by Jude Watson
“I got it from Alfie,” Jules said. “The last time I saw him. He said he had something special for me.”
“Special?”
“I said, ‘It’s just a torn-up card.’ He said I had to learn how to appreciate a lucky piece. He said, ‘Keep it in your pocket. Never let it go.’ Figure I needed luck, so …”
They stared at the joker, both halves joined.
“Some joke,” she said.
“It’s so we could recognize each other, right? Like something out of a fairy tale.”
Jules snorted. “So this is happily ever after?”
March shuffled the cards. He pushed them toward her to cut the deck. “He told you he was your father?” he asked.
“More like I guessed. He’d always bring me presents — little things. He got me these puppets from Germany once. Chocolates. A bunch of silk violets. Just a month ago he bought me a sewing machine — I do all the costumes for the troupe.”
March shook out his bag of pretzels. He divided them up. “Chips. Ante up.”
She pushed a pretzel forward, he matched it, and then dealt five cards down. Alfie had taught him poker, and March had never been able to beat him. Alfie had shown him the most important things, like how to spot a tell — an indication of how a player might bid — and how to look for crooks. Never cheat, but be able to spot a cheater.
Jules frowned at her cards. “Anyway, the last time I saw him was last week, the day we got to Amsterdam. Blue had a bunch of sites to check out for the pitch. They had this long argument — I don’t know what about. I could only see their faces — I was in the caravan. Alfie left, and I ran after him. I just knew suddenly. Why did he keep coming around? I knew it wasn’t for Blue. So I just said it to him, ‘Hey, are you my dad?’ He started to bawl and said yes, that he’d explain everything, but I said I didn’t need any explanations. He asked me what I wanted for my thirteenth birthday. I said a turntable and some vinyl. He said he’d give me something better. A home.” Jules grimaced. “Well, he was right about that, wasn’t he? A group home with a bunch of juvenile delinquents.” She pushed two pretzels into the pot.
“Wonder why he kept us apart,” March said.
“Probably because two kids slow down a crook.”
March glanced at her sharply, but she stared at her cards. He had a lousy hand, but he had a two and a four of diamonds. The chances of a straight weren’t great, but he might as well go for broke. All he had to lose was a snack. “See your two pretzels and raise you two.”
She threw two cards down. “Do you think we’ll have to go to school?”
He dealt her two more. “I’d say that’s a given.”
“Stinks. I wonder if we’ll have to take tests. What are you supposed to know at twelve? Geometry?” She rubbed her knuckle against her lip. It was a tell, he decided. She did it when she was nervous.
“I know how to pick locks, but I don’t think that’s a subject. Dealer takes three.” March held the cards without looking at them. “He told me that, for my birthday, we were going to stay put for a long while. He must have been planning something.”
Right before the job, Alfie had seemed nervous. He’d smiled and said, Some jobs have higher stakes, buddy. This is one.
Jules gave a dismissive shrug. “Guys like him are always full of plans. And the plans usually revolve around them.” She looked at him, her gray eyes glinting like silver. “Our dad was a liar and a thief. Face it. He handed me off to Blue when I was two, like I was a package he was sick of carrying.” She fanned out her cards. “Four of a kind!”
His eyes burning, March stared at his cards. It took a minute for the numbers and shapes to make sense. He felt a surge of triumph as he threw down his cards.
“He wasn’t a liar. Straight flush!” He scooped up the handful of pretzels and crunched down on one. “And maybe he had a reason!”
Her cheeks were red. “What kind of reason do you need to have to give away your own kid? I notice he kept you.”
“He said he went crazy after our mother died —”
“What are you, the excuser in chief?”
“He’s just not as bad as you think!”
“And maybe he’s not as good as you say!”
Angrily, March gathered the cards from the tray table. Jules clamped her hand on his wrist.
“Wait a second.”
She picked up the top card from March’s pile. She peered at it. When she looked at him, her gaze was pure fury. “These cards are marked! You cheated!”
