“No,” he agrees. “Are you the girl I knew?”
“You’ll never find out.”
He tilts his head to the side, as if demurring. Too much of a gentleman to tell me I’m wrong. Except he’s no gentleman. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to speak to your father.”
My heart thuds. “Why?”
“He owes me money.”
Oh God. Daddy, what have you done? “He doesn’t.”
I’m only delaying the inevitable, but I can’t think right now. Can’t deal with the fact that we have rent due in two days and barely enough money to cover it. How will we pay back hundreds of dollars?
Damon looks to the side a little. As if he’s embarrassed by my horror. Or maybe bored. He straightens the cuffs of his fine white shirt, perfectly tailored to his broad chest and narrow waist. He might be waiting in the eaves for an opera to begin, so casually refined.
“How dare you?” I whisper, waiting for him to meet my eyes, daring him.
He glances back at me, one dark eyebrow raised. “Pardon?”
“You know he doesn’t have a way to pay you back. How dare you loan him money? Charging insane interest rates he’ll never be able to afford. How dare you?”
A small laugh. “Would you have preferred I told him no? He would have gone straight to my father, who would have charged him higher interest than I did.”
“I hate you,” I say, tears stinging my eyes. “I hate you both.”
“And it’s not quite true that he doesn’t have a way to pay the money back.”
The silence spins out in brutal possibility. “How?”
“He has you.”
Part II
The King
Chapter Seven
When I first came to live with Daddy he worked in a prison-release program at Goodwill. He would pick things out of the donation piles to bring home. A Barbie with her hair cut jagged. A half-empty box of tinker toys. It was when he brought home the Rubik’s Cube that we hit the jackpot.
Some of the stickers had been torn or smudged away, but the colors were still visible. Only one sticker was gone completely, but a quick count of the sides told me it was yellow.
I sat down in front of the armchair, still worn and lumpy then. My legs crisscrossed, my heart pumping. And in twenty minutes solved the cube for the first time.
Daddy watched with a strange look in his eyes.
When I was done he turned the columns this way and that, trying his best to make sure no two colors were side by side. This time I already had practice. It took fifteen minutes.
So many evenings we sat like that, him messing up the cube, me putting it right.
That was before he lost the job at Goodwill, before he turned heavy to gambling. Before I met Damon Scott and began to hide what I could do.
Though I guess we’re still in old patterns. Daddy messing things up.
Me putting it right.
I can tell Daddy’s home before I put my key in the lock. Something about the air feels heavy with despair, with guilt—though maybe that’s just wishful thinking. I want him to be sorry for what he’s done. But the only thing I feel when I feed my addiction, when I breathe in the sharp tang of numbers is relief.
He sits in his lumpy armchair, the secondhand metal cane leaning against the side.
My feet seem to slow down as I approach him. As much as I need to have this confrontation, as many questions and accusations are swirling inside me, I wish I were anywhere but here.
I don’t bother to sit on the lumpy couch or the wooden coffee table with a crack down the side. Instead I sit down at his feet, crossing my legs. In the same place I sat so many times. The same way I did when I was a little girl.
That’s how I feel right now. Small and helpless.
In Daddy’s eyes I find terrible confirmation.
“I’m sorry,” he says gruffly.
“I don’t understand. Why would you borrow from Damon Scott?” When his lips press together, my heart stops. “Oh God. You owe someone else.”
He shakes his head, as if struggling to understand it himself. “I thought if I could pay off the debt with Damon Scott I’d have more time. So I borrowed from someone else. Pretty soon I owed almost everyone in the city money.”
“Almost?” I say, my voice tight.
Where I felt a surge of emotion with Damon Scott, there’s only emptiness. A blissful numbness that spreads from my heart to my fingers. It’s a relief, however temporary.
His eyes sharpen. “I didn’t borrow from Jonathan Scott.”
“You wanted to.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway, whether I borrowed from him or not. There’s no way I can survive this. Not with the amount of money on the line.”
“Damon Scott talked to me.”
Daddy surges up in a surprising show of strength, before making a cry of pain and falling back into the chair. “That bastard. Did he touch you?”
That small amount of protectiveness makes my heart squeeze. This is what I wanted. Someone to care about me, someone for me to care about. Without having to worry about kneecaps breaking.
How is it that some people get huge trees of family, aunts and uncles and cousins? A flick of a DNA strand, a twist of fate. And here I am, almost alone. Except for one person.
I can’t quite meet that person’s eyes. “Damon might be willing to help.”
“He’s no better than his father,” Daddy snarls. “Leaning on family like that. He’s not supposed to do that. He’s never done it before. And with you still a child.”
A child? Not really. There are enough men in the diner who stare at me to know they see me as a woman. And Jessica’s barely older than me, her body just as slender despite having given birth only eight months ago. We grow up early in the west side.
The Rubik’s Cube is long gone, lost to the vagaries of childhood. Maybe left behind in the trailer outside of town. But my fingers clench together all the same, longing for something to solve.
A puzzle that’s guaranteed to have an answer.
“What will we do?” I ask softly.
“I have a plan,” he says, gruff, almost glad.
“But how—”
“It’s better if you don’t know.”
“Tell me.”
“There’s this big game.”
Dread slithers down my spine, thick and cold. “No way.”
“The pot is huge, Penny. It could pay off all the debts and still have more.”
“You have to win.”
“With your help I would. If you were there—”
“You don’t think anyone would notice?” Counting cards isn’t allowed, which has never made sense to me. As if I could stop counting them. But any sort of signals I made would definitely be caught.
“The game isn’t for six months,” he says. “We have plenty of time to practice them.”
“And what would I be doing at a high-stakes game?” Even in the twisted sex world of Tanglewood, the fifteen-year-old daughter of a player would not be allowed into the private room. There are rules, which is why I couldn’t help him in the big games.
He’s silent in that way that’s filled with words. With guilty admissions. “You’d be in the room if you were my buy-in.”