She shuffled. Dealt.
“How’s the painting,” he said, arranging his hand.
She drew and set it in her hand. “It isn’t.”
“What do you mean it isn’t?”
“I mean I haven’t painted. The canvas has been on the easel since the night of your knee and I haven’t touched it.”
He looked at her over his cards. “What’s it of?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“You put up a canvas without knowing what you’re painting?”
“Sometimes that’s how it works. You put up the canvas and you mix a color and you wait for the painting to tell you what it is.”
“And it hasn’t told you.”
“Not yet.”
He drew. Looked at it. Set it in his hand.
“It will,” he said.
She didn’t answer. She drew, discarded and they kept playing.
The afternoon light came through the front window first, crossed the floor in a slow rectangle, reached the table by four, and by five was on the wall behind the stove, turning the white cabinets the color of warm bread.
“Do you remember the storm?” she asked. “Seventy-nine. The big one. The one that took out the pier.”
“Of course I remember the storm that took out the pier. I lost the newsstand awning.” He set down a card. “The whole front panel. Flew off in the middle of the night. I found it two blocks up on someone’s lawn.”
“I sandbagged the Shack until three in the morning.”
“I know. I helped you.”
She looked at him. “You did not.”
“I came over around midnight. You were hauling bags from the back and the water was already at the curb. I stacked the south wall. You told me to do the doorframe next.”
She put her cards down. She could see the night—the rain, the dark, the water—but she couldn’t find him in it.
“I don’t remember that,” she said.
“It was dark. And you were busy.” He looked at his hand instead of at her. “The water went down around three. You told me to go home. I would have stayed.”
Margo’s hands didn’t move. She sat with the queen of spades and the four of diamonds and a run of hearts she’d been building for three draws and she looked at this man across the table and tried to find him in the rain and the dark of a night decades ago. She couldn’t. But he’d been there.
She picked up her cards and didn’t look at him.
“That was a long time ago,” she said.
“It was.”
She knocked. He laid down. She wrote the score.
By five-thirty her column read 94 and his read 67 and the light on the wall behind the stove had gone from warm bread to gold.
