Spoonbenders

5 Buddy

The clock says 7:10 a.m., but this is not nearly enough information. The air is sticky and the sheets are damp from humidity, so it’s probably summer. But what year? This is a mystery that cannot be solved from the bed.

He pads downstairs to the kitchen, and there’s teenage Matty, cramming a piece of buttered toast into his mouth. That’s a major clue. This is probably the year that Matty and Irene moved back home. The year he did all the work on the house. The year of the Zap.

He says to himself: I am twenty-seven years old and Maureen Telemachus has been dead for twenty-one years.

Matty turns when he walks in, then coughs, choking on the toast, as if he’s surprised to see him. “Morning, Uncle Buddy,” he says finally. He looks quickly away, embarrassed. But by what?

The boy busies himself by pouring a tall mug of coffee. Buddy can’t remember why Matty would be up so early and already dressed, but then he notices that he’s wearing a yellow Bumblebee polo, and remembers that his nephew is working for Frankie this summer. At least the first part of the summer.

Matty glances at him, sees his frown, and says, “Oh, this isn’t for me. It’s for Frank.” Then: “I’m supposed to call him Frank when we’re working together.”

Buddy nods. Matty is having trouble keeping eye contact.

“Hey, that’s the van. Gotta go.” Matty pauses at the front door. Without quite looking at him, Matty says, “Thanks again for letting me use the computer. That’s really nice of you.”

Buddy thinks, I didn’t do it for you. But then, it doesn’t seem to hurt any of his plans to have the boy use it.

He goes to the calendar and checks the date. July eighth. All the days are marked off in Xs that are a particular shade of purplish pink. For a long moment he can’t remember the July Fourth picnic, then an image of fireworks comes to him, the crackle and boom. They went to Arlington Racecourse to see them. That was this year, he’s pretty sure. God knows it can’t be next year. He marks an X on today’s date. Then, as is his habit, he flips ahead through the months, to the end of the summer. Labor Day is circled in that same shade of pink. It drives a spike of fear into his heart every time he sees it.

September 4, 1995, 12:06 p.m. The moment the future ends. The day it all goes black.

Zap.

He only became aware of the date a few months ago. He woke up to realize that the future had disappeared. For years he’d been plowing through the days, hands over eyes, figuring that eventually a runaway truck or pulmonary embolism would catapult him out of the world.

But this, this ugly stump, so full of complicated doom. He never expected it would end like that. Gangsters and G-men. Bullets and burning cars. The gun against his head. It’s all terribly dramatic.

Yet if it were only his own demise waiting for him (no matter how outlandish and lurid), he’d close his eyes again and let Time carry him along. But there are other people to consider.

“For God’s sake, Buddy!” Irene says angrily.

He turns, confused.

“Put some clothes on!”

Ah. Irene doesn’t like it when he walks around naked. This doesn’t strike him as fair, since he’s the permanent resident and she’s just here temporarily. Plus, she’s not wearing much more than him, just running shorts and a T-shirt from a bank in Pennsylvania.

“What?” she asks. “You want to say something, say it.”

But he doesn’t know what to say. That’s the problem with a lot of future memories. If he doesn’t remember what he said, then he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say. Like being shoved onstage without a script. Better to say nothing than risk changing everything.

Irene scowls at him and puts up a hand to shield her eyes. “I’m going for a run,” she says.

That’s new, he’s pretty sure. Irene’s never been an exerciser. Though it’s probably a good idea. She’s looking older. True, he spends a lot of time remembering the young Irene, so these age changes can take him by surprise. But he also wonders if all the nights she’s been staying up late, typing in secret, are taking a toll.

He lets the calendar pages fall into place and goes upstairs to his room. In the top dresser drawer, hidden in a nest of Fruit of the Loom underwear, is a colorful women’s scarf. He unwraps it, revealing the gold medal. Well, stainless steel painted gold, but it’s precious to him all the same. It says THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL PSYCHIC. The woman who hung it around his neck was the former owner of the title. She made no demands of him, extracted no vows, but he felt the weight of responsibility all the same.

Come to think of it (but he was always thinking of it, the date hovering, omnipresent), she died on September 4. Is it ironic that the day the future ends is the anniversary of her death? Or is it mere coincidence? Is there any such thing as coincidence?

After she was gone, he told himself that he would take on her duties with bravery, reverence, and fortitude. And for a time, he did. But then, after he met and then lost the love of his life, he gave up. Stopped watching the horizon for fire. And what a mistake that was. This terminal event, the Zap, will burn deeply. He doesn’t have to see what follows to know what would come for his family: decades of damage; a torrent of tears.

He rubs a hand over his unshaven jaw, trying to focus. There’s so much he has to do if he’s going to save them. But what to do first?

Oh, right. Put on clothes.

He’s four years old and Maureen Telemachus is alive, so he’s not the World’s Most Powerful Psychic yet, just Buddy. He’s lying on his stomach in the living room, building a combination Tinkertoy/Lincoln Log trap for Frankie’s GI Joe. Joe is standing on a four-inch-high platform. Buddy pushes on a support log, and Joe falls over before the trapdoor opens. The action figure is so hard to balance.

