“Hi.” Ellen gave the room a smile but saved a special finger wave for me that seemed to say, We’re both female!
She wore a loose sweater—gold, with white stars—blue jeans, and canvas Keds. She had on very little makeup, if any, and her brown hair was cut short and might have looked stylish on another woman’s face. Ace had fooled me back at the park on Wednesday with his How many kids do I have? nonsense, but this time I was certain I was dealing with the parent of small children.
Still annoyed at myself for dismissing her so quickly, I went over and made a point of shaking her hand firmly, saying, “Nice to meet you, Ellen. I’m Natalie.” She smiled politely.
“You said there’d be six,” Ace said to Carlo. I knew what annoyed him. Fewer players meant smaller pots, and we had come a long way. “What about Hank and Roy?”
“Roy’s sick,” Ethan said. “And Hank forgot about some event at his kid’s school.”
Ace bit his lip. “Still, I would think …” But that was all we would learn about what he thought, because he went over to the drink table and unscrewed the cap from a bottle of tonic.
“What do you do, Ellen?” I asked.
“I teach kindergarten in Flemington.”
“I guess you like kids.” I always felt uncomfortable talking to mothers, who seemed to belong to a tribe with laws I wasn’t privy to and grievances I didn’t understand.
“Actually, they’re pretty gross a lot of the time.” She smiled. “But they’re sweet. They keep me young.”
The opposite seemed true. Her eyes looked tired and her mouth had permanent frown lines. I’d have guessed she was only a few years older than me, but children had aged her face and wreaked havoc on her fashion sense.
“Flemington’s what? A couple of hours away?” Ace asked, the vodka tonic in his cup fizzing.
“Thereabouts,” she said. “But I hadn’t seen Ethan and Margie in a while, and I like driving.” Her smile came and went in a single second. “I’m going to visit the ladies’ room, if you don’t mind.” She headed toward the rear of the shop.
Once she was out of earshot, Ethan said, “She’s in the middle of an ugly divorce.”
“I don’t like people watching the game,” Ace said.
I glanced over at the restroom. “Ugly how?”
“Oh, the usual nonsense,” Ethan said. “Husband’s an ass but wants custody. Just your typical awfulness. She needed a night away. Her mother’s watching the kids.”
“She’s gonna play, though, right?” Ace asked.
“Yeah, I’m gonna cover her,” Ethan said. “I taught her to play years ago. She isn’t half bad.” He smiled. “Okay, maybe half bad.” He gestured toward the food and drink. “You guys help yourself. Natalie, what’s your line of work?”
I told Ethan the story Ace and I came up with in the car. “I’m an events coordinator for a couple of hotels.” I’d performed in enough venues over the years to talk coherently about this.
“She hired me for one of those one-night poker courses,” Ace chimed in from the food table, “for a bunch of Merck executives. When she told me she had a regular game in college, I knew we’d be friends.”
I wished he hadn’t said “college.” I wasn’t ready to improvise a whole undergraduate experience. But no one asked. As we chatted and poured drinks and filled our small plates with cheese and bread, I couldn’t help taking note of the diverse agendas at the card table: Carlo’s need to recoup his losses; Ace’s need to make the trip to A.C. worth his while; Ethan’s desire for an entertaining night, to play host, and to take his niece’s mind off her domestic problems; Ellen’s need to escape her life, and her kids, for a few hours; my own need to see Ace in action, to gather the raw material for my magazine article. We had only one thing in common. We would all try to win.
But Ace would win, because the game would be rigged.
He was the first to sit down. I didn’t want to sit immediately to his right, because then I’d be the one cutting his cards. I didn’t want my presence to affect what he did—to make it harder or easier. So I sat down opposite him, where I could watch his play head-on.
Carlo sat to Ace’s right, and then Ellen asked, “We just sit anywhere?” After being told by Ethan that anywhere was fine, she sat to my left. His guests situated, Ethan took the last spot at the table, between me and Ace.
Ellen’s hands, I noticed, were dry and cracked, no doubt from being washed a hundred times a day. Her fingernails were ragged and bitten down. She caught me watching her hands, and I looked away.
“Do you play euchre, Natalie?” she asked.
“Euchre? No.”
“It’s such a great game,” she said. “If everyone gets tired of playing poker, we could switch to that.” She glanced around at the other players. “I’ll teach anyone who doesn’t know how. It’s not hard to learn.”
“I think we’re probably gonna stick with poker tonight,” Ace said in a voice that I suspected was him trying not to sound utterly condescending.
Ellen’s head lowered. She had come all this way, and now there’d be no euchre.
Fortunately, I knew how to make everything right again. “How old are your kids?” I asked.
They were three and five. And such rascals! She found a picture on her phone of the two of them and passed the phone around the table. We learned about Jenna’s recent fear of earthquakes and Nathan’s love of bugs.
“His favorite lately?” She lowered her voice as if telling the punch line of the world’s crudest joke. “It’s the dung beetle.”
Finally, the game got under way. We were playing $2/$4 no-limit Hold’em. A generation ago, the popular game was seven card stud. Now everyone played Hold’em. First you were dealt two cards, facedown. Then came three community cards—the “flop”—followed by another community
