by Naomi Niles
“Well, you’ve got my attention,” said Sam.
And she wasn’t the only one. Cheryl and Brian and the rest of our customers were all turned facing Marshall, eyebrows slightly contracted. “Tell us your proposal,” said Cheryl eagerly.
“Be careful,” said Joe in his wheezy voice. “I’ve played against that man before, and I wouldn’t bet against him.”
But no one listened to Old Joe.
“What do you have in mind?” I asked Marshall.
“The deal is this,” said Marshall, loudly enough to be heard across the room. “I have here a deck of cards—a standard set of fifty-two, no tricks or gimmicks—and I want to challenge you to a game in which we compete to see who can draw the highest card. I’ll draw one, and you’ll draw one.”
“And what do you get if you win?” I asked.
“I get to take you on a date.”
“That figures. And what do I get if I win?”
“If you win,” he said slowly, apparently relishing the genius of his plan, “then I’ll go away and never darken the door of this bakery again.”
The brilliance of it was that he knew I couldn’t say no, not when I could banish him forever with the turn of a card. It was a risk, though. Instinctively, I turned and looked to Sam for guidance.
“I think it’s a great idea, personally,” she said. “You should go for it.”
“Yes, please,” said Brian, leaning forward with a look of excitement. “This I have to see.”
The rest of our customers chimed in their agreement—all except Cheryl, who sat shaking her head. “I warned you before, that man is up to no good. If you play, you play at your own risk.”
That settled it, then. Feeling oddly defiant and wanting to prove Cheryl wrong, I turned to Marshall and said, “I’ll do it.”
“Really?” He seemed surprised, like he hadn’t been expecting his plan to work.
I nodded. “But we’re only playing one round, no do-overs, and you have to promise me that if I win, you’ll go away and stop bothering me.”
Marshall smiled, an odd gleam of triumph in his eyes. Extending his hand, he said, “Deal.”
I shook his hand, my pulse racing, nervously wondering what I had just agreed to.
Silence fell for a moment as the room seemed to hold its breath, suspended. I glared through the kitchen window at the trees now green with spring as though imploring them to come and rescue me.
Gentleman that he was, he allowed me to draw first. Fearing some trick and not wanting to draw from the top of the pile, I removed a card from the bottom and turned it over. It was a queen of diamonds.
I held it up in one hand so the rest of the room could see, feeling relieved and a little disappointed.
Marshall, ever the showman, made a show of being nervous. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. This may be the last moment we ever spend together.”
“Shame!” said Sam again. She really seemed to have taken a liking to him.
The room fell silent again as Marshall reached for the deck. As the rest of us held our breaths, he slid a card out from the middle and placed it face-down on the counter, then slowly turned it over.
It was a king of spades.
Stunned and defeated, I threw myself down on the counter. Sam reached over and patted my shoulder reassuringly.
Marshall, knowing that he had won and presumably wanting to leave while the taste of victory was still fresh in his mouth, bowed and said, “I guess I’ll be seeing you Saturday,” then turned and left.
Old Joe waited until he had left before crowing, “I told you! I knew he was going to pull something, and I was right. I don’t know how he did it, but I know there was a trick somewhere. There had to have been.”
Sam, however, was more resigned. “Looks like we need to take you shopping,” she said, then returned to her sweeping.
Chapter Eleven
Marshall
“You don’t feel even a little bad about tricking a girl into going out with you?” asked Mr. Wood.
“No, why would I feel bad?”
We were seated in his office on Thursday morning. I had just left the bakery, flush with victory, and couldn’t resist crowing to someone about what I had just done. Outside in the yard, a light mist blanketed the white dogwood blossoms and the sea-green grass. Sean hadn’t come in yet, but he had texted his grandfather to let him know he was on his way.
In the meantime, he and I were playing chess.
“Because,” said Mr. Wood, picking up his one remaining rook and slowly turning it over, “some would say it’s wrong to force a girl into going on a date with you against her will.”
Naturally, I balked at this. “She’s not doing it against her will,” I said angrily. “No one’s holding a gun to her head and forcing her to go on a date with me. If she doesn’t want to, she doesn’t have to.”
“Does she know that?” he replied.
I was silent for a minute. I had felt so good about myself after leaving the bakery; I was Jason bringing home the Golden Fleece. And now this old man was calling my methods into question. It had never been my intention to pressure Lori into doing anything she didn’t want to do. I was almost tempted to text her and apologize.
My thoughts were interrupted by the screech of tires in the yard and the sound of a car door slamming. A second later the door opened, and Sean came running in.
“Hey, did you go by the store this morning?” he asked me.
It was clear from the grin on my face that I had big news. “I did, actually.”
“And?”
“And we are going on a date on Saturday night. I hope she likes Mexican food because I’m in the mood for some chicken flautas.”
Sean stared in disbelief. “I can’t believe that actually worked. She has to have known she was playing against a sleight-of-hand master. I hope she doesn’t call and cancel when she figures out what you did.”
I let out a loud sigh. Everyone was making it sound like I had committed a crime. “I tried to tell him nobody wants to go on a date that they feel they’ve been tricked into,” said Mr. Wood.
