Spoonbenders

“It’s not like that.” But isn’t it? Everyone else is on the outside of the machine, and he’s running along under the glass, nudging the pinballs without being run over himself. He wants to tell her this. He wants to explain everything to her, but his own habit of silence is getting in the way. He wants to tell her that across town, his brother is being dragged from one boat to another.

“Oh, honey,” Cerise says. “You’re getting stressed out now. We can’t have that.” She takes his hand and puts it on her. “You have all the time you need.”

“I wish that were true,” he says.

She shushes him. “Don’t be that way.” She turns into him, and he feels Cerise’s cock harden in his grip. Even though he’s been picturing this night for years, he’s amazed every moment by what it’s like to be with another person. He thought it would be like masturbation, except a little better.

He was wrong. So, so wrong.

She says, “What else you want to try, your first day behind the wheel?”

“Everything,” he says.

Slowly, she teaches him how to please her. Yes, they have similar equipment, but they’re not the same. Cerise is Cerise. A miracle and a mystery.

He finds himself at a kitchen table, cards in his hands, three days before the Zap. Eventually they make enough noise that Matty stops pretending he’s sleeping and comes downstairs. Nobody worries about waking Teddy. He snores like a man twice his size, and his sleep is impenetrable.

Irene has made a pot of coffee, but Frankie has switched to beer and Buddy’s on his second tall glass of milk. Matty nabs the last chocolate frosted donut—that’s his favorite—and says, “So we’re having a party?”

“I thought you were grounded,” Frankie says.

Matty shoots him a worried look, but Irene is not in a rule-enforcing mood. “The game is seven-card stud,” she says to her son. “Low-high, nickel ante.”

“Nickel?” Matty says. “Pretty steep.”

“This is why you need a job,” she says.

“To lose it to you in poker?”

“Or win big,” Frankie says.

Matty looks away from Frankie, embarrassed. Covers it by hitching up his running shorts and affecting a world-weary voice. “Guess you gotta risk money to make money.”

Irene laughs, charmed by her boy, and Matty doesn’t hide his pleasure at this. Buddy’s reminded again that those two were on their own for years, a self-contained unit.

An hour from now, Buddy disappears to the top floor. He retrieves the blue envelope from the locked box in his room, the one with Matty’s name on it. Then he goes to Matty’s attic room, strips the boy’s bed, and puts on clean sheets. Frankie will have to take Matty’s room, because the new bunk beds in the basement are too small for him. Matty will fit, though. Buddy goes downstairs and unwraps a set of Kmart sheets and dresses one of the four bunk beds. In the springs of the bed above, he places the envelope and the Ziploc bag.

Then he goes up to his own room. He hopes to sleep for a few hours before resuming preparations for the Zap, including installing a new fire door for the basement.

But that’s in an hour. Now Irene deals him in. There’s no money to risk, however; everyone’s playing with handfuls of coins from Teddy’s change jar.

Buddy’s playing several games at once, in different eras. His mother asks if he’s got any sevens. Teddy leans close, his hands covering Buddy’s own tiny hands, as he shows him how to peek at the second card during the deal. A fourteen-year-old Irene, bored from babysitting duty, lays out a spider solitaire game while he watches. Frankie says, “You in or out?”

“I have two sevens,” Buddy says.

“What?”

Wrong answer. Suddenly he’s back in 1995, three days before the Zap. The end of history. There are no memories of future poker games. This is the last he will ever play. He will never win another hand from his brother, or watch his sister frown over her cards. And he will never see Cerise again.

Irene touches his arm. “Buddy?”

He tries to focus on his cards. There are no sevens in this hand, merely a loosely connected series of cards that will never become a straight or a flush, and he knows better than to try to bluff Irene. He mucks his cards, folding.

That’s okay. One less distraction. He can watch his family, all of them, play across the decades.

17 Matty

The blue envelope was tucked into the springs above his bunk bed. It was addressed to him, in black handwriting he didn’t recognize. Inside was a single page, from a yellow legal pad. The ink was faint and scratchy.