My Stepfather Sold Me at the Card Table, and the Man Who Won Me Never Looked My Way novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Card Table
Maeve's stepfather bonds her to the Hill Crew boss for a debt; she takes the form, writes her own line on it, puts the house key down and walks out, and the man who signed it holds the truck door with a shaking hand.
At 1:40 in the morning my stepfather put me on a card table like a stack of chips.
I had walked in off my shift in my pharmacy scrubs with my parka open, because his phone had rung me four times in a row.
The back room of the social club smelled of cigar smoke and wet wool and spilled beer.
Five men sat at the felt, one of them dealing.
The pot in the middle was a pile of paper slips, the crew's lay-away slips, the little yellow tickets half the hill borrowed against every winter.
My stepfather had lost the last hand.
I could tell from the color of his neck.
"Dermot," I said from the doorway. "What did you do?"
He didn't turn around.
"Nineteen thousand," a man at the table said pleasantly, and laid down his cards. "That's what he did, kiddo."
That was Bram Dacey.
He was the one holding the deck.
He wore a camel coat and a warm smile, and he had poured me coffee out of a thermos more times than I could count.
My stepfather finally looked over his shoulder.
He had the face of a man who had already counted what he was about to save.
"I can settle it," Dermot told the table. "There's another way. The old way."
Nobody spoke.
"A bond," Dermot said. "A year and a day. I've got somebody to put on it."
He pointed at me with two fingers, the way he pointed out a bartender.
The room went so quiet that I heard the radiator tick.
Bram opened a drawer in the side of the table as if he had been waiting all night to do it.
He drew out a single printed sheet, white, folded once, and smoothed it flat with his palm.
He slid it down the felt to the head of the table.
The man sitting there had not said a word since I came in.
He had not looked at me, either.
That was Cormick Lanigan.
The whole hill called him the Landlord, because he owned the bars, the scrap yards, the rowhouses and the winter loans.
He was tall even sitting down, with red hair going gray at the temples and a nose that had been broken once and set badly.
He had a coat on and his hat on the table beside him, and he read the sheet with his head bent.
I watched his hand.
It lay flat on the paper, and then it went still, all at once.
He read for a long moment.
Then he took the pen from Bram's fingers and signed the line marked HOLDER in one stroke, without raising his eyes.
Dermot sagged in relief, loud enough that the men around him heard it.
He was smiling, a small relieved smile, and I understood that I had not been asked because nobody had ever needed to ask.
I had paid the taxes on my mother's house since I was seventeen.
I had paid for the furnace and the roof and the funeral flowers.
I had cooked this man dinner four nights a week for nine years.
Nobody in that room had ever once asked me for anything.
I walked to the table.
My boots left wet prints on the floor, and I didn't look at Dermot.
I took the sheet out from under Cormick Lanigan's pen.
It was a form.
Across the top it said CREW BOND, and under that, in print, A YEAR AND A DAY.
There were two lines at the bottom.
The first said HOLDER, and on it, in black ink, was a signature that leaned hard to the right.
The second said BONDED.
My own name was typed there, MAEVE BRIGID TIERNEY, in the same clean letters as the rest.
Somebody had typed it before tonight.
I read it twice, and I noticed the word before the name, and I noticed the man who had printed it.
I did not look at Bram.
I picked up Dermot's key ring from the felt where he had tossed it.
It held one brass key, the key to my mother's house.
I worked that key off the ring with my thumbnail, and nobody stopped me.
I set it down on the felt in front of Cormick Lanigan.
"I'll go to your house on my own feet," I said.
My voice came out low and level, the voice I used at the pharmacy window when a man was shouting about a refill.
"I am not a thing on a card table, and I am not paying my stepfather's debt."
Five men looked at me.
"I'm paying yours," I said to the man at the head of the table, "whatever you meant by signing."
His eyes didn't move off the form.
A muscle in his jaw went tight and let go.
I took the pen out of his hand.
It was still warm.
Under his signature, in my own handwriting, I wrote one line: Tenant, not property. Lease at will. M.T.
Then I signed my name on BONDED, over the place where somebody had typed it for me.
I folded the sheet once and put it in my parka pocket.
Bram laughed softly, the way he laughed at jokes he liked.
"She's got fire, Cor," he said. "I told you she would."
Nobody answered him.
I turned my back on all of them and walked out ahead of the men.
The door to the street was heavy and iron-banded, and I put my shoulder against it.
The cold took my breath.
It was nine degrees.
The street was empty except for a black pickup parked at the curb under the one working lamp, with its engine running and its tailpipe smoking.
Above the roofs, on the hill, the steel headframe of a dead mine stood lit against the snow.
I heard the door of the club open behind me.
Boots came down the steps, slow, and stopped.
I didn't turn around.
"Get in the truck," a low voice said.
It said it to the empty air, to the street, to anywhere but me.
I turned.
Cormick Lanigan stood on the sidewalk with the passenger door of the pickup already open in his left hand.
He was looking at the snow in the gutter.
He still had not looked at me once.
I stood there with my own signature burning in my pocket and my mother's key on a card table behind me, and I looked at his hand on the door.
His knuckles were white.
The whole hand was shaking.
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