“She would have said yes eventually.” My frustration was reaching new heights. “It might have taken three weeks, or four, or five, but she would have relented when she saw my persistence. My trick just sped up the process.”
“If you say so.” He moved his rook five spaces to the left, threatening one of my knights. “But in the end, I think she would have appreciated your determination a lot more. Now she’s only going out of obligation.”
I looked to Sean for help. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt this bad for landing a date before.”
“Well, you probably landed your previous dates honestly,” Mr. Wood replied.
“Okay, but isn’t there an old saying about how ‘all is fair in love and war’?” said Sean. “It doesn’t really matter how he landed the date; the important thing is that he landed it. In ten years, they’ll be telling their kids the heartwarming story of how they met.”
“Yes, and Marshall will be explaining to his boy how you must never, ever do this thing, but here’s a story of how it worked this one time.”
I threw up my hands in frustration; Mr. Wood had made up his mind, and there was no convincing him that Lori might really want to go out with me. “How did she seem when you left?” asked Sean. “Worried? Upset? Secretly pleased but trying hard not to show it?”
“I’ll let you know on Saturday. If we go out, and she doesn’t absolutely have the time of her life, then I’ll never bother her again.”
“I guess we’ll know in a couple days,” said Mr. Wood. “Would you really tell us if she hated it?”
By that point, Sean had had enough—he and his grandfather exchanged some heated words—and within a few minutes, we had both been thrown out of his office.
Later, we discussed the conversation over beer and steaks at Sean’s house.
“You know, I don’t normally second-guess myself,” I told
him as I layered the skillet with caramelized onions, “but your grandfather made me feel awful. Going into the store this morning, my only goal was to make her smile and get a date out of it. I laid down the terms of the bet, and she agreed to them. There was nothing coercive about it.”
“Don’t listen to Gramps,” said Sean. “He’s never met Lori, and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
I fixed him with a serious look. “Okay, but are you just saying that because you’re my friend? If you really thought I had done something wrong, would you tell me?”
“If I thought you were being creepy, or manipulative, or underhanded, I would tell you. The thing you have to understand about Gramps is that he’s a contrarian. He loves to play devil’s advocate because he gets a kick out of being the only man in the room with his opinion. I can almost guarantee that if three or four of us went in there and tried to warn you that using a card trick to score a date with Lori was a bad idea, he would be all for it.”
I smiled, for the first time since leaving the bakery. “Maybe we should have done that from the beginning.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, but the way he insists on arguing with everyone gets on my nerves. I don’t think he even really believes half the things he says; it just amuses him to be outnumbered. And then you wonder why I had to block him on Facebook.”
“Well, anyway,” I said with a sigh, “I have a date now, and there’s no backing out of it.”
“There had better not be,” said Sean. “If you text her and call off the date because of what my granddad said, I will break that phone over your head.”
Chapter Twelve
Lori
“It’s not that I don’t like the guy,” I told Sam.
“Really? Because you definitely gave off the impression that you don’t like him.”
“It’s nothing personal, anyway. I don’t like most guys. If he knew me better, he would understand that.”
It was late Friday afternoon, and we were sitting in the back office going over our expense reports. Outside, the sun was setting, casting a dusky reddish light over the half-empty parking lot and the courthouse on the opposite side of the street.
We had been arguing about Marshall’s stunt for the last couple days. Sam was the first to point out that he was likely a master at card tricks and that the deck had been stacked against me from the beginning. “I should have asked him to let me see the deck. In a way, this is good, though, because now you have a date.”
“I don’t know whether I should feel excited about a date that I was tricked into going on,” I said irritably. “What exactly is he expecting to get out of this? Why would you insist on a date with someone who has shown no interest in you? Neither one of us is going to enjoy this.”
“No, you’re probably right,” said Sam, setting down her calculator and stretching her arms with a yawn. “But think of it this way: you haven’t been on a date in nearly two years, and this is a great way of dipping your toes back in the waters. You’ve always been the sort of person who relishes comfort and doesn’t like doing hard things unless pushed. Marshall is just giving you a nudge out of the door.”
I ought to have expected this reaction from my sister: nothing that got me dating could possibly be bad in her book. “But have you considered the possibility that maybe some of us don’t want to go on dates?” I asked in a beleaguered tone. “Dating leads to marriage, and marriage leads to babies, and each of those things takes away from valuable time you could have spent reading or learning a foreign language or finishing your masterpiece.”
“Lori, you’ve already read thousands more books than the average person,” said Sam. “I’m not worried.”
“No matter how much you read,” I said darkly, “it’s never enough.”
I motioned to the wall over the sink, where I hung a needlepoint I had bought at the festival. It was a picture of a china mug and a quote from C. S. Lewis: “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
“What have you been reading lately?” asked Sam.
“Still slowly making my way through Norse Mythology.” It had been slow going because I wanted to savor it, but also because I had picked up War and Peace again. Over Christmas, I had read to the part where Pierre learns that Natasha is planning to run away with that scoundrel Anatole and is forced to intervene before she destroys her marriage to Prince Andrei, who doesn’t seem to care much one way or the other. No one could paint a scene or portray a character as vividly as Tolstoy.
