not if he won. She was beginning to know Cisco.

  When hunger cut too sharp, she made herself a mug of cocoa. With the edge of hunger blunted, she could ask herself to do another hour’s work, or more. Dicey leaned against the stack of lumber, drinking, looking around her shop, noticing that her supply of firewood was getting low again. Sunday or Monday she’d have to replenish it.

  Night lay black outside the high windows. Night at the windows looked as flat and black as if the glass had been painted to keep all light out. There might be stars and moon out there, bright in the dark winter-clear air, but she couldn’t have seen them because of the way the interior light reflected off the glass. She thought about Jeff. She hadn’t talked to him, or written to him, or heard from him either, for a while. How long, she wasn’t sure of. She hadn’t realized how long it had been, however long it had been. Too long. She’d never totaled up how many phone calls she hadn’t returned, but if she did she’d probably feel bad.

  She went to the phone and dialed his number. She hadn’t meant to let so much time go by. The phone rang and rang. Finally, it was answered; but it wasn’t Jeff’s voice asking hello. “Roger?” Dicey asked. “It’s Dicey. Is Jeff around?”

  “No.” Roger sounded surprised. “He’s gone.”

  “When’ll he be back?”

  Another hesitation. “He’s gone for the weekend.”

  “Home?” she hoped. She wouldn’t mind seeing Jeff.

  “No, skiing. He’s in Pennsylvania—it’s a bunch of people, the midwinter weekend break.”

  “Oh.” Dicey hadn’t known it was already time for the long weekend.

  “He’ll be back Tuesday night.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “Any message?” Roger asked.

  “No,” Dicey said. “Just—tell him I called. Thanks, Roger.”

  She didn’t know why it should surprise her that Jeff had gone skiing. She knew he liked to ski. She knew she didn’t expect him to hang around his room all the time, on the off chance that she might return his telephone calls. Thinking about it, she didn’t much like the way she’d been ignoring Jeff. Especially since she knew perfectly well how she felt about him, she didn’t like the way she hadn’t taken any trouble over him. With Jeff, you had to be careful not to take advantage; he didn’t ask for much, he didn’t make demands, he made it easy to neglect him.

  Dicey’s stomach felt overfull, with bad instant cocoa and bad feelings. Before she went to bed, she would write Jeff a long letter, telling him everything about the past weeks—about Cisco mostly, because Jeff liked odd characters, and about the work she’d been doing. When you could make someone unhappy, that was the person you should be most careful of.

  She got back to work, making herself do it. Anyway, she told the swollen, disappointed feeling of her stomach, she knew how to make herself do things she didn’t like, do the work. Sometimes, she didn’t like herself any too well, but she always liked the way she could count on herself to get down to work. She heard the sound of a car engine outside. Before she could hope it was Jeff, she knew that it was their pickup.

  Maybeth and Sammy came in, each carrying an armload of firewood. “Where do you want this?” Sammy asked her. “We thought you probably needed wood, so we loaded up. Beside the stove?”

  Dicey looked at them, then back to the work. “Under the worktable. Thanks, Sammy. Thanks, Maybeth. You were right, I do.”

  “We finished dinner, and the kitchen, and neither of us had anything going on tonight,” Sammy said.

  The two of them worked quietly, going in and out. There was the sound of sandpaper, and the sound of footsteps, and the sound of chunks of wood being dropped down onto the floor, then stacked neatly. There was no sound of anyone talking, until Dicey stopped her work and turned around to look at the two of them, parading in and out, arms loaded, arms empty. The two of them, in heavy sweaters, weren’t looking at much of anything, as if they were looking inward, not outward. The two of them were coming in and going out of the shop as if they weren’t where they were. Usually, when the two of them—especially Sammy, but Maybeth, too, in a different way—were in a room, you felt the air in the room change. The air in the shop wasn’t changing.

  Dicey straightened up, Maybeth, arms piled high with firewood, followed Sammy into the shop. She waited until his logs were stacked before dumping hers onto the floor and crouching down, to add them to the growing pile.

  “Hey,” Dicey said. “What’s wrong?”

  “We came to tell you,” Maybeth said.

  “Let us finish this first, it’s only a couple of more loads,” Sammy interrupted. “Then I’ll make us some cocoa or something. You go ahead, Dicey, you don’t have to stop work.”

  “Okay,” Dicey said, worried a little. “Gram knows you’re here, doesn’t she?”

  “Sure,” Sammy said. “We told her we were bringing over some wood.”

  “So she wouldn’t worry about if we were bothering you,” Maybeth explained.

  “Are these those boats of Claude’s?” Sammy asked. Dicey had the rowboats spread around the floor of the shop. She had done the insides, the hardest part of the job, first, then flipped them over, to sand the outsides. She nodded.

  Sammy inspected the boat at his feet. “Piece of shit,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Dicey agreed. Maybeth got busy making the hot chocolate. Dicey didn’t much want another serving of the mix, but she thought she’d better let them play the scene the way they’d written it.