March looked down at the card. The design on the back was of a city skyline: black-and-white buildings with little white boxes for windows. On two of his cards, numbers were written in the boxes in a kind of pattern, penciled in lightly.
“I didn’t know,” March said. He flipped over the card. The five of diamonds.
“Sure. Son of a thief didn’t know the cards were marked. Tell me another one.” Jules rolled her eyes at him.
March felt heat rise in his cheeks. “I never looked at these cards! Alfie left them behind.”
“Then he was a thief and a liar and a cheater!”
“Say what you want,” he said, furious. “I don’t care. I don’t even know you. But think about this. He said he’d give you a home. He said the same thing to me. He must have been planning something. Some big score. He must have wanted us all to be together.”
“You’re delusional.” Jerkily, she grabbed her earbuds. “Let me give you a tip — grown-ups lie.”
She put her earbuds back in, cranked up her volume, and closed her eyes.
March regarded her through a red mist of fury. He couldn’t put the word sister next to this girl who just happened to have the same parents as his. She had three earrings in one ear and wore a ring on her thumb. Her hands looked rough and calloused. She could twist her body into shapes and swing fifty feet in the air. She’d had a whole life he couldn’t imagine. Her irritability level was off the charts.
And she hated their dad.
Hated March now, too, apparently.
What did he expect, instant family?
March turned away. He flipped through the deck. Six cards had notations on the backs, from the two of diamonds on up. Random numbers that made no sense. Just like the random phrases on Alfie’s list.
Alfie wasn’t a cheater. He knew that. So what did the numbers mean?
Exhaustion crashed down on him. He put the flimsy pillow against his cheek and leaned back. The cards blurred on the tray table as his eyes closed. He remembered Alfie’s face when he said, I’ve got things to tell you. He wished he’d been more awake. He wished he’d said, Tell me now.
What were you planning, Pop?
In lots of ways that people usually counted, March had probably had a lousy life. No roots laid down, no best friend, no school prizes, no Saturday soccer games where he’d kicked the winning goal. Weird to have your dad be your best friend. And Alfie’s friends — well, they weren’t exactly role models. His babysitter Penelope was a grifter. His “uncle” Ham taught him math at the racetrack.
But still, Alfie tried to make it fun when he could. After a big job, they’d check into a good hotel and have a spree. The holiday in Turkey or Hong Kong or that time they stayed in the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean for three weeks — They’re sinking, I hear, so we’d better go now, kid! I don’t want there to be one place in the world you can’t go.
Don’t call me kid, Pop.
Okay, kid.
But it was his life, and he didn’t want to be here, standing in a cemetery over an open grave. He missed his father so much that he couldn’t breathe.
The two social workers who had picked them up at the airport stood by, reluctant mourners who kept checking their watches. They were the administrators of the group home they were heading to, called Polestar House. Mandy Sue Miller was short and peppy, with a steady hum of irritability (“Gosh, you took so long at customs — are you smugglers, ha-ha?”) underneath a wide smile and cheeks so round, March
was positive she was storing nuts inside them. Pete Campos was tall and restless. He was thin, she was plump; she was chatty, he was silent; and no doubt, between them, they licked the platter clean.
Jules just looked as though she wanted to be anywhere but here.
“Thruway traffic and whatnot,” Pete whispered to Mandy Sue. He jiggled the car keys in his pocket. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
The cemetery guy coughed. “Do you have anything to say?” he asked.
“I hardly knew him,” Jules said. “Thanks for nothing, Dad.”
March curled his hands into fists. All he could see was the box, the hole, the plain marker. Birth, death, and nothing in between to show his dad had a life.
Alfie never looked back. Humans aren’t meant to look back. Or else we’d be able to turn our heads in a 180, just like an owl. He was always looking ahead to the next city, the next adventure. Maybe even now he was shooting forward somewhere in that other dimension, eyes wide open and looking for his chance. No 180s for Alfie, not even now.
“Don’t look back,” March blurted.
