After a moment, I see him. He’s already made it onto the main drag, which is six lanes of traffic that never stop. He’s walking toward the highway on-ramp, hauling his suitcase behind him. It’s enough to break your heart.
“David!” I yell. But he’s already too far away to hear me. How did he move so fast?
I run downstairs and jump into my car. Of course, there’s a guy in a pickup truck in front of me taking his sweet time at the exit to my parking lot, and I hit the longest red light in the history of the world as I wait to make my turn. Finally I can go. I gun the engine and race toward the highway, but he’s already gone.
I pull over at the top of the on-ramp. I get out of my car and look up and down the highway. I can see quite far from this little rise. He’s nowhere in sight. Of course not. He’s already been picked up. Some serial killer or child molester has him.
I sit on the hood of my car and proceed to pull my hair out by the roots.
I’ve failed my best friend. And I’ve failed her son. I have no words for the way I feel right now. But if you imagined swallowing a hand grenade, that would probably come close.
“David!” I shriek. I’m not much of a shrieker, but it seems to come naturally now. “David, where are you?”
I catch movement out of the corner of my eye. About fifty feet away, there’s a bus stop, not much more than a sign and a Plexiglas wind shelter. David is so small that he can actually hide behind a signpost. He sticks his head around it.
“What?” he says.
“There you are,” I say. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Away,” he says. “I don’t want to bother you anymore.”
I head over to the bus stop and sit down on the bench inside the shelter. I’m moving slow. I don’t want to spook him, for fear he’ll run out into the traffic or something. I pat the bench. After a moment he sits next to me.
“You’re not bothering me,” I say. “I’m so relieved to see you I could…I don’t know what.”
“You hate kids.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I can tell. You hate me. I can’t help that I was born or that my mom is dead. I don’t know where to go. I want to go back to that lawyer’s place. At least I didn’t ruin his job. I won’t be in the way there. I can stay out of trouble. They don’t mind me there.”
“I don’t mind you either,” I say.
“I lost you eight hundred dollars.”
I look at him, all four feet of him, his thin blond hair blown around his ears by the light breeze kicked up by the traffic.
“So what?” I say. “What’s eight hundred dollars? Money comes and goes, kid. That’s just the way it is. It’s not even that important.”
My dad said that to me about ten thousand times. It occurs to me that maybe he really didn’t have a clue what the hell he was talking about, since more often than not money and he were like oil and water. But it sounds pretty good right now.
And I actually mean it. If all it cost me was eight hundred bucks to get my dad back, or Josie back, or to wipe the hurt look off David’s face right now, wouldn’t I pay it a hundred times over? Money is only the means to an end. It’s not the end itself.
“You’re right that I didn’t plan on having kids,” I say. “You did kinda get dropped on me by surprise.”
“I knew it.” He looks worse than ever.
“But you know what? I’m glad you did.”
“You are? Why?”
“Because,” I say, “you’re bringing out something in me I didn’t know was there. And as annoying as that is, I think it’s good for me.”
He looks at me wide-eyed until he realizes I’m joking about being annoyed.
“You mean it?” he says.
“Yeah. And I’ll tell you another thing,” I say. “From now on until your dad comes, no more poker. For you or for me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. In fact, no more computer, period. It’ll just be you and me doing…whatever it is people used to do before computers. Quilting or chopping wood or whatever.”
“How will you make money?”
I shrug. “I have enough money for now,” I say, which is something I’ve never said in my life.
“What did people use to do before there were computers?” he asks.
“I have no idea,” I say. I think back to my childhood. It’s just a blur of poker games, all-night restaurants and hotel rooms, with the odd stint at my mom’s house thrown in. The question is, what did normal people do before computers? And the problem is, I really don’t know. I’ve never lived a normal life. Not for one minute. And I’m not about to start now.
“I think,” I say, “that they used to go places.”
“Really? Like where?”
“Like probably the zoo,” I say. “Yes, that’s it. In the old days, people used to go to the zoo at least once a week.”
“Is that true?”
“Sure it is. Everyone was on a first-name basis with the animals. The gorillas knew everyone in town.”
“That’s ridiculous,” David says, but he’s smiling.
“And after the zoo, they went camping,” I say. “And then they went bowling. And then they went to something called a park. That’s, like, a big open area with this weird green stuff called grass and these strange tall leafy things called trees.”
“I know what grass and trees are,” David says. He’s giggling now.
“Really? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them before,” I say. “Would you like to go see if we could locate some right now?”
“I’d rather go meet the gorillas,” David says. He hops up and grabs his suitcase.
“Then let’s go,” I say, and we head back to my car, his hand in mine.