“Are you even watching this?” Dad says, irritated. He’s only letting him stay up because Buddy pleaded to see the game. Dad’s stretched out in the recliner behind him, looking at the TV between his feet and over Buddy and his construction project. “Three up, three God damn down,” Dad says.

“Sorry,” Buddy says.

“Don’t be sorry,” Dad says. “You know why I’m raising you kids to be Cubs fans?”

Buddy shakes his head.

“Any mook can be a fan of a winning team,” Dad says. “It takes character to root for the doomed. You show up, you watch your boys take their swings, and you watch ’em go down in flames—every damn day. You think Jack Brickhouse is an optimist? No-siree. He may sound happy, but he’s dying inside. There’s no seat in Wrigley Field for a God damn Pollyanna. You root-root-root for the home team, and they lose anyway. It teaches you how the world works, kid. Sure, start every spring with your hopes and dreams, but in the universe in which we live, you will be mathematically eliminated by Labor Day. Count on it.”

Buddy tries to think of something to say to make his father feel better, but in that moment all he can remember is that the Cubs once beat the Braves, a team that Dad hates, by a huge score. “Eleven-zip,” Buddy says.

“Lie down,” Dad says. “You’re blocking the set.”

“A massacre,” Buddy says.

“Okay, how about this—run in the kitchen and get me a beer.”

Buddy hops up, runs into the kitchen, and there she is, the World’s Most Powerful Psychic. Alive. He can’t help but hug her legs in gratitude. Mom already has the can of Old Style open. “Here you go,” she says. “Keep the king happy. Then off to bed.”

Two nights later, Buddy’s construction project is a little more elaborate. There are Legos involved now, and some spare wood from the garage. GI Joe has been joined by one of Reenie’s Barbies. Dad squats down beside him. “Hey, Buddy. Whatcha working on?”

Buddy’s thrilled to explain. He shows him the first part of the trap, Joe and Barbie falling together into the box, and Dad lets him go on for a bit before he stops him and says, “That’s pretty great, kiddo. I need to ask you about something else, though.” Buddy sees he’s holding a newspaper. “Guess what the Cubs did today?”

Buddy has no idea.

“They beat the Atlanta Braves. Eleven to nothing. Eleven-zip.” Dad shows him the one-word newspaper headline. “Massacre.”

Buddy remembers this moment, seeing that long word on the page. He doesn’t know how to read that word, but he remembers knowing it, and that’s almost like reading it.

“You got it, Buddy.” His father is still squatting on the floor beside him. He never does this. “I want you to think real hard. Do you know any other baseball scores?”

Buddy nods excitedly. There’s nothing he wants more than to tell Dad all the things that will make him happy.

“So…” Dad says.

Buddy tries to remember some baseball scores, but nothing comes.

“Don’t try to think too hard,” his father says. “Whatever comes to mind.”

He tries to think of a number. “One to zero?” Buddy asks.

“Okay, good! Who’s playing, Buddy?”

“The Reds,” Buddy said. “And the Cubs. Cubs win.”

Dad sighs. “That’s the score of the game we were watching the other night,” Dad says. “Try to think of one that—” He stops himself. Mom is in the room now, looking at the two of them on the floor.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

“Nothing,” Teddy says. “Buddy’s showing me what he’s building.”

Buddy’s bolting a slab of steel to the basement wall when he remembers something. That memory—nothing but an image, a mental snapshot from the Zap Day—means that everything he’s done for several days will have to be redone. The three huge rectangles of steel he’s cut are now the wrong size, and will have to be trimmed or thrown out.

The original size of the rectangles came from his memory of the slabs covering the basement windows on Zap Day, and he’d cut them so that he could bolt them to the walls. But just now he’s remembered that the window was uncovered earlier in the day. Which means that the steel has to go up and down, like one of those grates that cover shop windows downtown. That’s way more complicated.

He wants to scream. But he doesn’t.

His curse, and blessing, is that his memory is full of holes. Everything that he does remember is a fact. Unalterable. The future, he learned when he was six years old, is no more mutable than the past. But there’s a loophole. If some future event seems awful, perhaps there’s something he does not recall that would change his understanding of what happened.

Say that he remembers a man in a bloodstained shirt. But does it have to be blood? Perhaps it’s only a terrible ketchup stain! Armed with this gap in his knowledge, it’s Buddy’s duty to fill a bowl with ketchup and throw it at the man. So what if he doesn’t remember throwing the ketchup? If he doesn’t remember not throwing the ketchup, then he is free to act.

His job is to make up stories. To suss out the best possible interpretation for the facts as he remembers them, and then guide events to a happy ending—or, failing that, the least tragic one.

But what if he fails to remember something important? What if throwing the ketchup so startles the man that he has a heart attack? The unknowns pile up around every remembered moment. If he acts, or doesn’t act, he may destroy everything. Each hole in his memory may be a deadly tiger pit or a sheltering foxhole.

When he does recall something new, it changes the meaning of what he (thought he) already knew. One stray image bubbling up into his consciousness adds a link to a chain, and seemingly unrelated events suddenly develop cause-and-effect relationships. He can rule out nothing. Everything may be important, everything may be connected to Zap Day. Worse, he is part of the equation. Every word he utters, every action he takes, may pervert the happy ending, or make it possible.

