“Then why do you want to play for money?”
“I don’t know. Just because I never did before, I guess. I just want to see how it feels. I’m not talking about a lot of money. Maybe, like… a quarter a round or something?”
He was still looking at me that way. So I looked down at the backs of my cards. Like I had something to hide, though I wasn’t sure if I did or not. I didn’t want us to look at our hands yet because it seemed fairer to decide if you’re going to bet before you see what you’re betting with. Otherwise, it’s sort of a biased decision.
“On one condition. Ten dollars is the limit. I don’t want you losing more than a whole week’s allowance.”
“What makes you think I’m going to lose?”
He broke into a twisted half smile, and we picked up our cards. I had two queens and an eight and nine of clubs, so that got me off to a pretty good start.
“I had a feeling there was a little gambler in you,” he said.
“Probably. My father was a gambler.”
He looked up from his cards. Into my face. A little too suddenly, I thought.
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“Well. Didn’t come up, I guess. I mean, when would I have told you?”
“I would think you’d have mentioned it when we were trying to figure out how he died.”
“Why? What does one thing have to do with the other?”
“Oh. Never mind. Forget it.”
“No, what? Tell me.”
He didn’t, at first. But after a while, he did.
“If someone is pretty deep into compulsive gambling, that can get dangerous. They usually end up owing huge amounts of money to the wrong people.”
“Well. Yeah. I guess. But a loan guy wouldn’t kill you, would he? If he did, then you could never pay him back.”
“Unless he wanted to make an example of someone. Or unless… No. You know what? Never mind. I’m sorry I ever started with this. Let’s drop it. This was your father, and we don’t know, so why am I speculating?”
“It’s okay. Maybe you know more about it than I do about it.”
He laughed a big, snorty laugh, but I wasn’t sure why.
“Angie,” he said. “Do I look like an expert on gambling? I worked forty-five years at a job I hated for the retirement benefits. I’ve been in love with the same woman for more than fifty years, but haven’t bothered to share that information with her. Where do you see big risk taking on this side of the table? You’re the gambler here, not me.”
We played in silence for a while, and then I called “Gin” and won a quarter. He actually paid me right then and there. Took a quarter out of his pocket and pushed it across the table at me. It was exhilarating, but by then, I knew it shouldn’t be, so I felt bad that it was.
While we were looking at our next hand, I said, “She told me she might come up and visit more often. That would be good. Right?”
I could see him looking at me, but I refused to look up from my cards.
“I didn’t tell her,” he said.
“I figured you didn’t.”
I threw my worst card down and picked up a new one. And tried not to say it. But I had to. I had to say it. I’d been not saying it for so long.
“You’re not going to… You’re going to tell her eventually, right? You’re not just never going to tell her. Are you?”
“I might be never going to tell her.”
I dropped my cards on the table face down. Then it was his turn to avoid my eyes.
“How can you do that? I don’t get that at all.”
“I already told you. I’m not a gambler. I don’t take risks well.”
“What risk? You’re not with her now. The worst that can happen is that you still won’t be.”
“That’s not entirely true. I have a good friendship with her now. We talk almost every day. If I tell her, and she doesn’t feel the same, she might feel terrible about hurting my feelings. Or it might be too hard for me to talk to her after that. It might drive a wedge between us. This way, I have half of what I want. I don’t want to wager with it and end up with nothing.”
“Or everything.”
“I don’t think she feels the same. She would have said so.”
“You didn’t.”
“Or I’d be able to tell.”
“She can’t.”
“Look. Angie. I know if you were me, you’d go for it.”
“I would. Definitely.”
“But I’m not you. Okay? I’m me. Now how about if we just play cards?”
We played about twenty more rounds, and I left two dollars and twenty-five cents richer than before. Which wasn’t much, I know. But it was still a win.
Sophie was asleep, so I threw her over my shoulder in the fireman’s carry.
Paul put the outside back light on for me, so I could pick my way through the snow and ice and get home.
I knocked, but my mom was still out. So I opened the door with my key.
After I got Sophie down in bed, I was about to shove the ring of keys into my pocket again. But first, I looked at them. I think I might have known why. I might have done it on purpose.
I stared at the key to my locked trunk for a minute. Swallowing too much and too hard.
Then I pulled the trunk out from under the bed and opened it up.
I took out The Tibetan Book of the Dead and put it on my bedside table. Sophie hadn’t been doing much shredding for a long time, anyway. And I didn’t have any books going.
Then I took out the note from Nellie. The two-and-a-half-year-old note that I still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to read.
I sat on the edge of the bed, and I read it. With my heart pounding, and my hands shaking, and my mouth so dry, I could hardly swallow.
I read it three or four times. And I’ve read it so many times since then, I could almost recite the whole thing by heart. But I won’t. Because not all of it matters to anybody except me. And because it’s a little private. Not for any special reason, but… just in general, it sort of is.
I’ll share the gist of it.