NINE
If you’ve ever kicked a bad habit, you might have some idea of how hard it is for me to give up my computer for two weeks. I’ve never done drugs, so I can’t really say what that’s like. I’ve tried smoking, but it didn’t agree with me. I inherited my father’s distaste for alcohol. So I don’t know how hard it is to kick those things.
But if it’s anything like giving up my computer, it’s not something I ever want to go through.
And if there’s such a thing as rehab for computer addicts, I would check myself in. It’s that bad.
It’s even worse, in fact, because I feel like I have to hide how I’m feeling from David. I want him to think everything’s fine. At the zoo, at the park, at the movies, at the mall—everywhere we go, all I can think about is sitting down and playing poker as soon as I get home. And every time I think about it, I remember that I promised David I won’t play until his dad comes for him.
I have no intention of going back on my word. As a child I had enough promises to me broken to know how much it hurts. I am not going to do that to him.
But I can’t believe how many times a day I think about it.
I won’t lie. It’s torture. It’s not like I played twenty-four/seven. It’s knowing I can’t play that’s the hard part.
I know there’s such a thing as a gambling addict. But I didn’t think I was one. I was never the kind of person who left things up to chance, the way an addict does. I don’t play any games where I’m not in total control.
Fish think poker is a game of luck, but luck has nothing to do with it. Sure, you can catch a bad break once in a while. That can happen to you doing anything in life. You can get creamed by a truck on the highway. You can have a heart attack sitting at your desk. A piano can fall on your head while you’re w
alking down the street. Poker is not like slot machines, where people just sit there for hour after hour, pumping money into those stupid one-armed bandits. Poker demands real skill. You need psychology. You need courage. You need patience. You need determination.
Okay, fine, maybe I was attached to the rush of winning. But is that a bad thing? It’s a lot better than being addicted to losing, after all.
Yet a little voice in my head keeps saying, You’re your father’s daughter.
And this makes me very unhappy. I loved my dad.
But I don’t want to be like him.
My father let poker destroy his entire life. It ruined his marriage. It ruined his career. He was a teacher before he started playing full-time, and while that never would have made him rich, he would have found a lot there to appreciate. But I guess a teacher’s life was too quiet for him.
And, of course, poker was the reason he died so young.
Without the game to distract me, I find that all the thoughts I believed were buried like so much dog crap aren’t buried at all. They come popping to the surface right away. And chief among them is my dad’s murder.
It happened about six years ago. I wasn’t there. Maybe if I had been, it wouldn’t have gone down the way it did.
There was one of those epic games, a three-day marathon. Only this one was different, because there was a new guy there who nobody knew. Normally, they were pretty careful about who they played with. But they let this guy in because he had a fat wad of cash, and he was so drugged up they figured he wouldn’t even notice if he was losing. He kept going into the bathroom and snorting meth. Nobody tried to stop him. They figured if he wanted to ruin his life, that was his business.
They weren’t trying to cheat him. I refuse to believe that. My dad wasn’t exactly father of the year, but he wasn’t a cheat.
Yet that’s exactly what this drugged-up meth head thought he was. And when my dad denied it, the meth head pulled out a knife and stabbed my father in the chest sixteen times.
That’s a number I’ll remember for the rest of my life. Sixteen. The coroner made a point of mentioning that in his report. The newspapers even picked up on it.
The killer ran out of the apartment and down the street, where the cops caught up with him. He was covered in blood and frothing at the mouth. He wouldn’t drop the knife. So they shot him as he howled at the moon like a coyote.
I found out later that he was divorced and had two little kids. He had struggled with drugs all his life and had recently gone through rehab, but he had come into some money somehow and decided to go on a bender.
Money comes and goes, see.
And, unfortunately, so do people.
That’s the story I never tell—the story of how I lost my dad, and how two little kids I never met lost their dad too.
The next day is even harder, because it’s my first full day without poker. But I stick to it. The computer stays off. I even put a sheet over the thing so I won’t have to look at it.
And I have David to keep me occupied. Let me tell you, in case you’ve forgotten, being ten years old is a pretty full-on experience. Which means that hanging out with a ten-year-old day in, day out for two weeks is pretty full on too.
We do all the things we said we were going to do and more. And to be honest, I don’t know when I’ve ever had so much fun. I start to remember what the world looks like to a kid that age. Of course, boys see the world differently than girls do. But not that differently. He’s afraid of a lot of the same things I used to be afraid of—bigger kids, authority figures, large dogs. He’s interested in things I never would have noticed—rainbows in puddles, distant airplanes, cars. He’s smart as a whip and knows more than I do about a lot of things. He has a quirky sense of humor that keeps me laughing.
