Seventeen Against the Dealer

by Cynthia Voigt

  “How’s your grandmother?” Mrs. Pommes asked her from behind the thick plastic shield that protected tellers from robbers.

  “Getting better,” Dicey said. She didn’t wonder how Mrs. Pommes knew Gram was sick; people just seemed to know.

  “And what can we do for you this afternoon?” Mrs. Pommes asked. Her earrings that day were long silver tubes that banged gently against her neck when she moved.

  “I want to cash this, into fifties please.” Dicey was used to writing checks, but it still made her realize that she was grown-up, a grown-up person, when she went to the bank and traded a check for cash.

  “You must have had a good trip, then,” Mrs. Pommes said. Before Dicey could ask her, What trip? and say, No, she hadn’t had any trip, Mrs. Pommes turned away to call up the account records on the computer. They always did that and it always took time. Dicey had learned to be patient. Mrs. Pommes returned to her window and slid the check back to Dicey. “You don’t have enough money to cover this,” she said.

  “I made a deposit this morning, from another account in this bank,” Dicey explained. The trouble with computers was that they didn’t always work efficiently. James said it was because they could think only in straight lines. She pictured Claude’s check, going in a straight line up to Baltimore, then coming back into her account, in a straight line.

  “Were you in earlier today? I guess I didn’t see you.”

  “I wasn’t, but the man who—works for me, he brought it in for me. I stay with Gram until Sammy and Maybeth get home from school, so I couldn’t come in myself.”

  “But—” Mrs. Pommes said, and she put her forefinger against her mouth while her face emptied itself of any expression, to disguise the worry that rose into her eyes. Her earrings hung quiet. “But you know, he cashed it.”

  Dicey didn’t know any such thing. “I made out a deposit slip.”

  “But—” Mrs. Pommes looked to the teller beside her, as if asking for help, but the young man was busy with a customer. She turned back to Dicey and leaned toward the plastic window to bring her face closer. Dicey felt as if she were a prisoner in jail, on visiting day. “You had countersigned the check. He told me you were going someplace in Virginia, I can’t recall the name, I’d never heard of it, but there are so many little places in Virginia one never hears of—to buy wood, where you’d heard the prices were excellent. He said you had to have it in cash. You’re supposed to write ‘For Deposit Only.’”

  Dicey felt her head nodding. She felt her feet heavy on the floor, as if she was wearing iron shoes and not sneakers.

  “I did wonder, because it was so much cash, that’s an awful lot of cash.” Dicey’s head nodded. “But he told me about the man from Annapolis who wanted to hire you to build him a boat, who came all the way down from Annapolis to hire you, and because you wanted to bring the wood back with you, you needed cash. Because the people in Virginia wouldn’t know you, wouldn’t know if your check was good. Oh, Dicey,” Mrs. Pommes said.

  Dicey’s head nodded. Her hands were like weights, holding down the check she had written.

  “He was so friendly, and frank. He was so careful, too, he counted it three times, then asked me for an envelope, and then he took all the money out again and asked if I could change the hundred dollar bills into fifties, because he wondered if hundreds weren’t too large. The lumberyards wouldn’t have much cash on hand to make change, that’s what he said. Then he counted it again . . . he must have been here for twenty minutes. I didn’t know, Dicey.”

  Dicey made her stupid head stop nodding. “Can you stop payment on the check?”

  “Not when it’s drawn on this bank. It came right out of Mr. Shorter’s account.”

  “Then how do I get my money back?” Dicey asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Pommes said. “You see, when you countersigned the check you authorized the bank to pay it out. That’s what countersigning means.”

  The money couldn’t be gone. She’d earned it. She’d worked for it and been paid. It didn’t make sense for the money to be gone.

  Dicey didn’t believe it, but she believed it. She wasn’t surprised. She wasn’t anything. Her head was nodding again, so she took up her own check. She jammed the paper into her pocket. She stepped away from the window. She didn’t know what she was going to do about this. She didn’t know anything.

