“Or they’re going to break more than my finger,” he said.
Sylvia thought she might be sick, and she realized she was squeezing the glass pill bottle in her hand. “What about these?” she asked accusingly, holding the bottle up to him as if this bit of evidence could somehow change things, as if it could give him some other reasonable explanation.
He looked confused. “Where did you get those? They’re my blood-pressure pills.” Suddenly she couldn’t stay in the same room as him. She threw the pill bottle across the desk to him and walked out of the house, got back in her car, and with shaky hands drove away so she could think.
His father had been a gambler. Walter had told her that when he was a boy, his father used to bring him along to the numerous properties he owned on the island to collect rent from the tenants, and they’d often end up at the Green Dragon on the peninsula. After a drink or two at the bar, his father would head upstairs for one of his not-so-secret poker games, and Walter would be left at the bar for hours. He waseleven at the time, but eventually the bartender gave him the job of ice chipper—breaking the slab down with a pick so that the chips would fit into a glass. He heard a lot while he was chipping away at that slab, and, as he got a few years older, he was allowed to go upstairs and sit in on some of the card games.
Just as he’d taken over his father’s businesses and properties, when his dad passed away, Walter had also stepped right into his father’s seat at the poker table. It had seemed natural to him: He knew what to do and he knew how to win. But when Sylvia and Walter married and had Judith, she’d asked him to stop. She knew too well what it was to be poor and she wanted those days behind her. There were times over the years when she’d suspected that he had gone back to the table, but as far as she knew, his interest had waned. She now felt like a complete fool.
Without even realizing that she’d driven herself back to the club, she pulled her pink-and-cream Dodge La Femme into the parking lot. Walter had surprised her with this car for Christmas. Pink paint job, pink steering wheel and dashboard, it even came with a pink purse, complete with pink cigarette case, lighter, comb, and lipstick holder, which all fit neatly into the back of the seat. “She’s a beauty for my beautiful wife,” he’d said on Christmas morning as he handed her the keys. “I wanted you to be one of the first to have a car made especially for a woman.” If they’d really wanted to cater this car to women, she grumbled to herself as she wrangled her pink beast into one of the parking spaces, they should have made it smaller and easier to drive. She killed the engine and sat there, hands still fixed to the smooth leather steering wheel.
How could he upend their life like this? Everything had been so perfect. Judith was doing well, the new club was making steady progress, or so she thought, and they were about to gear up for Bal Week, hosting the grand finale, the Bathing Beauty Contest, at the end of the week, just as they always did. How could they go on now as if nothing had happened? And their house, their home—where she’d lived since her wedding night, where she’d nursed Judith as a baby, where she’d raised her, hosted birthday parties, hosted every other imaginable soiree—surely hewas wrong about the house. My God, they needed a place to live, didn’t they? And what would people say if their beautiful bayfront home, that coveted corner lot, was suddenly up for sale? No one would believe it. This wasn’t happening, it couldn’t happen. She pressed her head to the steering wheel and closed her eyes, willing it to all just be a bad dream.