  Sammy wandered around the shop, picking up tools, running his hands over the sides of the dinghies, studying the stacked larch. “Are you going to be able to build this one?” he asked.

  Dicey nodded her head.

  “How many of Claude’s do you have left to do?”

  “When I get through with these? Fourteen.”

  “How many in all?”

  “Thirty.”

  “So you’ll be more than halfway done? How long will it take?”

  “That depends,” Dicey said.

  Sammy didn’t ask any more questions. Dicey sanded away, and listened to Maybeth rinsing out the mug Dicey had used earlier. “This is nice wood,” Sammy said. “Good grain, rift sawn.”

  “Yeah.” Dicey straightened up. That was it, all the rowboats were sanded, that job was done. All she had to do was wipe them down with a damp cloth, to pick up sawdust, and tomorrow she could start painting. She went over to stand by Sammy, and put her fingertips on the pale wood.

  “It must have cost you a lot,” he said.

  “Ken gave me a good price. How about helping me damp-wipe the boats?”

  “Sure thing.” Sammy looked down at her, but he was looking
at himself more than at her. Dicey, looking up at her little brother, the fatigue spreading across her back, decided that while they sat down to drink she’d better find out what was troubling him. For now, however, she just said, “Thanks.”

  They sat on the boats. Maybeth and Dicey shared a mug, because there were only two. Sammy sat across from them. He pulled a letter out of his back pocket, and passed it to Dicey. It was from Yale.

  She looked at the front. “It’s not addressed to me.”

  “Gram thought you might be interested. It’s James’s grades.”

  “Are they good?” she asked. She already knew what the answer would be. Looking at James’s report cards got pretty boring. She was proud of her brother, and she thought he was going to be able to do just about anything he tried for, but she didn’t see any sense in looking at yet another terrific report card. Especially since James wasn’t there. You had to be more careful of people if they were right there, watching your reactions.

  “The usual,” Sammy said. “Take a look.”

  “Later. I can’t even make sense out of the address at this point.” She passed the envelope back to Sammy. “I’m so tired, I’m not even thinking straight.”

  “We know,” Maybeth said. Looking at her sister, Dicey thought she probably did know. How or why Maybeth should be able to know, Dicey didn’t have any idea. It was as if Maybeth could see from inside other people, the way she sang from inside a song.

  “Let’s close up here and go home,” Dicey said. “Will you give me a ride?”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Sammy said. “It’s cold, and dark and—”

  “We wanted to give you a ride home,” Maybeth said.

  They sat three abreast in the cab of the truck. Dicey leaned her head against the window and closed her eyes. Her mind drifted, planning out the work of the weeks to come, one way if Cisco were there and the other without him. “Hey, Sammy, thanks for helping.” Beside him, she felt his shrug. “You, too, Maybeth.”

  The figures in Dicey’s checkbook appeared before her mind’s eye, the present balance—$615.77 wasn’t an awful lot, but it was enough to be going on with. She could always go back to work at McDonald’s if she had to. If she had to, she could make herself do that.

  Things used to be so much simpler. Clearer, things were clearer when she was younger and didn’t know as much as she did now, about the way things happened. Easier, too; she remembered life being easier. Right now she was as tired as if she had walked all day—like that summer seven years ago—or was it eight? She didn’t have the energy to fit the right number to the memory—when she had walked all day, with the little kids to take care of, too. Remembering it, comparing, she thought it was easier then. Or at least it was clearer, simpler. Maybe troubles you remembered, or bad times you’d gotten through, always looked easier than the trouble you were living in right then. She wouldn’t be surprised, although she didn’t see what good figuring that out would do, even if it was true.

  Dicey sat up, opened her eyes, turned her head to look at her brother and, beyond him, Maybeth’s profile. “Have you two gotten your exams back? How did they go?”

  “Everything was fine,” Sammy said. “No surprises.”

  “My lowest grade was a forty-nine,” Maybeth reported. “Last year it was a thirty-seven on the midyear exams. And, I passed the biology exam—”

  “Good,” Dicey started to say, but Maybeth kept on talking.

  “—and the English exam, too. I’ve never passed two exams before.”

  “Good for you, Maybeth,” Dicey said, and meant it. She didn’t know how Maybeth kept it up. This was her third year in high school; Maybeth was a junior. Twice a year, January and June, Maybeth studied for exams that, twice a year, she mostly failed. She never gave up on studying. She never flunked a whole course, because she worked as hard for every day as she did for exams. But twice a year, June and January, Maybeth got told she wasn’t as good as everybody else, and no matter how hard she worked, she wouldn’t be.

  If Dicey year after year got stuck onto the flypaper of money, and never did get to build boats because every year she had to work as hard as she could just to pay her share of the living expenses, to pay the rent on the shop, to buy supplies and tools, to pay the phone bill: That’s what it would be like. She could imagine how that would make her feel. Dicey wondered what kept Maybeth going.

  “There are only three more sets of exams you have to take,” Dicey said.