Mandy Sue gave him a shocked look. “Godresthissoul, oh Lord,” she said in a tone that indicated that March was a heathen.
“Amen,” Pete said, and glanced at his watch again.
March kept his gaze well away from the dirt that was now being shoveled over his father and saw a man leaning against a tree, not looking at them. He was wearing a fedora pulled low over his forehead.
Alfie had taught him that there were people who didn’t look at you and then there were people who deliberately didn’t look at you, and it was crucial to know the difference.
The guy was there for him.
The man must have noticed that March was now deliberately not looking at him, and so he walked down the cemetery road as if he had a pressing engagement with a dead person.
March remembered the person in the raincoat, standing on that corner in Amsterdam, whistling. Same guy? That would just be too creepy. But …
A minute later a green Audi barreled down the road.
Mandy Sue and Pete huddled with the cemetery manager. Mandy Sue tapped on her clipboard with a pointed pink fingernail. “Well, I need the paperwork today. You don’t know what it’s like, dealing with state government! If I don’t have it, I’m up poo creek without a paddle, ha-ha! No joke!”
She turned to March and Jules and said with bright ferocity, “Do not go anywhere! I can see you from that window!”
The three of them stumped off toward the office. March looked across the grave markers at Jules, who was now sitting on the grass, staring down at her shoes.
“Great eulogy,” he said. “Thanks.”
She looked up, startled at the anger in his voice. “What was I supposed to say?”
“How about, I’m sorry,” March shot back. His voice was suddenly choked, and he could feel his face growing hot. “I just buried my father, okay? You didn’t love him, I get that. But I …”
The words left him with the breath that wouldn’t come. The words I did. They were in the air between them. His love was between them. Exposed. That love was his, not hers. It was his to hold, his to hide. From now on. For the rest of his life. There would be no one who would know it. No one he would tell. Only Alfie had heard it, had held it, and he was gone. To his horror, March felt tears in his throat. He wanted to punch a tree.
“Ever since this happened,” he said, his voice shaking, “I want someone to say, ‘I’m sorry.’ And mean it.”
Jules stood unsteadily, her hands jammed in her pockets. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. I get it. I’m sorry. I really am,” she added. “I know I’ve been lousy. You just can’t help hating someone who never wanted you.”
“He gave you up,” March said. “But that doesn’t mean he didn’t want you.”
She scowled and kicked a stone. “What’s the difference?”
A large black Hummer with tinted windows crested the hill. It drove off the road and over the gravestones that laid flat in the earth. It rolled to a stop only a few feet from them.
The tinted window slid down. An older woman with black hair and wraparound sunglasses stuck her head out. March turned away, hiding his wet eyes.
“Did I miss it?” she asked.
“I think you’ve got the wrong funeral, lady,” Jules said.
She took off her sunglasses and leaned out the window. “You have your father’s eyes,” she said to Jules.
March turned. The woman was staring at both of them. Powder settled into the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. Her lipstick was orange and slick.
“Said he was an insurance salesman. Broke into my house just to show me he could, so he could sell me a policy. I showed him everything — the jewels, the security … what a fool I was. Charming man, your father.”
“I didn’t know him that well,” Jules said. “Thanks for coming.”
“He stole more than riches,” the woman said. Her hands clutched the wheel. Her fingers were long, with knobby knuckles and blue veins. “He stole my future.”
“Right,” Jules said. “But he’s dead now, so —”
She stuck out a bony finger and pointed to Alfie’s grave. “He’s where he belongs!”
Before March could react, Jules jackknifed to her feet. In one leap she was up against the car door. “You want to try that one again, crazy lady? Show some respect.”
Now she was defending Alfie? March looked on, startled at Jules’s sudden fierceness.
Rattled, the woman put her sunglasses back on. “If I were you, I’d show some respect. I’m here to offer you a deal.”
“What kind of deal?” March asked.
“What did he leave you?”
“What business is it of yours?”
She fixed her watery blue eyes on March. “Because I want them back. The moonstones. They are rough magic. Cruel. But real.” She extended a clawlike hand. “Beware of them!”