She was completely sorry, and felt stupid and bad for carelessly hurting and embarrassing me.
She wanted me to know that even though I was hurt and embarrassed, and she could understand that—because she remembered being a teenager and how incredibly mortifying everything was—I really shouldn’t be, because I hadn’t done a damn thing wrong.
And, probably most important, she said that liking her the way I did was more like a compliment, like a gift to her, not like an inconvenience.
I wished I’d known that last part all along.
I called Paul on the phone, because his lights were still on.
“I’m a terrible phony,” I said.
“I doubt it,” he said. “But tell me why you think so.”
“Because I’m no better than you are. There was somebody I liked, and I didn’t tell her. And when she figured it out on her own, I was so humiliated, I ran away and never said another word to her again. She wrote me a note about it, and I stuck it away and never even read it. So… some risk taker.”
“Well,” he said. “Now that you’ve figured that out, are you going to read it?”
“I just did.”
“Then you’re not a terrible phony. And you are better than me.”
Looking back, I guess I sort of got it in my head somehow that he’d follow my example. That if I could get a little braver, so could he. But six months and two Rachel visits went by. And he still didn’t take the risk.
2. Risk
It was June again, and it was four o’clock in the morning.
I left a note on the table for my mom.
It said, “You need to trust me. I know I’m technically a minor, and I know you’ll be pissed, but I’m almost seventeen now, and I think I’m grown up enough to do things by myself. I have to go talk to somebody (actually, a couple of somebodies), and the phone just won’t do it. Sometimes you have to look at somebo
dy face to face and say what you need to say to them. I should be back tomorrow (but it might even be the next day, so please don’t freak), and then you can be as mad as you want.”
I thought about signing it, but then I decided that was stupid, because there was only one person it could possibly be from.
I slipped out of the house and walked by flashlight into town. All the way to the bus station.
Then I pulled Nellie’s hundred-dollar bill out of my jeans pocket, the one she gave me after the fact for my inventory labor all that time ago, and bought a round-trip ticket to go home. Except that wasn’t a good way to say it, because that didn’t feel like home anymore. This did.
I got the window seat. And I got that view of the mountains I never got on the way up. When we’d driven up three years before, it had been sheeting rain, and I’d mostly either been asleep or hiding my head.
The bus was full, so I didn’t get to spread out over both seats the way I was hoping to. A woman sat next to me who reminded me a little bit of Nellie. I’m not really sure why, though. She didn’t look much like her. But she was about the same age, and seemed smart in all the same places. I knew because we’d chatted a little about this and that, and then she’d taken out her book and started to read.
I took out The Tibetan Book of the Dead, even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to read much of it, because I get sick if I try to read for long on a moving bus. I figured I’d read a page and then look at the view for a while.
Just as well, because it wasn’t what you might call light reading.
“I tried to get through that once,” the woman said. “It was too dense for me.”
Her voice startled me. I wasn’t expecting it.
“I think it’s too hard for me, too,” I said.
“Did you know that Tibetan Book of the Dead is just an informal title for the English translation? The real translation from the Tibetan would be something more like ‘The Great Liberation Upon Hearing in the Intermediate State.’”
“I did not know that. What does it mean?”
“I don’t have the first clue. I told you, it was over my head. And I’m a librarian. And you’re… what? Sixteen or seventeen? So it’s a little intimidating for me to watch you stick with it.”
“The fact that I’m still reading doesn’t mean I understand it. I don’t. I don’t understand about dying at all. That’s why I’m reading it. I thought maybe it would help explain it. Not so far.”
“Did somebody in your life die?”
“Yes,” I said.
But then I didn’t say any more. After a while, she went back to her book.
“My dad,” I said. Because by then, I knew I didn’t really have to. I wasn’t feeling trapped, once she’d started reading again. “But that was more than ten years ago. And one of my best friends at the end of last year.”
“Oh, dear. I’m sorry. Someone your age?”
“No. She was old.”
Actually, she was much younger and much older than me, both at the same time. Which is a riddle, like one of those Zen koans. The answer is dog. I didn’t say any of that.
“Do you believe what that book is teaching?” she asked me. Like my opinion mattered. “That part of us goes on, and there are choices when we leave our body?”
“I want to,” I said. “I’m trying to decide.”
I had to take two city buses from downtown.
Eventually, I got off the bus right across from the park with the fountain. The one that used to be the end point of my walks with Rigby and Sophie, back before we all moved. Back when Paul used to pay me to walk her. Because we weren’t exactly friends yet.
I set off on foot for the old neighborhood, Aunt Vi’s neighborhood, my backpack slung over one shoulder. I realized right away that the walk would take me right past Nellie’s bookstore. Which I hadn’t really thought out in advance. I wondered if it was on purpose that I hadn’t thought it out. Oh, I knew I’d be sticking my head in the bookstore and saying something to Nellie. At some point. She was part of the plan. Maybe thirty or forty percent of the important stuff I had to do on this trip. Just, somehow, I didn’t have it down in my head as the first thing. More tacked on as an afterthought for the end of the day.