And when we get tired of each other, we have quiet time. I go into my room, and he hangs out on the couch. He can read or watch TV. I allow myself to check my email on my phone, but that’s it. No computer. I read a book for the first time in about ten years. I take naps. Sometimes I just lie there and stare up at the ceiling. I think about the upcoming tournament, and I wonder how I’m going to qualify if I can’t play.
I still have enough time, even with my self-imposed vacation. I figure this time with David will give me a much-needed rest. In fact, I begin to wonder if taking a break is maybe the best thing for my game. It will clear my head. Shift my perspective.
And the fact is, I’m really coming to love that little guy. He fills my days. He’s the first person I think about, not myself. I’ve never allowed myself to feel that way about anyone before. I’ve resisted it. But now I can give in, because he’s safe. He’s not going to break my heart the way a full-grown man will, after all.
So the time goes fast. Two weeks passes in the blink of an eye.
Then I get a call from Charlie, saying that he’s arriving even sooner than expected. He can’t wait to see his son any longer. A month is too long, he explains. They need to be together. I certainly understand that. If David was my son, I would never want to be apart from him. I’m starting to feel that way about him anyway.
David is so excited to see his father again that he can speak of nothing else. How smart he is. How hard he works. I realize the boy idolizes his father. So that’s something else he and I have in common. I idolized my dad too.
A couple of days later, early in the morning, I drive us to the airport to meet David’s dad. They cry when they see each other. They hang on to each other for a long time. I feel like I’m not even there. I fade into the background and let them have their time. I’ve done what Josie asked me to do. My job is finished.
Charlie is a tall handsome guy with a thick head of curly hair and a charming accent. Looking at him, I can see that David is probably going to sprout when he’s a teenager, and he’s going to be a real lady-killer too. To be honest, Charlie makes my knees a little weak. But I can’t think about him like that. He’s Josie’s ex, and besides, he’s married.
Not that either of those things would have stopped Josie.
“I don’t know how to thank you for what you’ve done,” Charlie says to me.
“You don’t have to thank me. It was great having him.”
“Listen, I’m going to take David to the hotel. We have a lot to talk about.”
“Let me drive you,” I say.
Charlie protests, but politely, so I overrule him. On the way to the hotel the two of them chatter away at each other like birds. They even sit in the backseat together. It’s like they’ve forgotten I’m there. We pull up and get out to unload their suitcases.
“Will you meet us at the hotel restaurant for dinner tonight? Around six?” Charlie asks me.
“Are you sure? I don’t want to interfere in your time together,” I say.
“Nonsense. You’ve been an absolute gem. I want to thank you somehow for taking care of my son for me.”
“In that case, I’ll see you then.”
“Bye, Kat,” says David. He does something I’ve been hoping he’ll do all week. He runs up to me and gives me a big hug. It’s the best feeling in the world. And it’s not easy letting him go.
I watch Charlie and David walk up the steps to the lobby. I wonder if I should really go to dinner. Maybe I should just walk away from the whole situation right now. If this tugging on my heartstrings is any indication of how hard it’s going to be to say goodbye, then it’s time to rip this bandage off fast.
TEN
Back at my apartment, the first thing I do is rip the sheet off my battle station and fire it up. I’ve got some serious lost time to make up for.
In no time, I’m back to m
y old ways. Four games going. Facebook, chat window, YouTube. Keeping my losses down, taking a big pot when I see my chance. Everything going just as planned.
Only it doesn’t feel so great anymore. It just feels empty and boring. Like…what am I contributing to the world? To my life? What am I really doing with myself?
Something’s missing. I can swear I feel David behind me, watching, waiting. Once I even turn around and look. The feeling is that strong.
Then I feel like a crazy person. Of course he’s not there. I only wish he was.
I wish I was doing anything but playing poker, and I wish we were together.
Oh well. I’ll readjust, I figure.
Eventually.
The qualifying game is tomorrow. Even after David’s little all-in disaster, I’ve got enough for the buy-in. The truth is, losing eight hundred bucks is not that big a deal. Not as big as it would have been for my dad anyway. I’m a lot smarter with my money than he ever was. When I get it, I don’t blow it on stupid things. I put half away and play with the other half.
Of course, I don’t have anyone else to spend it on. Like a kid.
I wonder if maybe my dad spent all that money for me. Like, maybe he thought he was giving me something to remember. I never looked at it that way before. I never had a reason to.
Oh well. I’m also not a gambling addict, the way my dad was. This is not a habit. It’s my job. Anyone who thinks poker is just gambling is welcome to sit across the table from me anytime. I’ll have all his money within half an hour.
And if I had a family, I wouldn’t abandon them. I would be there when I was needed.
Yeah right, I hear a voice say. The whole reason you don’t have a family is because you think poker is more important.
I know that voice. It’s Josie, of course.
“What are you talking about?” I say out loud.