The Short Game (American Gypsy Novella)

by J. L. Fynn

  “Years ago I was faced with a similar choice,” she said, almost as in answer to my unasked question. “Twice, in fact. And both times I decided that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave the only community I’d ever known, especially not in a strange country. But I was wrong. Love might not be all you need, but if you have that, you can figure everything else out later. If you really like this girl, hang onto her. The worst thing you could do is live a life filled with regrets.”

  “Is that what you’ve done? Lived a life filled with regrets?” What was she talking about? I’d always known Maggie carried a weight of sadness around with her. She wore it around her neck everyday like the little silver pendant I never saw her without. But I’d thought that was because of losing my da. Now I was starting to think there might be something more to it. Something even deeper.

  She stood up and collected our mugs, putting them both in the sink. I thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then she turned around and put a cool palm on my cheek. “The greatest thing about having children,” she said, “especially two sweet boys like you and Shay, is that no matter what I may have done wrong in the past, it’s redeemed because it brought me these two beautiful babies. Or men now, I guess.” She smiled, but there wasn’t much joy in it.

  She gazed down at me for a long moment. I wanted to squirm away from her touch like I’d done when I was small, but I didn’t. Maggie had never revealed this much of herself before, and I didn’t want to lose the moment.

  It dawned on me that I’d never thought of my mother as having much of an inner life. Not one with any complexity, anyway. Maggie was always so sure and strong. The idea of her having any regrets was a shock.

  Finally she dropped her hand and her whole demeanor changed. This time when she smiled the familiar all-knowing glint was back in her eyes. “So, you make sure to be the gentleman I raised you to be, and the kind of man your da would be proud of, and you’ll have nothing to worry about where that girl is concerned.” She kissed the top of my head.

  It took me a long moment to process the conversation we’d just had. Apparently there was a lot that I still had to learn about my mother, but there was one thing I did know. When Maggie gave you advice, you were an idiot not to take it.

  I pulled my phone out of my pocket. Hey Bruiser, I texted. When can I see you again?

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I DIDN’T HAVE to wait long before the phone pinged with Tracy’s reply, and we made plans to meet at her place in an hour.

  I walked into our tiny bathroom, which was basically just a shower with a toilet in it, and hosed myself off. I got out, shaved at the kitchen sink, and put on some cologne that I found in one of Shay’s drawers.

  I put the finishing touches on my hair, which mostly involved making sure it was mussed in a nonchalant, cute way rather than in a gross, just-finished-a-week-long-bender way, and headed toward the door.

  “Jimmy,” Maggie said as my hand grabbed for the handle.

  “Yes’m?” I turned to face her, smiling, but the look in her eyes made the grin fade. She looked…scared. I walked back over to the small table and sat down. “I thought you said I should make things work with Tracy?”

  “It’s not that.” She waved the notion away and moved to sit down across from me. “There are a lot of things I haven’t told you, and I’m afraid they’re beginning to close in on me. I’ve done everything I could to protect you and Shay, but now…” she trailed off, and looked out of our little window. “I’m worried I can’t keep you safe anymore.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, as usual. Going out on the road always held its dangers, but what did that have to do with her? Maggie never did anything but make tea and tell people what she thought of them.

  “Is this about Shay? Do you want me to go up there? To Pennsylvania? If you told me what was going on I could—”

  “I don’t,” Maggie said so quickly she almost choked on the words. What the hell was happening to her? She sucked in a deep breath through her nose. “You going up there would only complicate things more.”

  “Maggie, I don’t know what you want me to do.”

  She dropped her face into her palms. I wondered if she was crying, but she didn’t move or make a sound. After a long moment, she picked her head up and faced me again, her cheeks dry. “I think I’m just nervous because the Sheedy boys are back early and Pat said he didn’t want Emma seeing me anymore.”

