Chapter 12
JENNA WAS HAVING SUNDAY lunch with her father in a real restaurant, the kind with cloth napkins. "How's your chicken?" Stuart d her. "Delicious," she replied. Of course she'd eaten chicken before, many times, but she'd never had it like this, in a sauce with small mushrooms.
Her father was eating some kind of fish. There were a lot of little bones that he had to keep picking out, which would have driven Jenna crazy, but he didn't seem to mind. A man like Stuart Kelley, who had once lived alone on a beach for a month and had fished for his own meals every day, wouldn't be bothered by a few bones. His life had been so amazing!
"Did you really work on an African safari?" she asked him.
"Only for a couple of weeks," he said. "And it wasn't one of those heavy-duty hunting safaris."
This was something else she liked about him--he didn't brag about everything he'd done. He was matter-of-fact about his adventures.
"Good," Jenna said in relief. "I don't like the idea of killing animals." She looked down at her plate. "I eat them, though. I guess that makes me kind of a hypocrite."
"I feel exactly the same way," Stuart confided, and once again, Jenna had that warm, happy feeling she'd been experiencing a lot lately. They had so much in common!
She had one worry, though. How could a man who'd been living such an exciting life suddenly move here and settle down with a regular job and a family? Because that was now her fantasy, and as hard as she tried to let her natural pessimism and distrust have an impact, the stories kept playing out in her head. A house with a yard. A mother, a father, maybe a dog, maybe even a little brother or sister …
"Stu? Stu Kelley?"
A red-faced man in a bright Hawaiian shirt had stopped by their table. Her father rose.
"Arnie! Good to see you!" The two men shook hands.
"What's it been--ten years? More?" the man asked. "How long are you in town for?"
"I'm not sure," Stuart said. He turned and gave Jenna a wink. "Depends on how things work out."
"What are you doing these days?"
"Not much. I'm between jobs at the moment. The money's running out, though, so I have to start looking around."
Once again, Jenna felt a rush of admiration. He didn't have much money, but he'd scraped together enough to take his daughter out to lunch in a restaurant where you didn't have to stand in line at a counter. She made a mental note not to order dessert.
The florid man nodded toward the opposite end of the restaurant. "Well, if you've still got a few bucks and you feel lucky, you might be interested in the back room."
"The back room?"
"There's a regular poker game there every Sunday afternoon. Nice guys, and the stakes aren't too high.
I'm on my way there now. Want to join us?"
"No thanks," Stuart said. "I'm spending the day with my daughter." He introduced them. Stuart and the big man promised each other to stay in touch, and Arnie took off for his game in the back room.
"Is poker a hard game to play?" Jenna asked.
"Not really. It's hard to win, though. It depends a lot on the cards you're dealt, so luck is a major factor. And reading minds."
Jenna's eyes widened. "Reading minds?"
Stuart laughed. "Not literally, Jenna. Have you ever heard the expression poker face?"
"No."
"It's when someone's expression tells you nothing about what they're thinking. It comes from the fact that in poker, frequently you have to bluff and pretend your cards are better or worse than they really are so that the other players will bet or raise or fold the way you want them to--so you can win."
She didn't know what he meant by raising or folding, but she got the general idea. "You have to guess what the other people are holding?"
"Exactly. And if the players have good poker faces, it's not easy. How about some dessert?"
"No thank you," Jenna said properly.
He didn't want any dessert either, so he called for the check, and the waiter brought it to the table. "Now, what would you like to do this afternoon? How about a movie?" He opened his wallet and took out some money. Jenna could see that there was very little left. She tried to think of something they could do that wouldn't cost anything.
"Do you know what I'd really like to do? See a real poker game."
Stuart was surprised. "Why?"
"I like card games, and I want to see how it works."
Stuart smiled. "I'm afraid it's not a spectator sport. Those guys in the back room aren't going to want us watching them."
"What if you played?" Jenna asked. "Would they let me sit with you?"
He looked at her in amusement. "You really want to do that?"
She bobbed her head up and down vigorously. He shrugged.
"We can ask."
In the back room, there was a pool table, a foosball machine, and a couple of tables where people were playing cards. When Arnie looked up and saw Stuart and Jenna, he waved them over.
"Hey, we're just about to start a new round. Want to join in?"
"Do you mind if my kid sits with me?" Stuart asked.
One of the other men grinned. "As long as she's only looking at your cards."
Stuart pulled over two chairs and they sat down. Jenna winced as he added what little was left in his wallet to the pot, and the cards were dealt.
Jenna wasn't exactly sure what was going on--all the calling and raising meant nothing to her. But after a while, some things became clear. The cards that a player was holding were called a hand, and the best hand won the game. Sometimes, though, people would pretend to have a better hand than they really did so that the other players would give up. That was the bluffing part.
Only nobody seemed to be bluffing in this game, and it was all kind of boring. Jenna realized she had made a mistake--card games were only fun when you yourself were playing them. Like her father said, poker wasn't a spectator sport.
She found a magazine in the corner and brought it back to her chair. It was about cars and wasn't any more interesting than the poker game, so once again she indulged in fantasies about her future life. She wondered how her mother would feel about her ex-husband's return. Would she be happy? She never talked about Stuart or expressed any interest or curiosity in where he was or what he was doing. Probably because she thought she'd never see him again. She was in for a big surprise . . .
"Jenna? What do you think?"
She shoved aside her daydreams and turned to her father.
"What?"
"Everyone's folded--it's just me and Mr. Clifford there. What I don't know is whether or not Mr. Clifford has a better hand than I do."
She glanced at her father's hand. It looked pretty good to her--three aces, two kings. But if Mr. Clifford had something like four aces and a king, it didn't matter--Stuart would lose and Mr. Clifford would get that pile of money in the center of the table.
"Take a look at him," her father urged her. "Do you think he's bluffing?"
She looked at the man across the table. He seemed friendly, with bushy eyebrows and a broad smile. She didn't have the slightest idea what kind of cards he had--he held them close, like all the players, and all she could see was the back of them. Too bad she didn't have x-ray vision.
But she did, in a way. Even if she couldn't see the actual cards, Mr. Clifford was probably thinking about them.
She was pretty sure it wasn't the right thing to do, but she couldn't resist. It would be so awful for Stuart to lose the little money he had left. So she did her thing.
And she was right about what was going on in Mr. Clifford's thoughts. There they were, spread out in her mind--two aces, two jacks, and a ten. She didn't know the value for sure, but it seemed to her that her father's hand was stronger.