Empire Falls

Comeau always looked like he was trying to figure out not how his opponent happened to be winning so much as how he was cheating, and Janine wondered if this sly, distrustful expression might be responsible for his nickname. Certainly it always made Janine want to take him aside and explain exactly how he was being cheated. “He’s smarter than you, Walt,” she’d have liked to tell him. “He’s cheating you by remembering what cards you’ve played and what cards he’s played. That’s how he knows what’s left in the deck. He pays attention to what you’re doing, and to what it means. It’s not a damn marked deck, and he doesn’t have an accomplice, and there’s no mirror behind you reflecting your cards. He’s just smarter than you. It might not be fair, but he is.”
    Miles, bad as he was, had been a far better card partner. He had no poker face at all, and he couldn’t help looking surprised when Lady Luck smiled on him and disappointed when she didn’t, but at least he was more often a step ahead of the game than a step behind, like the Silver Fox. To Janine, one of life’s crueler ironies was that Miles, who often could locate the Queen of Spades two tricks into a game of hearts, hadn’t been able to find her spot in twenty years of marriage.
    Janine counted Mississippis and got to ten before Walt decided what to discard, which ginned Horace nicely. Walt, ever curious, turned over the card Horace had laid facedown, groaning when he saw what it was. “You lucky bastard,” he said. “That was my damn gin card.”
    “I knew that, Mr. Comeau,” Horace explained, totaling up the points he’d caught Walt with. “Why do you suppose I wouldn’t give it to you?”
    Thus released from his torment, Walt rotated on his stool and took in the woman who would soon be his wife, breaking into a wide grin. This , Janine realized as Walt looked her over, was why she was marrying the man. He might be a beat slow—all right, several beats slow—but damn if he wasn’t always glad to see her. He always drank her in with what seemed to be fresh eyes, and she didn’t really care if the reason for this might be short-term memory deficiency. Walt’s appreciation made her glow inside, opening her up, allowing her spot to unfold like the soft petals of a flower so obviously that even Miles could have found it, not that he’d ever have the opportunity again. “Hey, good-lookin’,” Walt said. “Good thing Big Boy isn’t here. He’d commit hari-kari seeing how good you look.”
    Having given voice to this pleasantly dark thought, Walt turned to Horace for a second opinion. “How’d you like to go through the rest of your life knowing you had a woman this beautiful and lost her?”
    Horace was either still totaling up their score on his notepad or pretending to, forcing Walt to rotate back on his stool. “Let me guess,” he said. “One twenty-two.”
    Well, sure, okay. Here was another thing that irritated Janine, this constant public guessing game about her weight. Not that she wasn’t proud of having dropped the fifty pounds. And she knew, too, that Walt did it because he was proud of her. Still, it reminded her a little of that midway trick back when she was a girl, the booth where they guessed people’s weights. “One twenty-three.” Pleased in spite of herself, she grinned at him. “But can we not have this conversation in public?”
    “One twenty -three ?” Walt bellowed. “I’m going to get that scale in the women’s locker room checked out.” Again he rotated on his stool and nudged Horace. “How about it, though? One twenty-three. Guess how much she weighed when we met.”
    “I’d be real careful,” Janine advised Horace, who looked like he didn’t need to be warned.
    “Don’t be like that,” Walt said. “You should be proud.” Then, rotating back to Horace, “Mid one-eighties.”
    “You want anything, Janine?” David called over his shoulder from where he was browning a roast. Without, of course, actually looking at her.
    “No, I’m fine,” she told him. “Tick almost done back there?”
    “Pretty close.” Still not looking up from his work, the prick.
    “Tell her I’m here, okay?”
    “She knows you’re here.”
    The implication being what—that the kid could smell it when she came in? Or that Janine’s appearance altered the whole atmosphere?
    “Can you believe this woman?” Walt now asked. “No, I sure wouldn’t want to be that brother of yours,