  “The Sheedys are back early? All of them?” That wasn’t like them at all. The Sheedys liked to milk every last penny out of the season. Coming home, what, three weeks early? There had to be something big going on.

  “Well, not all of them,” Maggie said. “From what I heard Judd’s not back with them, but it makes me wonder….”

  “Wonder what?”

  She looked like she was struggling with whether to tell me something, but apparently silence won because her mouth stayed shut.

  “God damn it, Maggie!” I slammed my fist into the table, which creaked ominously. “Just tell me what the hell is going on!”

  Maggie’s eyes went wide and her mouth fell open. I’d yelled at a lot of people in my life, but never her. She wasn’t someone you could yell at, or would ever really want to, but I was tired of impossible to understand or interpret. Tired of her keeping me in the dark for months. Tired of her never really opening up to me about anything: my da, how he died, her bizarre relationship with Pop Sheedy. But more than anything, I was pissed she’d let Shay go up to Balanova to settle some sort of score without telling me a damn thing about it.

  Maggie put her head in her hands again, and this time I was sure she was crying. Her shoulders shook and pained gasping sounds rumbled from deep within her.

  “Just tell me what you know and maybe I could help.”

  “I, I can’t.” She went silent for such a long time I thought she was done speaking, but she wiped her face messily with her hand, smearing the tearstains that streaked down her cheeks. “If I tell you all of it, you’ll never forgive me. You’ll never forgive what I’ve done.”

  I should’ve apologized. Should’ve tried to comfort her. Should’ve told her I could forgive her anything, but I didn’t. I was too angry. “It’s sort of hard to forgive you, Maggie.” I said her name like it was a fly I’d found in my soup. “When I don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about. But you know what? I’ve spent my entire life looking out for Shay. He’s more than a brother to me. He’s my whole life. And if you’ve done something to put him in danger, then you’re right. I won’t forgive you.”

  In that moment I was so filled with rage, the feeling radiated out of every pore. I let it fill my eyes while I stared at her. The pain in her face would be burned into the backs of my eyelids from then on, but I didn’t care. Tears streamed down her face, and she didn’t try to hide them. She just looked at me. Looked at me like she’d never seen me before. Like she didn’t know who I was.

  I didn’t know who I was. And I didn’t know how I could’ve said such terrible things to her. But at that moment my heart was hard. I was worn out. Tired from all the stress of my brother being gone. Tired of the stress of keeping things from Tracy.

  I pushed myself up from the table and walked to the door. “I’ll see you later. Call me if you hear anything from Shay.”

  I stepped out of the trailer and pulled in a deep breath. The wind rustled in the trees, and birds squawked and called to one another, but all I could hear were Maggie’s wracked sobs. I sprinted to my truck and practically dove inside.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I DROVE OVER to Tracy’s wildly enough that I should’ve gone off the road a few times, but somehow I managed to make it the whole way uninjured. I just kept thinking about Maggie and Shay and the clan. I was so damn tired of everything. All the lies and all the secrets. Maggie wasn’t a bad mother. She was a wonderful mother, but when you were a Traveler, sometimes keeping the people you loved safe meant not telling them the truth, or at least not t
elling them the whole truth.

  But I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t want to live that way for one more day. One more second.

  I wanted to be with Tracy. Be normal. Go straight. Live like a buffer. If Tracy’d taught me anything it was that living like a buffer wasn’t nearly as bad or soul-crushing as Travelers had made it out to be. Sure it was a little boring, but boring in a good way. Boring in a not-having-to-be-worried-about-the-police-on-my-back way. Boring in a nights-in-sipping-beer-and-cuddling-with-my-girl way. If that was a boring country life, I’d take it.

  But if I were going to start over, I needed to do it right. I needed to tell Tracy the truth. About everything. I didn’t know how she’d react. Sure she was understanding about me being a Traveler, but that was a far cry from being okay with my past as a con.

  I considered not telling her. What was the point? If I was going straight anyway, what did my past matter?