  Maybe Cisco was at the shop; maybe he’d just decided to cash the check to do things his own way. He liked doing things his own way; she knew that. She decided to go over to the shop, just in case, although she didn’t expect to find him there. Banks should tell you, she thought. They told you about all those other things, service charges and penalties for overdrawn accounts; about how long you had to wait for checks to clear and how long you had before it was too late to question your monthly statement. But they never told you to write “For Deposit Only.” Now that she knew it, Dicey saw how much sense it made, and she wouldn’t make that mistake again. If she’d thought about it, she guessed she might have figured out you could write something like that on the back of the check—but she’d never even known she should be thinking about it. She’d always taken her paychecks in herself to deposit and no teller had ever stopped to say she ought to write “For Deposit Only.”

  The shop was as empty and clean as if he’d never been there. He hadn’t even done any work on the boats, Dicey thought. That, somehow, seemed like the last straw. That was the knockdown blow. She stood in her shop, her hands jammed into the pockets of her jacket, looking around at the emptiness, and she knew this was the end of it for her.

  Knowing it soaked into her and she soaked it up like a sponge. She thought she was going to cry—and she didn’t cry, she wasn’t a crier—but instead she thought she was going to throw up. She didn’t do either one of those things; she just stood there. Alone, in the cold room, with the three dinghies stacked on racks, and the four rowboats spread out over the floor, and the stack of larch glowing.

  She couldn’t stand to stay in the shop. She couldn’t stand to go home. She couldn’t do anything, and she couldn’t stand that, either.

  Dicey drifted out of the shop and around to the creek. Standing on the short wooden dock, she looked down into the water. The muddy brown bottom was rippled by little waves, and old tires, half-buried, half-covered, lay in it. The shallow water, blown by the wind, splashed rhythmically against the flat wooden bulkheading. Thick ice painted the pilings. A few snags, which used to be trees before erosion brought them down, raised branches like the bones of hands out of the water. Where miniature coves quieted the waves, sheets of thin ice floated. It was cold out there, but no colder than Dicey felt.

  She turned her back to the wind, looking at the shop, at its square cement shape. It was almost funny. It was almost perfect. She guessed that when Cisco made a promise, that was the time you could be sure he was lying. She guessed he probably enjoyed himself, stealing her money so slowly, counting it over and over. Most people would think that somebody stealing something would hurry out of the bank, and that was why he would have stayed so long, so they’d be wishing that he’d go, hurrying him out of the door. With Dicey’s money in his pocket.

  Dicey stared and stared at the squat cement shop, trying to see what she was going to do now. She felt as if she’d been surrounded by enemies—well, she’d known that, she’d known it wasn’t easy. She’d known her enemies and she thought she was well armed against them. She felt as if there’d been a huge long battle, and the worst of it wasn’t the losing, the worst of it was knowing that she was one of her own enemies.

  She hadn’t known enough to insure when she opened the business, and she hadn’t known enough to make it hard for people to break in. She’d just known how to work and save up money. She’d actually thought she was going to be able to build Mr. Hobart’s boat—in all honesty, she had to admit that while she’d been taken off guard when he ordered it, she hadn’t been surprised. She’d expected something to happen for her.


  Big dreams, she’d had big dreams. When big dreams exploded it was worse than when little ones got lost.

  She guessed she’d be one of those people who all their lives wouldn’t let go of their dreams. Not that she wasn’t letting go right now—what else could she do? It wasn’t as if anyone ever would buy a boat from some nobody who never built one and never went to school to learn how. She guessed she’d always be working on other people’s boats, in other people’s shops. She guessed she’d better get used to that.

  It was as if she’d been playing her hand out, against everybody, gambling on herself, and now it turned out that she’d been gambling against herself.

  Ashamed, that was how she felt. Because she knew she was going to have to go back and explain to her family what had happened, what she had let happen.

  Dicey squared her shoulders. She didn’t much like having to be ashamed of herself. But she knew them—Gram and Maybeth and Sammy, and James, too, when he heard. They wouldn’t be ashamed of her. It was just her being ashamed of herself. She could deal with that, she had the strength for that, and the anger.