  “I know.” Maybeth’s voice had a smile in it. “I can do it three more times. Maybe I’ll graduate from high school.”

  “Is that something you want?” Dicey asked.

  “Yes,” Maybeth answered. “I might not be able to, because everything keeps getting harder, but if I could I’d like that.”

  “Why?” Dicey wondered.

  “It would make a good ending,” Maybeth explained.

  “Ending to what?” Sammy asked.

  “Ending to me being in school, because—when you do something, it’s better if there’s a good ending.” She explained what she meant: “Just because you work hard doesn’t mean you’ll get your good ending.”

  “If it’s possible,” Sammy said, in a voice that made Dicey wonder what was going on in his mind, in his life.

  “I’d like to graduate, and have everybody come to see me graduate.”

  “I’ll be there,” Sammy promised. “You, too, won’t you, Dicey? We’ll be there with bells on and banners flying and—you know, Maybeth, I used to think you shouldn’t have to go to school—”

  “But I want to. How else would I learn something? Just because you’re not good at something doesn’t mean you don’t get to do it, does it?”

  “What gets me,” Sammy said, “is when you are good at something, and still don’t get to do it.”

  Dicey could sympathize with that. She didn’t know how good she was at building boats, and she kept trying to find out, but things kept getting in her way, things like time and money. Not people—the people she knew knew better than to get in her way.

  It wasn’t until she lay in bed that night, falling into sleep, that a question drifted across her mind. She was too tired to catch it. It was like when you see something out of the corner of your eye, some movement in the shadows at the far boundary of vision—that’s what the question was like. By the time she had noticed it, and said to herself that there was something there she might want to see clearly, and found the right muscles to turn her mental eyes to catch it, and seen what it was—she was asleep.

  CHAPTER 13

  The alarm cut through the darkness like a spotlight suddenly turned on. Dicey was up and dressed, washed and fed, and out the door, with the day’s work outlined in her head, before anyone else stirred in the silent house. She rode her bike through filmy gray predawn light. Air sounds were all she could hear—the whirring of air through the tires of the bike, the rush of air by her ears.

  She had figured out a way to work on all four of the rowboats at the same time. Maybe. If she moved the low wooden rack at the center of the floor over to the worktable—and she wasn’t using the worktable, so it didn’t matter whether the space around it was clear—if she spread out plastic sheeting to protect the cement—she should have room for all four of the rowboats on the floor of the shop. If she had all four spread out, she would waste less time waiting for a coat of paint to dry. If she painted the ones nearest the stove first, then the heat would make them dry faster. A good morning’s work, that was what she needed.

  A good morning’s work was what she put in, band after band of paint streaking off her brush. When she finally straightened up—it was early afternoon, to judge by the messages her stomach was sending her—the insides of all four boats had been painted with their first coats. The two by the stove were still slightly tacky to her fingertips, and she decided she’d go home, have lunch, and then maybe bring the truck over after a couple of hours, so she could drive home when she was finished for the day. Maybe she’d
bring Maybeth, too, to help her flip the boats; that would make more sense, having Maybeth to help turn them over and shift them around.

  In the meantime she could write Jeff, a long letter, the kind of long letter that felt as if she was talking to him. Since she couldn’t actually talk to him she’d write—which cost a lot less, anyway. She hadn’t talked to Jeff since—it was only two weeks, she figured it out, but it felt much longer.

  Gram was in the kitchen when Dicey got home, Gram sitting down for once, with a teapot, a mug, a jar of honey and a lemon, and a thick book. Dicey was too hungry even to toast the bread for her peanut butter sandwich. “What’re you reading?”

  “Dickens. What are you doing home?”

  “A coat of paint is drying. It’ll take another couple of hours. Is Maybeth here?”

  “She went shopping, up to Salisbury, a gaggle of them—somebody’s having a sale and somebody else has some money. You know how girls are.”

  Gram knew perfectly well Dicey didn’t know how girls were, and, furthermore, Gram knew Dicey knew she knew that. “How about you?” Dicey asked. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not worse,” Gram said, “and that’s something these days. I think I’ve broken the back of this cough.” Gram’s cheeks were too pink, and her eyes were too bright; her voice sounded rough-edged, too deep; her voice sounded chesty. Gram said she was getting better, but Dicey wasn’t sure about that. She didn’t feel like quarreling with Gram, however, so she asked instead, “What time does Sammy get off work?”

  “I expect him momently,” Gram told her, and then smiled. Gram’s smiles moved so fast across her face, if you weren’t watching you’d miss them entirely. “Do you know how long I’ve wanted to be able to use that word—momently—in a normal conversation?”

  Dicey smiled back. “No.”

  “That’s a relief. I sometimes think—sometimes I’m afraid you can read my mind. And there are a lot of things going on up there that are none of your business, girl, or that I’d just as soon not trouble you with. So I’m glad to know you can’t read my mind. Although,” Gram continued, “sometimes I think I can read yours.”