Chapter 11: Thirty-One Years

"She worked here for four years," Emmett said. "The best dealer I ever had."

"My mother waited tables," I said. "At a diner on Halsted. For nineteen years."

"After she left me, yes."

The oxygen tank hissed between us.

"She left you," I said.

"When the house changed hands. My partners were not good men."

He stopped to breathe, and I watched his chest work.

"They found out she was carrying a child and told me what that child would be worth to them."

"I had two weeks to fix it. I couldn't. She left in the night."

"She took me with her."

"She took you with her," he said. "I looked for you for eleven years. She was very good at disappearing."

I did not say anything.

I was looking at the photograph.

My mother was smiling at the camera, with one hand flat on the felt and the other holding the deck.

I had never seen her look that young.

"I'm your father," Emmett said.

He said it plainly, and he didn't reach for me.

"I know you don't want to hear it."

"I don't know what I want to hear."

"I'm not asking you to forgive me for anything tonight. I am telling you what the house is."

I stood up.

I hadn't planned to, and my chair scraped on the floor.

"You have your mother's shuffle," he said. "I watched you on the camera, and I knew you before the dealer spoke."

"It's in your hands."

"She never taught me a card trick in her life."

"Then she never had to."

I thought of a funeral twelve years ago.

A man in a gray suit had stood at the back of the chapel by himself.

He had left a long box of white roses on the steps and gone before anyone could thank him.

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