  What she didn’t have the strength for was to go inside to work. She returned to the shop, but not to light a fire or open a can of paint. She hung the shutter over the glass window, then closed and locked the door behind her. She wasn’t sure she ever wanted to go in there again.

  CHAPTER 23

  She told them after supper. Maybeth had roasted a chicken, which she served with mashed potatoes and peas. Sammy called it a second-string Thanksgiving meal, as he put together Gram’s plate and carried it into her bedroom on a tray. He picked the carcass clean, and then scraped at the potato bowl, before he ate the last two pieces of the pie Dicey had made earlier in the week. Gram also ate her plate clean, finishing all the small servings.

  Dicey had little appetite. She was waiting until dinner was over, and the dishes washed, and everybody gathered together in Gram’s room, to tell her story. “Okay,” she announced, when they were all crowded onto Gram’s double bed. “Here’s the news.” Maybeth sat at the head, beside Gram, and Sammy sat across from Dicey at the foot.

  “It’s not good news,” Gram predicted.

  Dicey didn’t even wonder how her grandmother already knew that. She didn’t want to tell them what had happened, and she told them.

  It was hard, saying it. She looked around at them while she explained. She wanted to stare down at Gram’s white bedspread, at her fingers picking at it, but she made herself look from one to the other of her family. As he listened, Sammy’s eyebrows pulled together and his lips pressed together; his eyes darkened. Gram had heard a lot of the sorry tale already, so at least she wasn’t surprised. Gram was determined not to look distressed, or be distressed; she pulled calmness, like the sheets and blankets of her bed, up over her shoulders, and sat there, like a queen who was about to have her head chopped off but was still a queen. Maybeth was the only one who looked upset, with sad eyes filmed by tears she wouldn’t shed. “Oh,” Maybeth said, “Oh. Oh, Dicey,” as the story went on.

  “All in all, I’ve been pretty stupid,” Dicey concluded.

  “That’s your side of it,” Gram said.

  “I don’t think I can deny it,” Dicey told them all. She felt better, for the telling of it, and for announcing that she accepted responsibility. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, Dicey,” Maybeth answered. “I’m sorry, too.” Dicey felt her sister’s sympathy fall over her, like sunlight, as warm and tangible as a fall of sunlight.

  “Thanks, Maybeth,” she said.

  Sammy didn’t say anything. He got up off the bed and just stood there. When Dicey turned her head to look, she could see—in the blankness on his face, in the set of his shoulders, and the tension in the muscles of his legs—how angry he was. She sat up straighter. Sammy, standing there, Sammy, angry—he looked like someone you wouldn’t want to cross. Strong, and ready, and dangerous.

  “I’m glad you’re on the same side I am,” she said, trying to make a joke. “There’s nothing we can do, Sammy.”

  “Where is this guy now?”

  “Long gone, is my guess. Probably Atlantic City.”

  “Where’s Atlantic City?”

  “Farther than the truck can go,” Gram said, “so get that idea right out of your head, young man.”

  Sammy walked across the room to the kitchen, then turned around and walked back, then turned again. He paced the room like a young wolf. All at once, Dicey could see him, really see him—playing the kind of tennis he told her about. She’d watched him play some matches, but he’d always been her little brother. Watching, she had sat tense, wanting him to win so much that she hadn’t really watched him. Now she could see how formidable he could be, and there was a little flame of anger in her that he couldn’t get the scholarship to camp. He couldn’t even try for it.

  Sammy paced and they watched, held by his anger, until he turned around at the door. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. But I’d sure like to get my hands on him. And your money.”

  “He’s probably gambled it away by now,” Dicey told him. That was what Cisco would do, and he’d keep gambling until he lost it all. He wouldn’t win, but if he did win he’d give her back hers, she suddenly knew that, too. She wouldn’t get it back, she knew that. She wasn’t holding that false hope out for herself. But if he had been able, he would—except he’d never stop trying to get more, not until he’d lost it all. “I shouldn’t have trusted him,” she said. “I should have known better.”