He once found a science book called Chaos that came very close to describing what it was like to work and live under these conditions. He asked Frankie to read it, hoping his brother would understand more about Buddy’s condition, but Frankie thought that Buddy wanted it explained to him. Frankie didn’t comprehend the ramifications of chaos theory, and so didn’t understand the question that haunted Buddy: How could anyone take meaningful action, when the results of that action could spin out of control and cause irreparable harm?

The World’s Most Powerful Psychic, however, cannot afford to lose hope. Yes, his memories are incomplete, a terrible foundation to build upon. Yes, his only blueprints are made of fog. But when he was awarded his medal, there was no guarantee that the job would be easy. So what if he has to move the metal sheet? So what if he has to move it again tomorrow? He has to make do with the information available.

He begins loosening the top lag bolts, regretting now that he made them so tight, then regretting his regret. That’s a death spiral if there ever was one. Just keep your mind on your job, he thinks. Both jobs: the one in front of him, and his larger responsibility to the family. But there’s so much he hasn’t done, and now there’s so little time. He always thought he’d go back to Alton. He’d walk into the hotel lobby and she’d be sitting at the bar like the first time he saw her, reading a magazine, legs crossed, one high-heeled shoe dangling from her foot, jiggling like bait on a line. She’d look up at him and smile, and say, “About time you got here.”

He yanks the bolt from the wood with a squeal. Mad at himself. He knows the difference between fantasy and memory. He knows this will never happen. September 4 is coming, and he’s never going to see his true love again.

Buddy is twenty-three years old when he tells Frankie that they need to visit a riverboat.

“You fucker,” Frankie says.

“What?” He didn’t foresee this reaction.

“You don’t talk to me forever, giving me the silent treatment, and the first thing you tell me is you want to go on a fucking boat?”

“It’s not just a boat,” Buddy says. “It’s a casino.”

This gets Frankie’s attention. “Where?”

“It’s opening in six months. On the Mississippi.”

Frankie tilts his head. His arms are crossed, because it’s cold in the garage. And maybe they stay crossed because he’s suspicious. “What did you see, Buddy?”

Buddy tells him about the Alton Belle, the first riverboat casino allowed in Illinois. Full of slot machines and table games, just like in Las Vegas.

“Table games?” Frankie says.

“Roulette,” Buddy says.

The word hangs in the air. Finally Frankie shakes his head, says, “No. No! You know I can’t do that shit anymore.” When Frankie gets nervous, nothing works. It’s only when he forgets himself that he remembers who he is.

“I saw chips,” Buddy says.

“Chips?”

“A pile of chips.”

“In front of me?”

“Stacks,” Buddy says.

Now Frankie’s pacing, though there’s not much space to move with all the junk and machinery: a snowblower (defunct) and lawn mower; a pile of lumber for a never-assembled shed; a band saw; a chest freezer; sleds and bikes and garbage cans and Mom’s old gardening supplies. Frankie’s come over because Buddy can’t drive to Frankie’s house (or anywhere). And they’re out in the garage because Buddy didn’t want Dad to overhear them.

Even though it’s cold in here, Frankie’s sweating just thinking about it. He’s broke, his business is failing, and lately cash has been evaporating at his touch. “When did you start seeing stuff again? I thought that was gone.”

Buddy shrugs.

“Jesus Christ,” Frankie says. He sits down on a cooler. Stands up again. Makes Buddy go through everything he saw.

Buddy fills in details, getting quickly back to that stack of chips. “They think it’s a lucky streak,” he says. “But it’s you.”

“Me,” Frankie says.

“All you.”

“Fuck,” Frankie says. Pacing again. “I don’t think I can do this. I’m rusty, man. Way out of practice.”

“So practice. We leave in six months.”

“I’m going to need a lot more information,” Frankie says. “Everything you’ve got.”

“Don’t worry,” Buddy says. “I’m coming with you.”

“You’re leaving the house,” Frankie says skeptically. “To go to a casino full of people.”

“I need to be in Alton,” Buddy says, and that’s the truth. For that’s where he will meet his true love.

Teddy is watching with an exasperated expression as Buddy sweeps up the sawdust. “Jesus Christ, you making a bomb shelter?” One of the windows is in place, attached to a heavy-duty hinge. Soon he’ll install a lever that will allow him to flip the steel shades up and out of the way.

“Can you just tell me why?” Teddy asks.

Buddy shrugs.

“No, God damn it. You do not get to just look at me with that dumb look. What the hell are you doing?”

Buddy makes a sound deep in his throat, a smothered moan.

“I can’t take it, Buddy. I can, not, take it. This house used to be fit for human beings.” Teddy starts listing the damage, the rooms his son has torn apart and left unfinished. And what about the huge hole in the backyard! What the hell was that for?

There’s nothing to do but wait for his father to tire. They both know how this will end: Teddy will storm out, and Buddy will go back to work. It’s a mystery why Dad hasn’t put a stop to the project. In all his memories, there’s nothing to tell him why his father hasn’t thrown him out of the house or threatened him with violence.