First I wanted to put it back in that old position. After all, I’d walk by her store again on the way back to the bus. But then I thought, What if she looks out the window and sees me walk by? Without sticking my head in and saying a word?
She’d think I hated her.
I got hit with a thought so sudden and so strong, it stopped me. Literally. I stopped walking and stood still on the sidewalk. And just thought it.
She might already think I hated her. That was the thought. She’d had nothing to go on but her own imagination, all this time. I’d put her in a position where she had to guess how that whole thing was left. Make it up in her head. You know. That place where things can get out of hand. Get blown all out of proportion.
At least, in my head, things do.
That really was the first moment it dawned on me how big an apology I owed her.
I started walking again, then had another thought that stopped me cold.
Maybe the bookstore wasn’t even there anymore, three years later. Little bookstores close all the time. Maybe Nellie was out of business. Then the apology would never get delivered, because I’d never find her. I didn’t even know her last name.
I started to walk again, and my steps got fast, because I was anxious to find out.
The bookstore was still there.
I slowed down, but I kept walking. Closer and closer. I expected my heart to pound, and my hands to get shaky, but it didn’t happen. I just felt numb. Like my body and my brain were made of petrified wood. I just felt heavy and numb.
When I got to her door, I paused a minute. With my hand on the door pull. Just froze there, looking at my own hand. Just seeing and feeling what I was doing. I knew it was a being-alive thing, but I still just felt numb.
I opened the door and stuck my head in.
“Hey,” I said. Quiet. Like a breath.
“Good afternoon,” she said. Flat and regular. Nothing special at all.
My heart dropped into my gut. And I felt it. Where was all that numb when I needed it most? It had never occurred to me that maybe she hated me. She liked me in the letter, and that’s how I’d expected things to stay.
I almost turned and walked right back out again.
Then I heard, “Angie?”
That’s when I realized she hadn’t even known it was me.
“Yeah. It’s me.”
“Oh, my God. Angie! I didn’t even recognize you! You’re all grown up.”
“It’s been a long time,” I said.
“Is there a reason just your head is inside?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have Sophie and that huge dog with you?”
“No.”
“Then what’s the reason?”
“I’m a big coward.”
She laughed. It turned out I liked to make her laugh just as much as I’d always used to.
I opened the door the rest of the way and went in. I stood in front of her counter, shifting back and forth from one foot to the other. Trying to feel if I was still numb or not. I had this thing in my stomach that felt like a little buzz of electricity. So probably not.
“I have to be honest,” she said. “I figured you were gone forever. I never thought I’d see you or hear from you again.”
I nodded. A little too much, in fact. “It was looking that way for a while.”
“What changed?”
“Me. I guess.”
“Duh,” she said.
I got hit hard with how much I’d missed her, without even knowing it.
“I meant, what changed in you?” she added.
“Hmm. Well. I watched a friend of mine being a big coward. And I thought he shouldn’t be. And then I realized I was, too, more than I’d been admitting. And I didn’t want to be
anymore. And also, I sort of felt like I owed you a big apology.”
“Want to know how you can totally make it up to me?”
“Yes.”
“You can sit down. That thing you’re doing is making me nervous. You look like a racehorse fidgeting in the starting gate. Factor in our history and it makes me think you’re about to bolt out of here.”
“Sorry.” I sat down in her big stuffed chair. Set the backpack on the rug. Slipped off my shoes and crossed my sock feet. “Better?”
“Much. So. I was wondering if you were even still in town.”
“I’m not. We got thrown out of my aunt’s house that same day. That last day I saw you. We moved out of town that day.”
“Oh. Well. That explains a lot.”
“Not really. I still could have called you.”
She laughed out loud, but I had no idea why.
“That’s such classic Angie. I’m trying to let you off easy, but you have to turn yourself in. I don’t think you owe me an apology. I think it was all me. I think I could have handled things better. I should have told you who Cathy was right at the beginning. I should have said right up front that she was my girlfriend. No surprises, you know? Hey. Are you hungry? I’m thinking pizza.”
Part of me didn’t want to stay. Or, at least, commit to staying. But I hadn’t eaten all day, and I was pretty damn hungry.
“I could eat some pizza.”
She picked up the phone and ordered it. And I got a chance to watch her while she wasn’t watching me watch her. It was a weird experience, because I was bowled over by how big and strong denial can be. I couldn’t grasp how I ever looked at her and didn’t completely know how much I wanted to get closer to her, and why. That’s a pretty damned big secret to be keeping, especially from yourself.
When she got off the phone, she said, “So…”
And I said, “So… is Cathy still your girlfriend?”
Which, the minute it came out of my mouth, I knew was a stupid question. Because what difference did it make? If Cathy wasn’t, somebody else was. Or would be. Because Nellie was still in her thirties, and I was still in my teens. It was a brick wall I knew damn well we’d never get around. So I don’t even know why I asked.
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