The Gambler

by Molly O'Keefe

  “Hey—” Richard wiped his hands off on the apron “—that’s taking care of one another. You’ll remember I did the same thing for you for years after you found me in Vegas.”

  I was a kid! I wanted to yell. I was your kid! It’s part of a father’s job description.

  But the truth was, Richard often got the job description for father and sperm donor confused.

  I should just leave. Leave him here to find these nonexistent gems. My feet twitched with the urge to turn around and walk away, leave Richard behind like he’d done to me.

  If I could leave the best of my family behind, why the hell couldn’t I walk away from the worst of them?

  “I need you, son,” Richard said, his voice getting earnest, his eyes slightly damp. The old caring father routine—I may have been absent, but you were never absent from my thoughts. I fell for that story hook, line and sinker more times than I liked to admit.

  “You need me to help you look for gems,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “You could hire someone for that. Hell, we could get a cleaning crew in here and they’d—”

  There was something off on Dad’s face, something raw. Something not manufactured and it looked like worry.

  “What?” I asked, feeling my stomach fall into my shoes.

  “It’s not a big deal—”

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “I was in a…thing…back in Los Angeles.”

  “Oh, my God,” I breathed, turning away from my father, fisting my hands in my hair. “Oh. My. God.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Richard said. I heard him step forward and put up my hand. If the old man got closer there was a good chance I would knock him out. “I swear to you, son, I didn’t do anything. But the friend I was staying with was arrested for credit-card fraud. I didn’t know what he was doing, but because—”

  “But because you were staying with him, the police think you do.” I sighed and looked my father hard in the eye.

  “I was questioned and released. I swear, son,” he said. “I had nothing to do with it. Credit-card fraud is for lowlifes.”

  My laughter was a hard bark. “Good to know you have standards.”

  “I just need a change of scene, until things cool down. Just for a little while.”

  “What if I decide to leave?”

  “Then I’d wish you well,” he said, “but I better stay. Empty house and all.”

  Empty house full of gems.

  “It’s not your house.”

  “Not yours, either.”

  Son. Of. A. Bitch.

  There was no way I could leave now. It would be like walking away from a bomb with a lit fuse. There was simply no telling what kind of trouble Richard would get into unattended. And if I wasn’t here, Juliette would drive by, checking on The Manor. It was only a matter of time before she found Richard.

  “I need a drink,” I muttered.

  “What we need is a plan,” Richard said an hour later, pouring another finger of whiskey in the old crystal tumblers. I picked mine up, loving the paper-thin edge of the glass against my lips and the solid heft and weight in my hands. Made me want to bite it and hurl it against a wall.

  Sort of how I felt about my father.

  About Juliette. Lord, how was I going to be able to avoid her now? In a town this size? Impossible.

  “What we need is to stop drinking, start looking,” I said, drinking anyway.

  “I’ve been looking,” Richard said, stretching back in his chair, crossing his legs at the ankles.

  We sat on the back porch, the early afternoon sunlight a bright warm blanket across our legs, the whiskey a warm blanket in my stomach. Thoughts of Juliette like a sore tooth I just could not leave alone.

  More whiskey would fix that, I thought, taking a half inch from the glass. Which was why I was drinking instead of looking, because first things, after all, were first.

  Gotta get Juliette out of my head.

  “Yeah? Where have you been looking?”

  “I started in the basement,” Richard said, looking out over the maze and the greenhouse. “Boxes of paperwork. I tell you—” he smiled, shaking his head “—that little girl of mine is a packrat—”

  I stiffened. Don’t call her that, I wanted to yell. You don’t get to call her that.

  But I bit back the words.

  “Margot still raising orchids?” I asked, unable to look directly at my father without the help of much more booze.

  “I wouldn’t know, son. Margot and I never discussed hobbies.”

  I stood and stepped onto the lush green grass, a miracle in the end-of-summer heat, and crossed the yard, my fingers brushing the silvery green leaves of the trees. Soft. But not soft like Juliette.