  But it did. It mattered to me. Tracy’d been brave enough to open up about her screwed-up family. I wanted to be as honest as she’d been. She made me want to be a better man. A braver man.

  I had to come clean. About everything. Let the chips fall as they may and if she still cared for me after that, then I’d know being with her was the right move.

  I knocked on Tracy’s door a little too hard, and she opened it with a worried look on her face. “Is everything all right?” she asked, motioning me in. I sat down on the couch while she walked into the kitchen. She came back with two beers, but I shooed them away. Alcohol wasn’t what I needed.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, worried.

  I sucked in a long, calming breath. “We need to talk.”

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “No…yes. There are things you need to know about me. Things that I’m worried will make you hate me—”

  “Not this again.” She sighed. “I could never hate you, Jimmy.”

  I dropped my eyes to the floor. “Let me tell you what I have to say before you decide that.”

  “Jeez. You’re acting like you killed someone.” She laughed, but when I didn’t join in with her, she looked concerned again. “You didn’t, did you?”

  “No, no. I’ve never killed anyone. I would never kill anyone. But, still, there are a lot of things you don’t know about me. And I want to be honest with you. Completely.”

  “Okay.” She sat down on the chair across from me.

  “Well, you know how I told you I’m a Traveler?”

  “You’re not really a Traveler?”

  “No. I am. Will you let me get this out?”

  “Yeah, sorry,” she said.

  “No, I appreciate your questions,” I said, not wanting to hurt her feelings. “This is just really hard for me. So it might take a minute.”

  “No interruptions. I promise.”

  “Have you ever heard the rumors that gypsies are crooks?”

  “Yeah,” she said with less hesitation than I would’ve liked.

  “Well, we’re not. At least not all of us. There are a lot of Traveler clans that are mostly straight, and I can’t really tell you about the Roma because we don’t have much to do with them, but my clan...we’re not always on the up-and-up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know how the day I met you, my brother accidentally got an extra ten dollars in change?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That wasn’t exactly an accident.”

  “You stole from me?” she said, for the first time seeming upset.

  “Not stole, exactly.”

  She gave me a hard look.

  “Okay, well, yeah, it was stealing, but I didn’t take anything out of the register. We used a quick-change scam to get you to give us an extra ten bucks.”

  “Jimmy! You realize I had to pay that money back to my boss.”

  The hurt in her expression made me feel like a monster. “I’m really sorry, Trace. I know what I did was wrong. That’s why I wanted to come clean, but I’ll leave right now if you want me to.”

  “No.” She stood up and started pacing the room. “No. Tell me the rest of it. I’m sure ten dollars doesn’t have you this worked up.”

  I let out another long breath. I didn’t want to go on. I felt like I couldn’t, but I knew I had to. If I didn’t get it all out now, I never would, and I needed to know that Tracy really cared about me. Not the whitewashed version that I’d given her up until now, but the real me. The one with a small, but not insignificant rap sheet. “Well, it’s not just silly quick-change scams. When we’re on the road, we do driveway paving, roofing. Except, we don’t always do the best job. We go door-to-door, tell people we have materials left over from a previous job, then tell them that we can give them a great deal. Or we’ll go to businesses and tell the people there that someone already okayed the work. Then we’ll do a half-assed job, but because we’re out of there the next day, it doesn’t matter. We just move on to the next town and do the same thing.”

  “So you don’t really know how to do roofs or pave driveways? I thought you were handy.”

  “I am,” I said distractedly. “I mean, I know how to do it. It’s just cheaper to cut corners. We make more money that way and for less work. But, I haven’t gotten to the worst part yet.”

  “There’s something worse?”

  “You know how I’ve told you about my brother Shay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, he’s not really away at college. Or, he is, but he’s not enrolled at Balanova. He’s gone up there for a con. A long con. A really long con. One that Pop Sheedy’s had in the works for twenty years now.”

  “Pop Sheedy?”

