I didn’t say anything.
“You’ve been in that space every day for three weeks,” he went on. “I’m not watching you spend all of Thanksgiving break in there like that.”
I leaned back in my chair, looking at the wall I hadn’t stopped adjusting since Tuesday. “I’m working,” I said.
“You’re circling,” he replied. “Different activity.”
I let out a breath.
“Be there at two,” he said. “This is not a request.”
Leon had been Marcus’s college teammate and spent twenty years in New York doing something in finance that Marcus described as extremely legal with a tone I had learned not to examine too closely, and had come back to Philadelphia three years ago and bought a house in East Oak Lane with a porch that wrapped around two sides and something to say about everything.
By the time I pulled up, the front gate was already open. Voices carried from the side of the house, the type of conversation that didn’t stop when somebody new walked in. I followed it around back.
Leon’s porch sat just high enough off the ground to catch whatever breeze was moving through, screened in on three sides with an outdoor heater keeping the space comfortable, a long table set up with cards already in play. Two hanging plants leaned toward the light, one of them half alive, and a speaker somewhere behind us was running something with a bass line that stayed under everything else.
“Look who decided to come outside,” Marcus said without looking up.
Leon stood from his chair, dapped me up, pulled me in with the other hand. “About time,” he said. “You been hiding.”
“I’ve been working,” I said.
“That’s what he said,” Marcus muttered.
I knew three of them. Leon, Marcus, and Kyle, who taught history at Temple and carried himself like a man who had been in a long argument with the past and had nointention of losing it. The other two I met there, Big Ray, compact and steady, and Darius, who had already formed an opinion about me before I sat down and would revise it in real time depending on how I played.
“Sit,” Leon said, sliding a chair back with his foot. “You with Kyle.”
I dropped into the seat, picked up the cards Big Ray pushed toward me, the deck still warm from his hands.
Kyle showed himself quick, not in the cards but in the way he moved through them, steady, no wasted motion, and I adjusted within a couple hands so we didn’t have to say anything about it. Marcus played the way Marcus always played, somewhere between instinct and belief, like the game might reward him for confidence alone.
Big Ray shuffled once, twice, then dealt, cards snapping against the table. I picked mine up, fanned them out, started sorting.
“Go ahead,” Kyle said under his breath. “Tell us what you about to do.”
Marcus barely glanced at his hand. “Give me four.”
Kyle let out a quiet laugh. “Already?”
“I know what I got.”
“You absolutely do not.”
Big Ray didn’t look up. “Call it.”
Kyle glanced at me. I gave him a number. He nodded, then looked back at Marcus.
“That four about to hurt us,” he said.
Marcus leaned back like he had already decided how this was going to go. “Play the hand.”
We played it out. First book, clean. Second, a reach. Third, Marcus cut early. Kyle glanced at me once.
“You ain’t have to do that.”
“I did.”