“Okay, how about this,” Teddy says. “Just tell me when it’s going to end. Can you do that? Look at me, Buddy. Look at me. When are you going to stop?”

Buddy’s lungs cramp in his chest. He opens his mouth to speak and quickly closes it. How can he explain?

After ten seconds of painful silence, Teddy growls and leaves in the usual way.

Buddy sits on the closed toilet, pondering. He hates to make anyone angry, even if it’s for their own good. For a couple of years, before Mom died, Buddy had given his father every Cubs box score he could remember. Once he wrote, in crayon, all the digits to a future Illinois lottery ticket, though he wrote a 6 instead of a 9 and his father won nothing. (Or perhaps, he realized later, Buddy remembered the way he’d written the numbers in the future, and so the memory was an accurate re-creation of his mistake. These things were so difficult to untangle.)

Somehow Mom found out about the lottery. She got so mad that his father stopped asking him for predictions. Young Buddy was mystified by the ban, especially because he was still allowed to work the Wonder Wheel onstage. But it wasn’t until The Mike Douglas Show that he understood how dangerous the future could be.

Buddy is five years old and Mom is alive. There she is, so tall, holding his hand, looking down at him with blue eyes. Her silver dress sparkles in the stage lights like magic. “We’re on TV, Buddy,” she says. But it doesn’t seem like TV at all. It’s just like being onstage at all the theaters they’ve been performing at. There’s even an audience. There shouldn’t be an audience for TV, should there?

Mom says, “When Mr. Douglas comes over, you can do your spinner trick.” The Wonder Wheel has spokes that make a clackety sound, and on each wedge of the wheel is a different picture: duck, clown, fire truck. People applaud every time it stops on the picture he’s predicted, and that’s almost every time. His favorite part is starting the wheel spinning, not saying where it will land.

He’s getting ready to spin the wheel when a memory hits him like a slap to his head. He remembers his sister holding his hand while they stand at the edge of a grave, looking at a coffin. Their mother’s coffin. Suddenly the gleaming box drops into the hole, too fast, and people shout. There in the TV studio, Buddy cries out with them, a wordless shout of fear.

Mom says, “Buddy! Buddy!” She crouches down, and tells him not to be scared. But of course he’s scared, because all the memories are coming now, in a rolling wave: Astounding Archibald walking out onstage, calling them fakes. But Mom isn’t there to perform the showstopper trick, and because of that she ends up in a coffin.

Mom, alive, says, “Can you put away your tears?”

He can’t, because the memories are still coming, and now he’s remembering the night, months from now, when Mom falls in the kitchen and hurts her head. He remembers the medal she hangs around his neck. And he remembers dressing up to go see her in the hospital, and then the coffin falling, and Irene squeezing his hand.

The memories come that fast, bam bam bam, from Astounding Archibald’s dramatic entrance to the casket disappearing into the dark. If one thing happens they all happen.

Five-year-old Buddy doesn’t know how to make his mother’s death not be true. What can he do at this size, at this age? He has memories of being big, tall enough to look down on Frankie, to loom over his father, and he wants to be that huge man right now. He could stop crying, and the future could be different.

“Jesus Christ,” Teddy hisses. They’re in commercial. Dad doesn’t know it, but Astounding Archibald is about to walk onstage, and Mom is going to die. Buddy collapses onto the floor, and the man wearing a headset steps back in surprise. “Get him out of here,” Dad says.

Buddy’s worked himself into a blubbery, boneless state. He can only think of the hole in the ground, swallowing his mother. She carries Buddy out on her hip, and he doesn’t release her even after they reach the greenroom. He’s still crying, unable to stop.

He hasn’t learned to invent stories yet. If he were older, if he were smarter, he could find some clever way to explain the coffin and keep his mother alive. But he’s too afraid, and his body is not in his control. He’s failed.

Buddy’s twenty-seven years old but he feels older. Much older. Or maybe he’s just hungry.

He makes a baloney sandwich and eats it standing up at the sink, then washes it down with a tall glass of Carnation Instant Breakfast. He loves that chalky residue in his throat. A whole meal in a glass! Perfect for the precog who has to keep up his strength.

He likes it when the house is empty like this, Irene at work and Matty out with Frankie, and Dad—well, not even the World’s Most Powerful Psychic knows what Dad does with his time. He only remembers what he’s around for. Not like Mom, who seemed to know everything, everywhere. There was a reason she was the titleholder for so long. Yes, he feels like a fraud some days, or a next-best-thing champion, like Scottie Pippen after Michael Jordan retired, or Timothy Dalton. He does what he can with the talent he possesses.

Sometimes, though, it’s as if the talent possesses him. For example, he’s just remembered taking a walk around the neighborhood with Miss Poppins, a walk that was to start in five minutes. Theoretically he could try to ignore the memory and stay home, but he can’t risk it. Everything may be connected to the Zap, even walking a dog. Or stealing a newspaper. The other day he suddenly remembered stealing a Chicago Tribune from a neighbor’s porch. Not only that, but he had a distinct memory of circling a headline in black marker and then placing the newspaper where his father would see it. Why a Tribune? Why that article? He still doesn’t know. Soldiers do not have to understand their orders.

