Thirteen Diamonds

married.
    Upon entering the kitchen, hot with summer and cooking, I saw that we were having scallops. I searched my mind, trying to remember whether scallops were shellfish, but then told myself: Lillian, quit being silly. You aren't the one with the allergy to shellfish. Again I tried to banish the picture of a choking Gerald from my mind.
    Dr. Enriquez was younger than Albert and casually dressed. She wore a tennis outfit—Albert was an avid tennis player—with a shirt that buttoned at the top; however, she had forgotten to button the buttons. But our dinners were casual. Pretty soon they might become clothing optional.
    “Albert has told me so much about you, Mrs. Morgan,” Dr. Enriquez gushed, after he introduced us.
    “Nothing good, I hope,” I said, glancing at him. I doubted that he was in the habit of talking about his mother to his girlfriends.
    She continued, “I love your hair. What do you use?”
    “She pours ink on it,” Albert said, probably jealous because his own hair was thinning. “That's what gives it the blue tint.”
    “I don't want to look like everybody else at Silver Acres,” I said.
    “Well I think it's beautiful,” Maria said. “And you're so slim. I need to get your secret.”
    “You have to be thin to live long enough to get into a retirement community,” Albert said. “The fat ones die off too soon.”
    Albert could stand to lose a few pounds. I said to Maria, “You obviously don't need any of my secrets.”
    She bowed her head slightly and said, “Thank you.”
    “Don't praise Mother too much,” Albert said. “She taught at Duke, you know, not UNC.”
    Maria laughed.  “I think we can forgive her
    that—especially since she mothered a UNC professor and grandmothered a UNC graduate. And I assume Winston will attend UNC.”
    I didn't want to get into that discussion. Albert was a professor of history at the University of North Carolina. Duke and UNC, located in adjoining cities, are big rivals, especially on the basketball court. I said, “Both are great universities.”
    “Yes,” Maria said. “With distinguished professors. Helping to improve the world.”
    “Another center of great universities is Boston,” I said, “with Harvard and MIT, among others. And yet, with all their brains they haven't been able to make the roads of Boston driveable.”
    I saw Albert frown, a signal that I was being too free with my opinions, so I shut up. We sat down to eat, three blonds, a brunette and a bluehead.
    I had kept my promise to myself not to talk about Silver Acres, when Albert said to me, “I understand there was some excitement at your bridge club last week. I heard a man choked to death.”
    Sandra and Maria gasped. Where had Albert heard that? Once a bomb has been dropped people don't go quietly on about their business so I had to explain about poor Gerald Weiss. After they calmed down I gave a short lecture on what I had learned about food allergies.
    “My girlfriend gets hives from eating peanuts,” Sandra said, but I've never heard of anybody dying from a food allergy.”
    “The human body—in fact, all animal bodies—are marvelous things,” Maria said, “but sometimes the body's defense mechanisms go overboard in defending against perceived predators and destroy what they are trying to protect.”
    I couldn't have said it better myself. I mentioned that Gerald had been holding a bridge hand of 13 diamonds when he died.
    “That's like winning the lottery,” Sandra said, “except that it doesn't pay as well.”
    “In fact,” I said, “the odds against being dealt 13 diamonds are much greater than the odds against winning a lottery, where you have to pick, say, six numbers out of 51. With the bridge hand you have to pick 13 correctly out of 52.”
    “No wonder I've never been dealt more than eight cards of one suit,” Albert said. “Of course I've never played the lottery because a professor friend of mine wrote a book showing that the expected return from playing the lottery is much worse than what you get in Las Vegas.”
    “If the odds against being dealt 13 of one suit are prohibitive,” I said, “what do you think the odds are against being dealt a perfect hand and then promptly dying?”
    “Maybe not so great because of the shock factor,” Albert joked.
    “I'm serious. Everybody seems to have dismissed this, but I think it bears looking into.”
    “Looking into for what reason?” Maria asked.
    “Leave it alone, Mother,” Albert