  “Hey, why the sudden interest in finding the gems, Ty?” Dad followed me across the grass. He stumbled a little, but righted himself with grace. Dad never could hold his liquor, but he was about the most gracious drunk I had ever seen. Whiskey turned the old man into royalty. “This morning you could care less.”

  “We’ve got nothing else to do,” I said.

  “You don’t believe me about the gems, do you?”

  “I don’t believe one way or the other.” At this point I was babysitter/bomb squad, and if the baby wanted to look for gems—what did it hurt?

  “You aren’t excited about the money?” Dad asked.

  I shook my head. I had more money than I could spend in five years, and considering the way money rolled out of my hands, that was saying something.

  But with this last win, I’d finally taken my brother, Carter’s, advice and talked to a money guy. I got a nice little check every month from my investments.

  Carter, I thought, the whiskey making me fond rather than irritated at the thought of my brother. Leave it to the Golden Boy to find a way to run a con on nothing.

  I stepped into the greenhouse, which was warm and humid, like breathing underwater. Plants lined a table, and more hung from baskets. No blooms, just the young shoots, green arrows out of dark soil.

  Margot was starting over with her orchids and I had to wonder why. I took a sip and touched the soil in one of the baskets. Dry, but not very, considering Margot was on some cruise and Savannah was off falling in love in Paris.

  Someone was watering the plants, and it could only be Juliette. Always Juliette.

  I found the hose coiled in the corner and turned it on, finding the balance between a trickle and a flood, just like Margot taught me a million years ago.

  “Orchids are particular,” she’d said, filling the hanging pan under a pink flower. “Some want water from the bottom, some want it from the top. Some want lots, some barely any.”

  “Seems like a lot of work,” I’d said, pissed off at the world because I knew why I was here and that my mother was never coming back. I didn’t want to take care of the damn plants, I wanted to smash them. Break those little pink flowers into pieces.

  “That’s why I need your help,” she’d said, looking right at me, right down to that twitchy dark place. She knew I wanted to wreck her flowers. Wreck everything. And still she wanted my help.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said, scowling.

  “I’ll show you,” she said, putting the hose in my hand.

  “You think the gems are in here?” Richard asked, digging into one of the pots, crushing the green bud with his big, fat, clumsy fingers.

  “No, Dad,” I said, and flicked the hose at him as if Richard was a cat digging in a house plant.

  “Hey! Watch it!” Richard said, bouncing away, bumping into a worktable.

  “I don’t think the gems are here.” I splashed a little water in each of the pots, I didn’t know which was which. Which, if any, needed special care.

  I turned off the hose, flinging it back in its corner. The last sip of whiskey burned a familiar trail down my throat. An odd longing bobbed in my chest, an unvoiced wish for something I didn’t even understand.

  I miss this place. I
miss Margot and Savannah. I miss Juliette.

  I thought of who I’d been, that boy with those bright green dreams pushing out of the rotten soil my mother had planted me in.

  The thought, as soon as it was fully formed and poisonous, was plucked out. Destroyed.

  Wishing for something different was a waste. These were the cards I’d been dealt, and if I didn’t like them—too bad.

  I was Tyler O’Neill, born a con man, from a long line of con men and petty crooks. This was my life.

  And the best thing I could do for Juliette Tremblant was to keep myself and Dad far away from her.

  I tested the weight of the tumbler in my hand. Tossing it. Catching it. Fine crystal, it was so perfect. Better than a baseball.

  The tumbler rocketed through the air—a perfect arc, catching the light at its zenith, splashing rainbows across the courtyard—and then smashed against the stone wall, fracturing into a million glittering pieces.

  “Tyler?” Dad asked, his voice careful.

  “I’ll start in the upstairs bedrooms,” I said, and headed back to the house.