Besides, he sometimes likes what destiny has ordered him to do. He certainly likes walking with Miss Poppins. Staying home would be cutting off his nose to spite his future face. And why? To preserve some illusion of free will? Nonsense. Duty eats free will for breakfast.

Outside, the air is still humid, but he has to admit that it’s lovely out. Frankie routinely needles him for never leaving the house, but of course that isn’t true. He goes out all the time, when he remembers he’s supposed to. And he loves his little neighborhood, in all its various phases: the times when there are as many empty lots as houses and the grasses run with garter snakes; the other times when the mini-mansions start to pop up in place of the run-down ranch homes; the long, stable times in between. He feels a kinship with the trees of his street: the Benevolent Brotherhood of Patient Sentinels. They take the long view.

Two doors down, he knocks at the front screen door and calls out, “It’s me.” Inside, Miss Poppins barks excitedly, tiny electric yips, and then the little puff ball is there at the door, paws against the screen.

“I was wondering if our little old lady would like to go out,” he says.

He feels safe talking to Mrs. Klauser. Her days are so regular, and their conversations so circumscribed, that there’s little danger of causing side effects. She calls him in, and he edges through the door to keep the dog inside.

Mrs. Klauser is in her usual chair, the TV on. “How’s your project?” she asks. “I could hear the band saw from here.”

“All’s good,” he says, and hooks the leash to the dog.

“And your father’s doing well?” Mrs. Klauser is frail currently, and that frailty makes her more tentative. Other times she’s energetic and forthright. During the year following his mother’s death, Mrs. Klauser made the Telemachus family meals two times a week. No one asked her to do this. She saw a need and did something.

“Just fine,” Buddy says. “Back in a bit.”

Miss Poppins quiets as soon as they get outside and trots eagerly ahead. Within minutes she squats and delivers a polite poop, which he nabs in the plastic bag he’s brought with him. They resume their walk, both of them perfectly in sync. The dog knows their usual route through the neighborhood. Today, though, halfway through their walk, Buddy surprises her by cutting between two houses, a shortcut back to their block. It’s a surprise to him, too. He didn’t remember he’d do that until he was almost about to make the turn.

Miss Poppins adjusts to this detour with aplomb. Dogs live in the moment. Sometimes he wishes he were a dog.

A silver van is parked a few doors down from his house. He remembers this van. A month from now, he will briefly talk to the van driver, a black man whom Buddy recognizes from his childhood. Weeks after that, on Zap Day, the driver will walk into the house. Is it the same driver who is behind the wheel now? Buddy doesn’t look through the windshield to check, because that’s not something he remembers doing. It’s possible to walk up to the van and yank open the doors and demand to know what the men are doing there, but not advisable. The consequences could be catastrophic. He walks past the vehicle, past his own house, and up to Mrs. Klauser’s door.

“She was a good girl,” he tells her.

“Did she poop?”

“Oh yes,” he says. Then he remembers something. Something vital. “You should think about getting a puppy,” he says.

“Oh no, Miss Poppins is enough for me.”

“Think about it,” Buddy says. “She’d probably like the company.”

He walks back home without once looking at the van.

6 Matty

“This one’s Bones,” Polly said. Or maybe it was Cassie who’d spoken. He’d never been able to tell the twins apart. “And this one’s Speedy.”

“Which is ironic, because he’s a turtle,” Matty said. The twins weren’t interested in irony, or commentary. They just wanted him to sit on the Pepto-Bismol-colored carpet in their bedroom while they dumped small stuffed animals onto his lap.

The other girl—Cassie or Polly—hauled more creatures from the long drawer set into the base of the bunk beds. “This is Zip the Cat, and Quackers, and Valentino”—she pronounced it “tine-o”—“and Pincher, and…Squealer.”

She placed this last one, a beanbag pig, in his palm. The heart-shaped tag attached to it listed its name (Squealer the Pig) and birth date (April 23, 1993). Keeping the tags intact—most of which, like the pig’s, were clipped to the ear, pirate-style—was evidently part of the deal, in the same way that hard-core nerds kept their Star Wars action figures in their original packaging. “Squealer the Pig is a little obvious,” he said.

“This is Inky,” the first twin said, dropping a plush octopus in his lap. “And this is Goldie, Snort, Nip, and…Ally the Alligator.”

“Ally the Alligator? That’s not even trying,” he said. “Plus, he’s clearly dead.”

“He’s not dead!” one of them said angrily.

“Sure he is—they put his tag on his toe.” They stared at him. He said, “Someday you’re going to get that joke and just la-a-a-ugh.”

That was one of Grandpa Teddy’s most common lines, but these girls weren’t laughing. The twins looked at each other, brows furrowed, and one of them said to Matty, “It was an accident.”

“They were on top of the TV,” the other one said.

“What now?” Matty asked.

A voice said, “A bunch of those things burned up when the TV blew.” Malice had appeared in the doorway of the twins’ bedroom. She wore cutoff jeans and a white T-shirt that said BOWIE NOW in hand-painted letters. “It was a tragedy. Do you know when they burn they just bleed plastic? It’s not even stuffing.”

