My Stepfather Lost Me in a Poker Game, Then I Cleaned Him Out novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Both

Andre took the slip out of Russ's fingers.

He read it, slowly, the way he read a bond application.

Then he held it out in front of him and let go of it.

It floated down onto the tile between them.

"No," he said.

Russ looked at Laurent.

"No," Laurent said.

"You two split a pot over her not three weeks ago," Russ said. "Don't get religious on me now."

"We didn't win her, Russ," Laurent said. "She walked into Andre's office and named her price."

"We've been paying it every day since," Andre said. "She's not yours to write down. She never was."

He said it to Russ.

But he was looking at me.

So was Laurent.

For two weeks I'd been waiting for one of them to hand me back across the felt.

Every kind thing they'd done, I'd counted.

I stood in that lobby and understood that neither of them was ever going to pick up that slip.

I stepped on it on my way to the doors.

That night my mother slept nineteen floors up in Laurent's bed, with the curtains open on the Gulf.

His building had an elevator, which Andre's didn't.

She lay propped on his pillows, watching the lights of the shrimp boats far out on the water.

She spelled one word on the board when she saw them.

RAY.

Brandi came at nine with a bag of clothes and a bottle of wine and kicked us all out.

"I've got her," she said. "Go. Go do whatever it is the three of you do."

"We don't do anything, the three of us," I said.

Brandi looked at Andre, and at Laurent, and back at me.

"Not yet," she said.

My mother laughed, crooked and loud, from the bed.

Andre's apartment was dark except for the red stripes of the sign through the blinds.

He'd turned it back on.

The three of us stood in his kitchen, and nobody turned on a light.

"So," Andre said.

"So," Laurent said.

They looked at each other across me.

"You touch her like you're reading her," Andre said.

"You touch her like you own the building."

"I do own the building."

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