It was Sam who had first gotten me hooked on Russian literature, and she couldn’t have been more delighted that I had fallen under Tolstoy’s spell. “Are you loving Pierre?” she asked. “Isn’t he brill?”
“I like him quite a bit better than Andrei, who probably should have taken his first advice and never gotten married. I think my favorite characters are the ones who only show up for a scene or two—like Balaga the troika driver, who kind of reminds me of Hagrid, and Natasha’s uncle’s fat housekeeper who dances and makes merry at Christmas. I just wish I knew how he could conjure the most memorable characters in only one or two lines of description.”
“Kind of makes you jealous, doesn’t it?”
“It really does, and I can’t read more than a few pages at a time because I begin to despair that I’ll ever write anything that matters. The scene with the comet was so good it made me want to throw all my journals into the sea.”
“If you like that, you should check out Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812,” said Sam, referring to a musical that had recently opened on Broadway.
“Oh, it’s just stunning, isn’t it? I’d have given anything to have been in the audience during a live performance.”
“Me, too. The music is great, but I hear it’s the sort of thing you really have to experience live to get the full effect. If they ever go on tour and the show is anywhere close, I’ll take you.”
“That would just be the most fantastic birthday present,” I replied. “Even better than Les Mis.”
Sam went back to her calculating, and I returned to my bills. Because of the attention we had generated at the festival and the recent uptick in customers, it seemed likely that we were going to have a bit of money left over at the end of the month. Sam suggested sinking it back into the business, though we were divided as to how we intended to do this. She wanted to move to a more central location while I was considering remodeling. At some point in the next few weeks, I wanted to visit IKEA and get the bookcase we had been talking about.
When I mentioned this to Sam, she asked casually, “How would you feel about going tomorrow?”
I shook my head. “You know we can’t go tomorrow; we have work. Saturday is always our busiest day of the week.”
“Well, we’re going shopping tomorrow either way. You’re going on a date, and I would love it if you wore a new dress that didn’t immediately suggest ‘English grandmother or librarian.’”
“Nothing wrong with being an English grandmother,” I said defensively. “I’m sure they’re lovely. Anyway, who’s going to mind the shop?”
“I’ve already asked Jamal if he would do it,” she said quietly, eyes lowered to her clipboard. “He said yes.”
My immediate instinct was to feel angry that Sam hadn’t consulted me before leaving him in charge of the shop. He wasn’t employed here, and I didn’t care how much she loved him; I had never trusted anyone except paid employees to be in charge of the register. “Are we sure that’s even legal?” I asked her.
“I don’t see why not,” Sam shrugged. “We’re the ones who own the place, and it’s not like he’s going to steal anything. You don’t have to worry about it.”
“Well, I’m a little worried,” I snapped. “What if something goes wrong, and we’re not here to take care of it?”
“He’ll be texting me, like, every three minutes. We’re not living in the 1980s, where a day trip into the city cuts you off from kith and kin
. We have ways of staying connected now, and the moment something goes wrong, we’ll know about it.”
This was hardly reassuring, as it left open the possibility that something could go wrong. “I really wish you had mentioned this to me before planning my whole day. I don’t need a new dress. It’s not worth leaving the store unsupervised for eight hours.”
“It’s not going to be unsupervised—”
“No, but it might as well be!”
I rarely yelled at Sam unless I was truly angry. Setting her pencil down on the table, she glared at me with a mixture of alarm and annoyance.
“I’m sorry,” I said after a long pause. “It’s just, between him tricking me into going out with him and you planning my weekend and leaving somebody else in charge of our store, it feels like my whole life is being taken over by other people. I would just prefer to have some control over my own decisions. If I can’t get it from my date, I thought I could at least get it from you.”
Sam sat quietly staring at her pencil, a look of contrition on her face. “I’m sorry. I guess I should’ve known you would feel that way. If it makes you feel any better, I can text Jamal and let him know we’ll be working tomorrow. You can wear one of your old dresses if it makes you happy.”
Now that I had calmed down a bit, I was beginning to feel bad for having snapped at her. “No, you’ve already made plans. Besides, we haven’t been out in a while, and I would like to visit IKEA—I just hope you won’t be disappointed if I end up buying a dress that reinforces my spinster-librarian image.”
“Knowing you, that’s probably unavoidable,” Sam said with a smile. “Anyway, I hope you know that if you don’t feel comfortable going on this date, you can always back out of it. I’d have your back, and so would a lot of other people. You shouldn’t feel obligated to do something you never wanted to do just because someone tricked you with a sleight-of-hand trick.”
I looked up at her curiously. “But I thought you wanted me to go on this date? You were adamant about it.”
“I do think it would be good for you, but also I only want you to do things that you feel good about. If you would rather spend Saturday up at the library reading about nineteenth-century Russian ballet, then Jamal and I can run the store, and I’ll tell that guy to get lost.”