  6

  TYLER

  * * *

  “Somebody’s pounding on the door, son,” Richard said, from the other couch in the library. We’d passed out here after searching the room for gems. And emptying the contents of that whiskey bottle.

  “I hear them,” I said, pushing a pillow over my eyes to block out the morning sun.

  “You need to answer that.”

  “You answer it.”

  “What if it’s that cop?” Richard said. “You want to explain me?”

  No. No, I did not.

  I stood, got my bearings, and stumbled to the front door.

  “Someone better be dead,” I muttered, opening the door only to find the kid, staring up at me.

  “Miguel?” I asked, the name erupting from the fog in my brain. I carefully kept the door closed around me - no need for the kid to see Richard. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “You…okay?”

  Miguel nodded, pushing back the gray hood of his sweatshirt, revealing bruises and the burn that looked no better for having been twenty-four hours older.

  I stepped out onto the porch and shut the door firmly behind me. “What can I do for you, Miguel?”

  “I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Miguel said. “About your car.”

  “Bad idea stealing cars,” I said, because I figured some kind of anti-grand theft auto PSA was called for.

  “I guess so,” Miguel said, glancing over at the road, the big tree in front.

  I waited, but the kid didn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry to elaborate.

  “Well,” I said, clapping my hands together, hoping Miguel might startle like a bird, “glad we got that sorted out—”

  “I wouldn’t need to steal any cars if I had money,” Miguel said.

  My jaw dropped. “Excuse me?”

  “I saw you on TV last year winning all that money,” Miguel said. My head cleared real fast. Extortion. This kid was full of surprises.

  “I don’t want your money,” Miguel said. “I’m not here for that.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I want to learn how to do what you do,” Miguel said.

  “Play cards?” I laughed.

  Miguel nodded, not laughing at all. I laughed harder. The kid was serious?

  “That’s a good one, Miguel. Seriously. But—”

  “I already know how to play. I play online over at my friend George’s house and I win. A lot.”

  “That’s great, but I’m not teaching you how to play poker. Juliette would have a fit.”

  “She doesn’t have to know.”

  I reassessed the kid in front of me. His dark eyes, past the scabby blood and bruises, were focused, smart and…very, very old.

  A kid who’d never been a kid.

  The sound of a car pulling around the corner, spitting gravel, ripped my eyes from Miguel’s.

  The car was too far away to tell who it was, but suddenly the cherry top blazed once from just inside the windshield.

  Juliette. Holy hell.

  “Listen,” Miguel said. “Just let me come here after school, a few hours for a few weeks. That’s it.”

  “That’s it?” I laughed.

  Juliette’s car stopped in front of the house and she was out the door in a split second, marching toward us.

  “Morning, Juliette,” I said, waving as though it was all no big deal, when under my shirt I had a good cold sweat going.

  “We got a call saying some kid was snooping around here,” Juliette said.

  Dad! He must have been peeking through the window, but what was he thinking, calling the cops?

  “Sorry to call,” I said, falling in step with the lie because I had no choice. “I saw someone snooping around, I got a little nervous and—”

  “You!” she said, sticking her finger in Miguel’s face, not even listening to my crappy cover-up. “You should be at school.”

  “I show up like this and Ms. Jenkins has to call the social workers,” he said, and she took a deep breath, as if reassessing, and I got the sense that Juliette was flying blind.

  “George is bringing me my homework,” Miguel said in the vacuum. “I told Ms. Jenkins I was sick. Don’t worry, Chief, I’ve got it covered.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “He came to apologize,” I said. “About the car. Very adult of him, if you ask me.”

  Juliette watched me for a long time, her eyes unreadable. And I had the worst, the worst urge to reach over, touch her shoulder and tell her everything would be fine.

  But I had the old man to hide, some stolen gems to find, a delinquent to get rid of and a whole lot of past experience that told me reaching out for Juliette only hurt in the end.

