That’s when Kjersten got home, and came out to say hello. I was happy to see her, in spite of it feeling awkward.
“I hear you’re the school’s official Cupid,” she said with a smirk, obviously referring to the new currency of love in our school, for which I was supplying the paperwork.
“I don’t shoot the arrows, I just load the bow.”
Gunnar groaned and rolled his eyes at that. The smile Kjersten had for me faded when she looked at the big hunk of granite in the middle of our dust bowl. I had gotten so used to seeing the unfinished tombstone there, I had forgotten about it.
“You should move that thing,” Kjersten told him. “It’s an eyesore.”
“Naa,” Gunnar said. “People died in the dust bowl, so having a gravestone makes it more authentic.”
Kjersten threw me a look, but I turned away. I knew better than to put myself in the middle of this. Instead I just busied myself brushing dirt clods off my jeans.
“Are you staying for dinner?” Kjersten asked.
“No,” I told her, way too quickly. “I’m working at my dad’s restaurant tonight.” After the last Ümlaut meal, I’d rather be pushing menus and pouring water than having to sit at that table again. I think I’d rather be ON the menu than have to eat with their father, if he came home.
Kjersten must have read my mind, because she said, “It’s not always that bad.”
“Yes it is,” said Gunnar, chugging some of the hot coffee.
“Do you always have to be so negative?” Kjersten asked. I wanted to tell her that maybe she should cut her dying brother a little slack, but siding against a prospective girlfriend in any situation is unwise.
Gunnar shrugged. “I’m not being negative, I’m just telling the truth.” Then he glanced at the coffeepot. “Just like Benjamin Franklin said, ‛Truth can only be served from a scalding kettle; whether you blister or make tea is up to you.’”
Kjersten gave him a disgusted look that actually made her appear slightly less beautiful, which I hadn’t thought was possible. “My brother’s nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is.”
Then she turned to storm off.
“I’m smart enough to know where Dad goes,” said Gunnar.
It stopped Kjersten in midstorm, but only for an instant. Then she picked up her stride and continued inside, without even turning back to give Gunnar an ounce of satisfaction.
Once she was gone, Gunnar and I continued to hurl plants into Hefty bags in silence. Now that Kjersten had reminded me of the gravestone, I couldn’t stop looking at it. The elephant in the dust bowl. But for once Gunnar wasn’t obsessing over his own eventual doom. His thoughts were somewhere else entirely.
“Three times,” Gunnar said, finally breaking the silence. “Three times I checked the odometer in my dad’s car before he left and after he got back, then did the math. All three times, he traveled somewhere that was between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and forty miles away.”
It was good detective work, I guess, but was only half the job. “It doesn’t mean much if you don’t know which direction he’s going.”
“Try northwest.” Then Gunnar reached into his pocket and flipped me a red disk. “I found this in his car.” Even before I caught it, I knew what it was.
“A poker chip? He’s playing poker?”
“Probably blackjack or craps,” Gunnar said “Take a closer look.”
The chip was red with black stripes around the edge. There was an A printed in the center.
“The Anawana Tribal Casino,” Gunnar said. “And, according to MapQuest, it’s one hundred and thirty-seven miles from our front door.”
9. Echolocate This
Everybody gambles. You don’t have to go to a tribal casino to do it either. You do it every day without even realizing it. It could be as simple as skipping your math homework on Tuesday night because you know that your math teacher has cafeteria duty before class on Wednesday, so chances are homework won’t be checked, because cafeteria duty will crush the spirit of any teacher.
You gamble when you put off applying for a summer job until July 1—betting that your desire to earn money is outweighed by the fact that you probably won’t get the job anyway, so why bother wasting valuable time that could be spent not cleaning your room, or not doing the dishes, or not doing math homework on Tuesday?
The point is, every decision we make is a gamble. My parents are in the middle of a major gamble themselves. They’re risking everything on the restaurant. I admire them for it, because they’re betting on themselves, which is kind of a noble thing to do. Then, on the other hand, there are the ten lottery tickets my mom buys each week, which are just plain embarrassing.
“What’s the point?” my brother Frankie says whenever he sees one lying around. “Do you know scientists have determined that you’re more likely to get struck by lightning five times than win?” Which makes me wonder if some poor slob gets his fifth lightning strike every time someone wins the lottery, and how badly do you have to piss off God to be that guy?
“I know the odds are terrible,” Mom always says. “But I still get excited. The excitement is worth ten dollars a week.”
I guess that’s okay—but what happens when ten dollars becomes a hundred? Or a thousand? When does it become a problem? It must happen so slowly, so secretly, that nobody notices until it becomes a terminal illness of its own.
See, my parents can gamble with their restaurant and it’s okay, because hard work and talent can change the odds in your favor.
But nothing changes the odds in a casino; they got all these big fancy hotels in Vegas to prove it. The house takes back around 15 percent of all the money gambled, guaranteed. You might win a thousand bucks today and you’ll be all excited, totally forgetting that over the past year you lost a lot more than you just won.
Life is kind of like that—I guess Gunnar knew that more than anyone. All our little daily thrills don’t change the fact that our chips eventually run out. It’s the scalding pot of truth we gotta make tea out of. The tea’s pretty good most of the time, unless you’re that poor slob who got struck by lightning five times. If you’re him, I can’t help you, except to point out that your life has the noble purpose of making the rest of us feel lucky.
I didn’t know where Mr. Ümlaut was on the lightning-lottery scale, but I had a feeling he was standing in a stormy field, wearing lots of metal.
On Saturday night I was determined to put all the struggles of the Ümlaut family out of my mind entirely. This was to be a night of fun. This was my first date with Kjersten.
Of course we wouldn’t be alone—it was a double date with Lexie and Clicking Raoul. Like I said, I couldn’t turn down the chance to take Kjersten to a fancy restaurant, and Crawley’s was among the fanciest. I was quick to discover that the responsibility of dating an older woman is enough to fry all your brain cells. The logistics alone ... How are you going to travel? Does she drive you? Is that humiliating if she does? Do you take a bus, and if you do, does that make you seem cheap? Do you call a taxi and go broke from cab fare even before you get where you’re going? Or do you walk there together and have everyone snicker at you because she’s taller than you?
In the end, I settled for simply meeting her at the restaurant. My mother raised an eyebrow when I let it slip before I left that Kjersten had a car.