“Shut up, Mary Alice!” one of them yelled, and the other said at the same time, “Get out, Mary Alice!”

“They don’t like to speak of the Great Beanie Fire of Ninety-Four,” Malice said.

“We’re telling Mom!” one of them said, and the twins rushed out. Malice looked back at Matty and caught him looking at her legs—specifically at the white pocket flaps that peeked from the bottom of her shorts. Those flashes of white cloth were inexplicably, unbearably, sexy.

Commandment #1 (Don’t look down her shirt, it’s creepy) required an amendment: Don’t look at her legs, either.

“So you’re staying the night,” Malice said.

“Yeah.” He got to his feet, sending little toy bodies tumbling.

“Why?” Malice asked.

“Why?” This was a question not even his mother had asked. And why hadn’t she? Matty had no good reason to spend the night at Uncle Frankie’s—none that he could talk about anyway. When Frankie asked her if he could sleep over, she’d let him go without an interrogation. Now that he thought about it, that was deeply weird.

“Your dad thought it would be fun,” Matty said finally.

“Fun,” she said skeptically. “To hang out with us.”

“He said we’d order Chinese.”

“Ooh, I take it back, then. Ordering Chinese is a regular cocaine orgy.”

He laughed—too loud—and tried to blank the images flashing in his head. “Yeah, well. Have you spent a night watching TV with Uncle Buddy?”

“Good point,” she said. “See you round the chow mein.”

She walked away. In blatant violation of all rules and amendments, he watched her go.

Compared with Grandpa Teddy’s house, Frankie’s house was loud. Not so much in actual decibels (Uncle Buddy’s construction projects made plenty of racket), but in emotional volume. Aunt Loretta yelled at the twins; Uncle Frankie yelled at Malice; the twins yelled for the sake of yelling. Bottled up as they were in this two-bedroom ranch, there was nowhere for their shouts to dissipate and nowhere for him to hide. After years of living alone with Mom, and another six months of living in a house where hardly anyone spoke, Matty found the din to be nerve-wracking. He felt like the new recruit in a war movie, the one who jumped at every boom of the artillery.

Only Malice was quiet, though her scowl could blast everyone but the twins into silence. Before the rest of the family finished dinner, Malice disappeared into her basement lair. Everyone else decamped to the living room, where the TV was cranked up to a volume that turned the canned sitcom laughter menacing. Cassie and Polly, excited that Matty had been assigned their room, were building a blanket fort between the couch and Uncle Frankie’s recliner where they could spend the night.

Aunt Loretta left the room at regular intervals to have a smoke on the back porch. During one of these absences, Frankie looked over at him and said, “So. You think you’re ready?”

“I’m going to try,” Matty said.

At ten, after a laugh-injected episode of Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, Uncle Frankie clapped his hands and said, “Bedtime, ladies!” They protested, but Aunt Loretta herded the girls to the bathroom and back. Uncle Frankie walked Matty to the girls’ room. The beanbag menagerie had not been put away.

“Let’s get you some fresh air,” Uncle Frankie said. He undid the latch on the sole window in the room and tried to lift the sash, but it didn’t budge. “Usually we—ugh, little stiff—we keep ’em closed, because it’s the ground floor, and rapists.” He slammed the heel of his palm upward and the window shrieked up a few inches. “There we go. But you’ll be all right, right?”

“I guess so,” Matty said.

Uncle Frankie leaned in close. “I put a sign in the garage,” he said in a low voice. “I even left the light on.”

Matty nodded.

“A simple three-word phrase,” Uncle Frankie said.

“Don’t give me any clues,” Matty said.

“Right. Good thinking. Got to make this a real test.” Frankie looked him in the eye, said, “Good luck, Matty,” and closed the door.

“Matt,” he said quietly.

He opened his backpack and quickly changed into the gym shorts and T-shirt he’d brought—no way was he going to sleep in just his underwear. He turned out the lights and crawled under the pink covers of the lower bunk. His feet touched the footboard. The upper bunk was alarmingly close to his face.

He turned to look at the room, which was surprisingly well lit. There were two night-lights, and the ceiling revealed itself to be spangled with glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars, planets, and comets. The herd of boneless pets seemed to be sprawled across a miniature savannah. The room was getting warmer. The barely open window was a mail slot for the delivery of humidity.

He closed his eyes. Took a breath.

Concentrate, Matt.

He clenched his fists, released them.

He knew he could slip outside his body. The hard part—which he’d been working on for a month with limited success—was to do so without touching himself. He’d never be able to go onstage if the only way to use his power was to jack off in front of the audience. Uncle Frankie had told him they could make real money with his abilities if he practiced, and Matty had been imagining the return of the Amazing Telemachus Family, starring Matthias Telemachus, Astral Projector. They’d first bring the act to small theaters, building buzz, until they made a groundbreaking performance on live television. All he had to do was astral project. And not think of his cousin. And those cutoffs.

Commandment #2. Do not have lustful thoughts about your cousin.

“Damn it,” he said aloud. He tried to think of someone else, anyone else. How about Elle Macpherson?