  Gram shook her head. “Don’t fool yourself, girl. It’s not your failure. It’s his. Yours would have been not to trust him.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Dicey protested.

  “I didn’t claim it did. Things don’t have to make sense—and that’s lucky, because they tend not to—not when there are people involved. What are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know,” Dicey admitted. She couldn’t think ahead. The future stretched out empty in front of her, and she couldn’t look at it.

  “I’ve got money for the phone bill,” Maybeth offered.

  Dicey almost said, Thanks but no thanks, I’ll manage somehow. But she didn’t. When someone offered you something, to help you, you owed them something, you owed them being able to help you out. “I’d appreciate that,” she said. “I don’t like not paying my bills.”

  “I know,” Maybeth told her. “You always like to do things your own way.”

  That, Dicey thought, was the trouble. Maybeth had put her finger right on the trouble that got Dicey into this trouble.

  “That’s not bad, Dicey,” Maybeth said. “I don’t think it’s bad, I just think it’s true.”

  “I hope it’s not bad,” Dicey admitted, “because I think I’m stuck with it.”

  So she had better plan to get back to work and finish up Claude’s boats. What else she’d do, she didn’t know. But she wouldn’t go back to work as if that was the only important thing—she’d learned that much from all these mistakes. She’d lost Jeff, she’d cost herself Jeff, and she was so sorry about that—almost as sorry for how badly she must have made him feel as for herself, losing him.

  She’d have to accept that, and she guessed she could. She might well have lost Gram, who’d have neglected herself into the grave if Sammy and Maybeth hadn’t been around to prod Dicey into action. Dicey was shocked at herself, although she didn’t let it show. She got up from the bed, saying, “I’m going to bring the cribbage board in here, in case anyone wants to challenge me to a game. Gram?” While she was saying that, she was talking to herself, inside her head. She thought she’d learned long ago, and learned hard enough, that she didn’t want to neglect her family—but she guessed she’d have to expect herself to keep on making mistakes.

  In the living room, digging through the desk drawer to find the cards, picking up the cribbage board from the bookshelf, she accepted that: She would make mistakes. But she was going to be as sure as she could be not to make the ones
she really didn’t want to make. It could be a question of which mistakes you made, and how you used them. Since she was going to keep on making them, she wanted to take them that way.

  Dicey almost ran back into Gram’s bedroom, almost laughing out loud. She was twenty-one years old, and she’d just figured out that she wasn’t finished learning. She was this old, and she’d just understood that growing up didn’t mean you had things answered, settled. She wondered, coming back into Gram’s room to play a cutthroat game of cribbage, how old you were before you began to get things settled. She looked at her grandmother, wondering.

  “In my experience, older than dead,” Gram told her.

  Dicey just threw back her head and laughed. “You’re crazy.”

  “That’s as may be, but I’m not so far gone that I can’t skunk you—if the cards lie right,” Gram announced.

  Dicey took up the challenge.

  * * *

  The next morning Dicey went to work. She took her bike because Sammy, too, had work to get to and he needed the truck, but she didn’t leave the house until they’d all had breakfast together, and she planned to be back by five. She rode the miles into town along the level road, pedaling hard, partly to use up some of her energy but partly also to keep herself warm. The air was clear but biting cold. Filmy clouds filtered the weak February sunshine.

  Dicey worked the day away. With no hurry, no pressure to finish up fast, she didn’t slow down. It felt slower, but it wasn’t. Time went by at the same ticktocking pace, but Dicey’s inner time was measuring itself out differently. She covered wood with paint, in long, slow strokes. The paint flowed from the brush onto the wood smoothly, silkily. She dipped and stroked, dipped and stroked. Sometime in the middle of the day, she realized that it was good to paint, even these boats of Claude’s; it was good to do a job right. She guessed, solitary and silent, that what she did when things went wrong was get to work. Since that was also what she did when things went right, she guessed that was just what she did.