“You any good at poker?” I ask her.
She turns her head toward me, her cheeks taking on a slight pink hue, and she answers the poster of a sunny Wisconsin day plastered to the wall above my head.
It’s progress.
First time I saw her after the incident that I pretend didn’t happen, she ducked, turned, tried to cross the street, and almost got run over by the garbage truck. Hasn’t looked me in the eye since.
“I brought cash,” she tells the poster. “Is two thousand enough for a buy-in?”
Two thousand.
We usually play with fifty bucks each, and that’s on the weeks we’re feeling rich.
“We know you’ve got cash,” Jane says. “We need to know if you can play or if this is going to be boring.”
Tavi’s dog barks twice.
“Shh, Pebbles, Mommy’s got this,” she says to the fluffy little creature as she scratches its head. Then she reaches up to her face like she wants to adjust the sunglasses she’s not wearing tonight and smiles at Jane again. “I got stuck in a poker game in Russia once with my friend Svetlana, and I thought they were playing in rubles, but it turns out they were playing in dollars, and ten thousand dollars is a lot more than ten thousand rubles, so since none of us had more than five thousand in cash on us, we had to get our hosts drunk, which issuperhard to do when you’re in Russia, by the way, and it involved a lot of dancing and a lot of faking taking vodka shots myself, and in the end, I walked away with three phone numbers, and Svetlana got married to one of them six months later.”
Willie Wayne, Ridhi, and Jane all frown at her.
I swipe a hand over my mouth to cover a grin. “All right then. Here. Sit in for me.”
“Dylan,”Jane hisses.
“I’ll spit in your eggs if you don’t sit your ass down right now,” Ridhi tells me.
I ignore them both and look at Tavi again as I rise and offer her my chair. “What’s your poison? I’ll fix you a drink.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she replies to my left ear.
It’s progress.
Don’t really like it when people don’t want to talk to me.
I’m about as harmless as a cotton ball—these days, anyway—unless you’re a clogged toilet or a drippy sink, and I intentionally have the memory of a goldfish.
Forget all kinds of things I don’t want to remember.
Like what happened that’s making Tavi Lightly unable to look me in the face.
“It’s the rules,” I tell her. “Have to have a drink if you’re gonna play poker. Keeps the playing field level.”
“Level as that second pool table at Ladyfingers,” Ridhi murmurs.
Tavi’s nose wrinkles at the spread of alcohol on the counter. “Do you have any vegan, sugar-free light beer?”
Ridhi shuffles the deck. “We have vodka. You want to play, you’ll have vodka too.”
“Okay. Vodka it is.” Tavi beams at Ridhi and Jane again. “And I promise I’ll keep up. No questions. For real. About the game, I mean. I havesomany questions about Tickled Pink and all of you who live here. This seems like such a great chance to get to know you better. And I really do want to get to know you all better. I was so overwhelmed when we got here, especially when I realized my new home neededsomuch work, but now it’s, like, time to really dig in and be part of the community, you know?”
“Only thing you need to know is that if you breathe a word of anything that happens tonight to anyone, we’ll be breathing word of what you’re up to all over the tabloids.”
Can’t fault Ridhi for saying it.
If the rest of the town knew we ran secret poker games in a secret bunker one Thursday night a month, we’d have to find a new night.
And a new bunker.
