“Set that check on the table,” he said, “so we can both see it.”
One hundred and eight thousand dollars wasn’t an amount I could fathom. We were suddenly rich. But my father shook his head. “Jesus Aitch,” he said, “that right there is all they think I’m worth?”
I didn’t know what to say. I knew the they in his sentence referred to the company he used to work for, and to the insurance agent he was always yelling at over the phone, but I knew it also referred to the whole world that had conspired against him, and that included me.
“I’m gonna go back upstairs, okay?” I said.
By then my mother had started taking me to Jack Clarion’s magic shop a couple of afternoons a week so she could spend a secret hour with the man who ran the secondhand furniture store at the end of the strip mall. When I was at home I would hide out in my bedroom for long stretches, listening to CDs and practicing card flourishes and coin drops. Some were the moves Jack showed me. Others came from the books he convinced my mother to buy for me—Modern Coin Magic, The Royal Road to Card Magic—dense books that confused me but filled me with wonder over secrets that felt as deep as the earth. The books, like the practicing, took me someplace safer, someplace else. I would read and practice, practice and read, and hope that my parents had forgotten I was in the house. I would hear the rise and fall of their voices—commands, rebukes, apologies, the choked-back sounds that contained deeper truths—but I’d be afraid to raise the volume on my CD player, afraid to remind them that the root of all their troubles was one flight up the stairs. Sleight of hand is a quiet activity. Playing cards make a gentle riffle like birds taking flight. Sponge balls make no noise. Even a dropped coin lands softly on thick bedroom carpet. I balanced a small mirror on my bed and watched my hands learn new moves that I would repeat over and over, hundreds of times, and then it would be dinner and then it would be bedtime.
On the night my father’s check came, I stayed up in my bedroom until the pizza arrived. In the kitchen, I put two slices onto a plate and carried it back upstairs with me. Then I remained in my room until after I heard my mother come home, when my father called me downstairs to see the limousine parked out front.
“Put your shoes on, Natalie,” he said. And to my mother: “Just me and the kid.”
“What is this?” my mother asked.
“It’s a car,” he said. “Natalie, get your coat.”
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Honey, please. I said just me and Natalie.”
He took me to Atlantic City. By the time we arrived it was late but no part of me was sleepy. At the Showboat casino he told the security man, “She’s my hands.” He had me reach into his pocket for the check and show it.
“So what do you think of that check?” he asked once we were inside the casino.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t mean anything other than what I asked. What do you think about it?”
I knew I was supposed to say something, so I went with the obvious. “It’s so much money.”
He shook his head. “No. That’s where you’re wrong. It isn’t nearly enough. But I’ll bet my lawyer has a new summer home.”
I followed my father to the chip counter, where, after speaking with several employees, he was allowed to exchange the check for chips. He told the attendant to put them into one of the white buckets stacked on the counter. “Carry this for me, Nat, will you? That’s my girl.” He smiled at me, a real smile, and my whole body warmed up. I didn’t understand exactly why we were there, but his smile, so rare these days, was worth the whole trip.
In the middle of the vast room, where machines bleeped and buzzed and sang all around us, he bent down to my level—I was still several inches shorter than he was—and put his head so close to mine we were almost touching.
“Being a grown-up,” he said to me, “means being willing to commit to a thing. Do you understand?”
I nodded. He waited a moment, maybe hoping for more, but I had no more.
“The way I figure it,” he said, “I’m due at least twice this much.”
Although I’d figured out by then that he drank too much and picked fights with other men because it was his way of hurting himself—even a thirteen-year-old could figure that out—I wouldn’t fully understand until much later how badly he needed to prove to his only daughter that he remained a man of action and strength, a hero who fought on. I knew then only that his breath smelled like pepperoni pizza and his green eyes were pleading with me to agree with him.
“Definitely,” I said, my heart beating almost as fast as it had a year earlier, in the moments after the steel doors had slammed home. “You’re right, Dad,” I said. “You’re owed at least that.”
I had no idea what the hell I was talking about, but my words must have been the right ones because my father’s lips curved into a satisfied smile. “I’m glad you feel that way,” he said, putting his arm around me. I felt the warm weight of his ruined hand on my shoulder, and I didn’t even