But suddenly he couldn’t summon a clear picture of the supermodel. Why hadn’t he packed his Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue? (Not actually the whole issue. He’d pulled a few of the good pages from the 1994 edition at the Waldenbooks in the Monroeville Mall in Pittsburgh, which was the most larcenous thing he’d ever done in his life, and guarded them carefully ever since.)

After a half hour, he was still rooted to his body. The air was too close, and the bunk bed a coffin. He threw off the covers and crawled out onto the crinkly carpet, nudging aside plush toys. He rolled onto his back under the open window, spread his arms and legs to the artificial stars, and waited for moving molecules of air to touch his skin.

Nothing. And why was the carpet so stiff? Had the girls spilled Kool-Aid or something? And why hadn’t they arranged the stars into real constellations? At least that would have been educational.

Shut up, he said to his brain. Think of Elle Macpherson. But all he could visualize were those rectangles of pocket cloth, white against Malice’s brown thighs. Which was crazy. It was just cloth. Cloth that normally was not seen, sure, but it wasn’t lingerie. There was no reason a couple of inches of cotton should stop his heart.

He pushed his hands away from himself and clutched the carpet.

Commandment #3. Under no circumstances should you touch yourself while having lustful thoughts about your cousin.

The rule would be easier to keep if it wasn’t such a reliable ticket to an OBE. (Which stood for out-of-body experience, aka astral projection, which was sort of like clairvoyance and remote viewing, but with a body attached. He’d been reading up.) Over the past few weeks, he’d been able to jump out of his skin half a dozen times. Mostly he barely got to his own ceiling, but twice now, fueled by a fantasy of being forced to sleep in the same bed as Mary Alice because of some unspecified family emergency, he’d pushed his consciousness up and out of the house, so that he was able to hover, kitelike, above the roof.

He’d reported all his successes to Uncle Frankie, without explaining Malice’s part in them, and didn’t bring up the failures at all. Frankie was especially anxious to confirm that Matty was not just imagining the travels—after all, a roof was a roof. And so this test. All Matty had to do was breathe, relax, and not think of white cotton.

A dozen glassy-eyed animals watched him suspiciously. God it was hot.

Somewhere an air conditioner rumbled. Probably in Frankie and Loretta’s room. No wonder Malice slept in the basement. He could almost picture her down there, on the old hideaway bed. One leg poking out of the sheets, an arm thrown over her eyes. He imagined her surrounded by darkness but caught like a girl onstage by the spotlight of the unshaded lamp that sat on the milk crate that served as her bedside table. Her arm moved away from her face, and surprise, her eyes were wide open, more than awake, because it was clear she hadn’t fallen asleep tonight; no, she’d been waiting. She turned toward the milk crate, checked a small digital clock there, and rolled out of bed. She was still wearing that white Bowie T-shirt, but the cutoffs had been replaced by a pair of black jeans. She picked up a red flannel shirt from the floor and pulled it on without buttoning it, then stooped to tug on a pair of high-tops. She hustled toward the door that led to the back stairs, turned the lock, and vanished. She was sneaking out!

He opened his eyes. He’d been asleep, and now his heart thudded with dream excitement. But maybe he wasn’t dreaming. He jumped up and lurched to the window.

There was Mary Alice, walking quickly across the lawn, heading to the street. Dressed in red flannel and black jeans.

“Mary Alice,” he hissed. She didn’t hear him. Louder, he said, “Malice.”

She whirled as if shot.

“It’s me,” he said in a stage whisper.

She froze for a moment, then walked closer to the window and looked up at him. “I know it’s you,” she said, also whispering. “What do you want?”

He pushed up on the window, and managed to shove it a few inches higher. “Where are you going?”

“Go to bed, Matty.”

Matt, he thought. “Wait there. I’m coming out.”

“No! Just—”

But he’d already ducked away from the window. He yanked off his shorts and pulled on his jeans, a maneuver that required much hopping and teetering. Then he grabbed his gym shoes and eased open the bedroom door. A few feet away, Frankie and Loretta’s door was shut. The air conditioner groaned obliviously. Matty crept down the hallway, holding his shoes.

In the living room, the blanket fort had collapsed and the twins lay in the polyester wreckage, unconscious. He stepped over their bodies and unlocked the front door.

Malice was gone.

He crossed the lawn, the grass slicking his bare feet, and looked down the street in both directions. Nothing.

He couldn’t believe it. She’d ditched him.

Yet—he’d had an OBE! Without touching himself! Though once again he’d been thinking of Malice, so that was a problem.

Another problem? Getting back into the twins’ bedroom.

He moved quietly around the side of the house, carrying his shoes in each hand like weapons. He could hear nothing but the moan and rattle of the air conditioner jutting from Frankie and Loretta’s bedroom window. He reached the rear of the house, where the light from the garage window cast a yellow light across the backyard. The twins’ swing set crouched in the half shadows like a huge spider.

