Herman shook his head. “No. He wants in, he should be here. What does it take? He lives a block away.”
“Relax, Herm,” said Cam, sitting next to him. “It’s rainin’ out. Everybody’s late when it rains. Forget about it.” Cam had lost an arm in a machine-shop accident and always said nothing would ever bother him after that. At seventy, he was tall, gaunt, and his skin was pitted from teenage acne. Still, a ready smile redeemed his otherwise working-class face and he’d tell you proudly that his teeth were all his own.
“I can’t forget about it,” Herman said. “The kid has no responsibility. If he worked for me, I’d fire him.”
Cam sat back in his chair. “Did you go to that show this weekend, for the poker chips?”
Herman nodded. “Yeah, but they’re not all poker chips. Some are casino chips, some are dealers’ chips. Some are markers. It’s all different.”
Cam smiled. “Oh, I see. Very complicated.”
“Yes, it is, and to answer your question, I got some nice chips.” Herman twisted toward the front door, showing the casino chip painted on his yarmulke. It was a gray chip that said club bingo in cheery red letters around the outside. I once asked Herman if this was sacrilegious, he said it depended on what your religion was. “Now where the hell is that goddamn kid?”
“It’s not David’s fault he’s late,” Uncle Sal said. “They work him because he’s young. They take advantage.” Sal was shorter than my father and frailer, with identical bifocals. His forearms were skinny, his elbows protruded from his short-sleeved shirt like chalky knobs, and he had a neck as stringy as a baby bird’s. Sal had never married, he was like a permanent little brother.
“What chips you buy, Herm?” Cam asked.
“I got some nice ones. One mother-of-pearl, a real pretty purple one, and I bought a new ivory. With scrimshaw.”
“Like with a boat on it?”
“Nah, got a fleur-de-lis in the middle.”
“Floor-da-what?” Sal asked.
Herman rolled his eyes. “Like a design, Sal. A French design. It’s from 1870, like you.”
My father laughed. “How much you pay for this French chip, Herman?”
“Like it’s your business?”
My father smiled. “They’re robbin’ you blind, you know that.” The plastic chips he’d been playing with fell to the table with a clatter I recalled from my childhood, when I’d go to sleep in the tiny back bedroom. They didn’t let me join the game officially until I was thirteen and had paid my dues fetching beer and pepperoni.
“They’re an investment,” Herman said. “They’re antique.”
“Hah! They’re used.”
I pitched a card at my father and it sailed like a whirligig across the table. “Dad, play nice. He’s got a hobby. You got a hobby?”
“Yeah, I read the obits, that’s my hobby. I drink coffee, that’s my hobby, too. Did you hear about Lou, Miss Fresh?”
“Lou who?”
“Terazzi, from Daly Street. Had a heart attack in the middle of dinner. Dead before his face hit the spaghetti.”
“You’re a poet, Dad.”
Cam shook his head.
“No kiddin’,” Herman said, surprised. “Lou, huh?”
Uncle Sal patted his bony forehead with a paper napkin. “It’s hot in here. The cards are gonna be sticky. I hate that, when the cards are sticky.”
“Everybody’s complainin’ tonight,” my father said.
Cam rose and got a box of Reynolds Wrap from the drawer. Not that he wanted to wrap anything, he used the box to hold his cards, in the slit behind the metal strip. “Stop your complainin’, everybody. You’re upsettin’ Vito.”
Sal looked down, examining his arthritic fingers. “I’m not complainin’, I’m just sayin’. We should get air condition.”
Herman rubbed his tummy through his T-shirt. “Vito Morrone, an air conditioner? You have to spend money.”
“Hah! I spend money, I spend plenty of money. I just don’t like air condition. I got enough time to be cold after I’m dead.”
“It’s the humidity,” Uncle Sal said quietly. “The humidity, it makes the cards sticky.”
My father frowned at him. “It’s ’cause the windows are closed, we don’t have the cross-ventilation. Every other time, we have the cross-ventilation. So stop your complainin’, Sallie.”
“I was just sayin’. It’s humid, to me, is all.”
Cam took his seat. “Stop fightin’, both of you. We’re okay without air condition. It’s not that hot, just stop talkin’ about it. So how’s the meat business, Herm?”
“Lousy. Couldn’t be worse. There used to be four hundred kosher butchers in this city. Now there’s only a handful. A handful.”
“Gotta make more Jews,” Cam said.
Herman laughed. “Don’t look at me, I did my part.” He had three daughters he loved to the marrow. It was the middle one, Mindy, who’d painted the casino chip on his yarmulke. I’d met her at her son’s bris, then later at a custody trial for the same child. She was a smart brunette, clever, and feisty enough to take on her lawyer husband, and win.
“How’s Mindy and the baby?” I asked him.
“Real good, real good. And she’s makin’ good money with the court reporting. Good money, Rita.”
“Terrific. Tell her to send me more of her business cards. Now, what are we gonna play? Seven-card? No high-low?”
Herman and Cam nodded, but my father said, “That’s all you ever want to play.”
“Sue me. Mindy will do the transcripts.”
“Seven-card it is,” Cam said. He was the best player at the table, he liked to say he beat us with one hand tied behind his back. “If my Rita wants seven-card, it’s seven-card.”
“Thanks, handsome,” I said, and he grinned.
Seven-card stud was my game. Four of the cards are showing, three are dealt facedown. It was harder than knowing none of the cards at all. Imagination, speculation, and fear rushed in to fill the gaps; the trick was to keep your illusions and reality straight. If I’d been losing my touch away from the table, I felt at home here, with Cam’s stump and Herman’s chips and Sal’s complaints. I was glad I came.
There was a buzz from the door downstairs. “That’s David,” Uncle Sal said.
“No, I thought it was Santa Claus,” my father said, getting up and shuffling downstairs.
Herman snorted. “Let him wait in the rain. I’m not going through this every week.”
“They take advantage,” Sal said again.
In a minute I could hear my father climbing the creaky stairs with David, then a clang as David dropped his umbrella into the metal can by the apartment door. I knew my father would like taking David in from the rain, I remembered him doing the same for me as a child. Unbuttoning my red boots, popping the loop of elastic around the button, then tugging off my damp socks. Laying them out on the radiator in the living room, where they dried into cottony arched backs, with a ridge down the middle like a spine.
“Sorry, I’m late,” David said as he came into the room in a damp polo shirt and unstructured sport jacket. He looked at me in surprise. “What are you doing here, Rita?”
“Waiting to kick some wrinkly butts.”
Cam laughed. “Oh yeah?”
“Hah!” my father said. “I got an ass like a baby.”
But David kept looking at me. “I thought with the harassment suit, you’d be-”
“I took the night off.”
“I just heard about that woman, the plaintiff.”
“Siddown, kid,” Herman said. “I’m waiting for the shoe to drop here.”
“What’d you hear?” I asked. “That she was a Girl Scout, a budding Cassatt, or-”
“You don’t know?” David pulled out his vinyl chair.
“Know what?”
“She’s dead.”
“Dead?” I said, stunned.