  “Fine,” she finally said, holding out her arm as if to steer Miguel out toward her car. “You apologized. If you’re not going to be at school, you can come down to the station. Get to work cleaning cars.”

  Miguel stepped away but glanced back at me. I tried hard not to see the desperation in Miguel’s old-man eyes, but then remembered that Miguel had a little sister.

  A little sister he was trying to protect.

  All too clearly, I recalled being sixteen and feeling sixty, trying to keep a little sister safe, keep her a child, when our entire world was conspiring to rip her innocence away from her.

  And then there was Juliette, working so hard against a system set up to ruin kids like Miguel. And while I wasn’t about to teach Miguel how to play poker, I could find something to keep the kid busy a few hours a day.

  I owed her that.

  Before I could put the brakes on this ludicrous idea, I jumped right off the cliff.

  “I think I figured out what you could do to punish Miguel here.”

  “Oh, you did, did you?” Juliette asked.

  “I did.” I nodded, not a single idea coming to me. “I had an idea.”

  “Okay, so let’s hear it.” Juliette shifted her weight and the porch groaned. The sagging, beat-up porch. Where my ass got handed to me ten years ago. Where all my dreams of a different kind of life had died and I’d taken the way out with the least expectations.

  “He’s going to help me fix up the house,” I said.

  “Not buying it, Tyler,” she said, shaking her head. “Let’s go, Miguel.”

  “What do you mean, not buying it?” I asked, temper flaring. “I’m trying to help you out!”

  “Well, I don’t need your help.” She practically sneered, and I threw my hands up.

  “This is what I get for trying to be a good guy.”

  “Oh, please, Tyler. Like you would know?”

  “But, I want to do this,” Miguel said, cutting through our bickering. “Tyler said he would supervise, He’d even write up reports and stuff.”

  I blinked down at the kid. The word supervise had never even crossed my brain. And reports? The kid was reaching. Miguel shrugged
and smiled, and damn if I didn’t start liking the kid.

  “Right.” Juliette’s sarcasm was thick. “Tyler O’Neill supervising is a disaster waiting to happen.”

  “Hey,” I said, “you don’t know that.”

  “I know you, Tyler. And that’s enough.”

  “Where are you going to take me?” Miguel asked. And from the way Juliette’s face went pale I knew it was the right question.

  “Can’t imagine having a kid down at the station all day is going to go unnoticed by Mayor Bourdage.” Man, it was still weird that Gatean was mayor.

  Juliette chewed her lip and then despite the impressionable minor and her old boyfriend standing witness she swore, long and loud. Creatively.

  There’s my girl.

  And really, in the end, that’s why I was doing this. I owed her. I owed her big.

  7

  It was like The Twilight Zone or something. A man comes back to his hometown with the intention of staying at an empty house and before he knows it he’s saddled with his father, a juvenile would-be car thief and his…whatever the hell Juliette was to me—old girlfriend, first love, giant pain in various body parts.

  “I will be checking up on him,” Juliette said, looking stony-eyed and serious. She sized me up and I felt as though I’d just been measured for my coffin. “Every day.”

  “I don’t think that’s nece—”

  “And you,” Juliette talked over me like I wasn’t there, turning all her attention to Miguel. “You will go to school tomorrow. Tell Ms. Jenkins you were in a fight with the football team or something, I don’t care. But you’re at school and then you’re here and I’ll make sure,” she said. “And if you’re so much as ten minutes—”

  “I won’t be,” Miguel said, quick and eager, looking nothing like the ballsy kid who’d been on my stoop this morning. Now he was all exuberant puppy, bright-eyed and wagging tail.

  “No funny stuff,” Juliette said to me and some kind of wiseass comment was right on the tip of my tongue, some kind of “screw you” because she was authority after all, despite being Juliette. I really did have this thing with people telling me what to do, but then she went and blinked and those wide hazel eyes weren’t so steely, weren’t so tough. “I’m counting on you, Tyler. And you’ve got to know how hard that is for me.”