“Listen,” I said, “I gotta run. Maybe we can stay in touch?”
“Yeah, it doesn’t work that way.” All the energy had left her voice. “All right, Natalie, you take care of yourself.” The phone went silent.
I shouldn’t have stormed out of your shop last week. You’ve always been there for me, and without you I would have nothing. You saw something worthwhile in a depressed and lonely kid and gave me confidence and were always on my side, and I’m sorry. And by the way, you were right. The whole idea of profiling a cheat—that was dumb. I’ve got better uses for my time.
I rehearsed several versions of an apology until the moment I entered the dark store, and then the jangle of the sleigh bells shook them all away. It was Tuesday morning. Jack sat on a stool behind the glass counter with a notebook in front of him. He often sat there with a pencil and notebook, I’d noticed over the years—checking and rechecking the math, I supposed, that proved his business was still tanking.
“I am becoming more like him,” I said.
“Like who?”
“My dad.”
He put down the pencil and shut the notebook. “Forget what I said.”
“You were right. I’m becoming more like him. He cared about things. He was actually alive before he was dead.”
“It was a cheap shot. I was aggravated. I’m an ass.”
“No—you’re a crotchety jerk. There’s a big difference.”
He slid the pencil into the spiral rings of the notebook and set it down. “You want a soda?”
“Actually, I was hoping we could talk through a routine I need to prepare. You know, for the World of Magic convention? Where I’ll be performing in a couple of weeks?”
After a moment of confusion, he smiled, something I hadn’t seen him do in a long time. I’d forgotten how bad his teeth were.
“Good for you,” he said, and then his smile vanished. “You know the shithead is one of the directors of the conference now?”
No, I hadn’t known. I shrugged. “I don’t care one way or the other. It doesn’t matter.”
He nodded. “Atta girl.”
I almost made it big. That’s the truth. I was seventeen. My dad had been dead for two years, and during that time I had thrown myself into magic for the same reasons so many other kids do—to have control over something, to be mysterious, to avoid whatever needed avoiding. But unlike most kids who dabble for a few years before stuffing their gear into the back of their bedroom closet, I had Jack Clarion for a teacher. So all my practice happened to be the right kind of practice. It led somewhere. I shut myself in my room and woodshedded, and I got pretty good pretty fast. Then Jack goes and registers me for the WOM convention and enters me in the close-up contest without telling me about it first. One day I walk into his store for a lesson and he says, Guess what you’re doing next month? I suppose he saw something in me. We rode the train together to the city and spent the day attending lectures and shows. I’d been to New York only a couple of times before that, and I was anxious about everything and certain I was going to get mugged. My mother had pretty much guaranteed I would. The only thing I wasn’t nervous about was the time I’d be onstage. I was too young and naive to be worried about that.
I came in second that year. The guy who won, Mick Shane, deserved to win. His close-up performance was inventive and as smooth as silk. He isn’t a household name, but who is, among laymen, except for David Copperfield and David Blaine and Criss Angel and Penn and Teller? And they all do stage acts. They might have started in close-up, but they moved on to bigger things: bigger props, bigger stages, bigger pay. But magicians all know Mick. He’d been around a long time and never changed his focus from close-up magic with everyday objects. He was an inspiring artist, and I was honored to have come in second to him.
And coming in second to Mick Shane was enough to earn me plenty of attention. I was young and clever and skilled, the girl who’d outperformed hundreds of grown men. Before the weekend was out, I had a booking agent. Before the month was out, that agency had lined me up with a dozen corporate and private gigs.
They were flying me places: Seattle, San Francisco, Cancún, even London. My mother couldn’t believe it. They paid her way, too, since I was a minor. We traveled together that year. My mother liked to talk as if she were worldly and well traveled, but all her travels were to places like Dollywood and Ocean City, Maryland. So boarding a plane and heading abroad—this was new for both of us. It was wonderful. It began to seem impossible that my life could be otherwise.
Then the next WOM convention came along, and being eighteen, a full-fledged adult, I insisted on going alone. I won the close-up contest that year. Grand prize. And guess who came in second? Mick was a very gracious runner-up, paying me compliments and inviting me for coffee. We talked about magic in a way I’d never talked about it with anybody, not even with Jack. He told me which moves he—he—hadn’t mastered yet, and he guessed how I did one of the tricks in my performance, where I passed a pencil through a glass of water. His guess was about half right, and I didn’t mind telling him what he’d gotten wrong, because he was