  “Our clan leader.”

  She let that sink in for a moment. “What sort of con’s he up there for?”

  “I’m not sure. I know it has something to do with my da and how he was killed when I was little. Payback. But I don’t know more than that because my mam—Maggie—she won’t tell me what’s going on, and there’s no way Pop Sheedy will tell me even if I had the guts to ask. Shay might, but I don’t think he knows a whole lot more than I do at this point. I’m just worried he’s in danger. Actually, I’m pretty positive he’s in danger.”

  I pushed my hands through my hair. “I should go,” I said, getting to my feet.

  Tracy blinked, clearly surprised by this sudden announcement. “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know why I’m dragging you into this. You’re a nice girl. You’re going somewhere. You’ll be off to college soon. It’s bad enough for you to slum it with a high school dropout, but a con artist? I need to go.”

  I turned around and got a couple of steps before I felt her hand on my arm. She pulled, and I let her turn me back around although my neck stayed slack. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, but I could see her from the corner of my eye. She was so beautiful with her golden hair and shining blue eyes. She deserved more. Everything, really. And I was nothing. But, still, I didn’t fight her or try to pull away. I knew I didn’t deserve her, but that didn’t mean I didn’t need her.

  “Look, Jimmy, I’m not going to pretend I’m happy about all this, but I know that you’re not a bad person. There’s a reason you brought back the money to me a month ago, and it’s not just my pretty face.”

  “That was a lot of it,” I said sullenly, but I felt a grin tugging at the corner of my lips. Sometimes it felt like she could read my mind.

  “And there’s got to be a reason you decided to tell me all of this. You’re worried about your brother because you care about him. That doesn’t sound like an evil guy to me.”

  “I may not be evil, but I’m—”

  “Shush,” she said. “Now it’s time for you to let me talk. You are a good man, Jimmy Reilly. I don’t know how I know it, but I do. I can see it in everything you do. You said you know how to actually fix roofs and pave driveways, right?”

  “Yeah. I’m good with my hands.” I dared to look at her for the first time.

 
Her cheeks pinked just a little, but she ignored the suggestive undertones of the comment and went on. “Well, there are a lot of roofs and driveways in Baton Rouge, and I’m sure some of ‘em will need fixing while I’m up at LSU. There are plenty of jobs up there, even for a jack-leg handyman. Maybe you won’t make the money you do now, but you won’t have to be looking over your shoulder all the time, and you’ll be able to feel good about the work you’re doing.”

  I couldn’t believe it. After everything I’d told her, she still wanted to be with me. Was even thinking about how we could be together next year once she was in college. I wrapped my arms around her and lifted her chin so she was looking up at me. “You really are something special, Tracy Manning.”

  “Well, you’re really something special too, Jimmy Reilly.” She gave me a stern look. “And don’t you forget it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, leaning down to kiss her.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I LAY ON my back, staring up at Tracy’s ceiling. She was sound asleep with her head on my chest, but I was wide awake. It was still the dead of night, and not even the moon managed to break through the dense blackness outside the window next to Tracy’s bed. It wasn’t that sleeping with her was uncomfortable—far from it. I loved feeling her next to me and hearing the quiet snore she’d never admit to having. I just couldn’t stop thinking about Maggie. And everything I’d said to her.

  I loved my mam a lot. And I knew that she’d done everything in her power to be the best mother she could.

  I didn’t know what all these mistakes were that she was talking about, but she was wrong about one thing. There was nothing she could have possibly done that would ever make me hate her. I knew my mam’s heart, and it was good. Good right down to the core.

  And yet, I’d yelled at her like some spoiled brat. I wasn’t the only one anxious while Shay was away. Maggie had to be out of her mind with worry, and here I was only thinking about myself. Tomorrow morning I had to go home and apologize. Tell her that whatever she could tell me, I was happy to hear without judgment, but if she wasn’t ready to tell me everything yet, I understood.