A voice came yodeling out across the distance. “Maaarrch! Juliiiiaa! Get in the carrrrr!” It was Mandy Sue.
“I’ll find you again,” she hissed. Jules had to leap back as the big car jerked forward, bumping over the gravestones and taking off down Cemetery Road.
“Crazy old bat,” Jules said.
“Yeah,” March said. His hand found the secret pocket and closed around the moonstone.
Crazy old ladies and magic moonstones flew right out of March’s head as Pete pulled up a pockmarked driveway to their new home.
Two houses crouched on a plot of chartreuse lawn. One was a noxious shade of antacid pink and the other was the color of a bruise. A sad little swing hung from the branch of a monster oak. The garage looked like it would collapse if a hummingbird landed on it. There was a surprisingly healthy vegetable garden in the back.
“Welcome to Polestar House! Pink for girls, blue for boys,” Mandy Sue said. “Get it? I picked the colors myself. Bubble gum and blueberry, ha-ha.”
“Classic,” Jules said. “Ha-ha.”
Mandy Sue twisted in the front seat to look at Jules. Her smile was brightly false. “Okay, throw your packs and duffels down on the ground!” she trilled.
“Is there a bellhop?” March asked.
“Bedbugs,” Mandy Sue said. “Nobody gets in my house with their suitcases until I make sure you’re not carrying any little hitchhikers with ya! I seal up the luggage in plastic bags and then stick ’em in the deep freeze for two days.”
“I don’t … have … bedbugs,” Jules said.
“But you lived on the street, riiigggght?”
“No, I lived in a caravan.” Jules’s voice was made of ice. “We were a traveling troupe. In the off-season I lived in a house. Just like you.”
“And I lived in an apartment,” March said. “The landlady cleaned every day.”
“There are clean clothes and a changing area in the garage. I’ll put your stuff in sealable bags. Rules! Pete, your turn.” Mandy Sue headed off to the pink house.
“Rul
es,” Pete said. “Better get used to following them. It will make things so much easier.”
“For you?” Jules asked.
“For you,” Pete said. “I promise you that.”
* * *
March changed into bright-green sweatpants that were too short and a T-shirt that advertised Mountain Dew. He looked like an overgrown leprechaun.
He stood by a splintery picnic table and looked at the back of the house. How was it possible that he’d traveled halfway around the world and ended up here in Dumpsville?
A window rattled open on the second floor, and a boy stuck his head out. He held his dreadlocks back with one hand as he let out a long gob of spit. March watched as it hit the walk just inches from his sneakers.
“Cuke Boy!” the boy yelled, and slammed the window down.
Rats would check out of this dump.
I know, Pop.
If there’s no way out, find a way.
I know.
And now for the grand tour. He joined Jules, who was standing with Pete. She was dressed in a T-shirt with a lollipop on the front and pink sweats.
“Don’t say a word,” she warned him.
Every piece of furniture was dinged, scuffed, or torn. There were locks on the closets and locks on the fridge. Peppy posters lined the halls, which said BE YOURSELF, NO ONE ELSE CAN and TRY TRY TRY UNTIL YOU DO DO DO.
“Mandy makes up the sayings and prints them on the computer,” Pete said. “She’s got a real talent.”
“Clearly,” Jules said.
March smelled antiseptic and something underneath that. Onions? Pine? Cherry mouthwash? “What is that smell?” he whispered to Jules.
“It’s the scent of ‘nobody cares,’ ” she answered.
Pete was especially proud of the “hangout room,” a paneled and ultrasueded den that smelled like mildew and popcorn, with a stained green carpet and two couches wrapped in plastic. “Mandy Sue has got a thing about bugs,” he said. He pointed to the new acquisition, a flat-screen TV.
“We have television nights on Saturdays and occasional important sports events,” Pete said. “Super Bowl and whatnot. Counselors have to approve the choice of program, and there’s a discussion of what program to watch. Majority rules.”