He sat at the top of the basement stairs and pulled on his shoes. Malice had closed the door behind her, of course, but if it wasn’t locked he could get back into the house that way. But now he didn’t want to go back inside. Why couldn’t Malice have waited for him? No doubt she was having fun, joyriding across the northern suburbs. He was wide awake with nowhere to go. He could take a walk, but Uncle Frankie’s neighborhood was sketchier than Grandpa Teddy’s. The cars were older and rustier, the beige-brick houses narrower and closer together. Chain-link fences were a recurring landscaping motif. This block was probably safer than the one he’d left in Pittsburgh, but back there he knew which people were the bad people, which ones looked like bad people but weren’t, and which people looked like nice people but were assholes.

Then he remembered what was in the garage. He went to the side door and pushed inside. It took him only a few seconds to find the white poster board, set out on the hood of Loretta’s Toyota Corolla. In black capital letters it said, SEIZE THE DAY.

That was hardly a random phrase. Frankie said “Carpe diem,” like, three times a day. But what about the night? What was a fourteen-year-old supposed to do with the night?

He woke to cartoons blaring from the living room. His bladder was full and he was desperate to get to the toilet. He looked both ways down the hallway and, seeing the coast was clear, scampered across to the tiny bathroom. It was like a closet-sized version of a dollar store, crammed with shampoo bottles and bath toys and scented candles. When he lifted the toilet lid, he rattled the row of UltraLife bath products balanced on the back of the commode. How did five people—six, counting himself—share one tiny bathroom?

When he got to the living room, the twins for once didn’t mob him; the television claimed their complete attention. In the kitchen Uncle Frankie sat at the table reading the Sun-Times, a plate smeared with dried egg yolk in front of him. In the center of the table was a mound of cigarette stubs in a plastic ashtray, but Aunt Loretta was nowhere in sight. Neither was Malice. He imagined that she’d slunk back to her underground lair before dawn.

“You look like a man who needs a cup of joe,” Uncle Frankie said. He was inordinately proud of Matty’s new addiction to coffee. It was an inevitable consequence of working with the crew, as it was practically the only thing they drank. Matty had started with a training-wheels concoction that could have been marketed as Sugared Milk—now with slight coffee flavor! and then gradually darkened the mix. In six or seven years he’d be able to take it black.

Uncle Frankie waited (impatiently, Matty thought) while he mixed his drink. “So?” Frankie asked. He raised a significant eyebrow. “Anything?”

“Yeah,” Matty said. “I’m pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure?”

Matty felt embarrassed. “I mean, yeah, but…” He took a delaying sip from the mug. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether I’m imagining what I’m seeing, or I’m really seeing it.”

His uncle frowned, and Matty hurried to explain. “Like, I traveled last night, definitely traveled, but—”

“Holy shit! Where to? How far’d you go?”

“Uh, just around the house. But I was also kinda sleepy, so I was thinking, well, what if I just dreamed some of it?”

“You can’t think like that! There are always two explanations for what happens, the one that skeptical people fall back on, and the real one, the one you know in your heart. The doubters are going to say, Oh, you moved it with your foot, oh, you peeked at the cards, you imagined it. You can’t let them get to you. You have to believe in your talent, Matty, and then you go out there and…and…”

“Seize the day?”

Frankie looked stunned. “What did you say?” Then he roared with laughter. “What the fuck did you say?” Now Matty was laughing, too. Frankie wiped a tear from his eye. “You bastard. Just slip it in there like that! You got a hell of a poker face, kid!”

Matty was too embarrassed to correct him. And after all, he did astrally project last night. The fact that he tried to follow Malice was beside the point.

“I didn’t think you’d be ready for the next step so quickly,” Frankie said. “Do you need to get back home today?”

“Well, I should probably—”

“Because I think you need to stay another night.”

“Okay,” Matty said quickly.

“Finish your coffee,” Frankie said. “Then we move on to phase two.”

Phase two evidently involved visiting every pawnshop in the suburbs—for what, Frankie wouldn’t say. He’d leave Matty in the Bumblebee van, go inside the shop, and come out minutes later, annoyed that he hadn’t found what he was looking for. Then they were off again, across the unbroken sprawl of Chicagoland, a single city made up of interlocking strip malls, decorated at random intervals by WELCOME TO signs with defiantly rural names—River Forest, Forest Glen, Glenview—and enough dales and groves and elms and oaks to populate Middle Earth. The flatlanders had been especially determined to tag every bump of land with a “Heights” or “Ridge.” Pity the poor hobbit trying to find anything to climb in the town of Mount Prospect.

In the van, Uncle Frankie always talked to Matty as if he were an adult—or, more accurately, as if Frankie had forgotten he was a kid. It was during the trips to and from work that Matty learned about the phone business, city driving (“never signal on a lane change, it just warns them”), multilevel marketing, Greek mythology, and politics. Frankie delivered monologues on such topics as how Mayor Bilandic had lost the ’79 election not because he failed to clean up the snow after those storms, but because he looked like a wimp apologizing for it, while Jane Byrne was clearly the toughest, most unapologetic woman in Chicago. (“You know how sometimes it gets too cold to snow? That was Jane Byrne’s face.”)

There were some topics, however, that Matty would have been fine skipping. He could not unhear that Frankie’s first night with Aunt Loretta was “the craziest sex of my life. A whole ’nother level, like I’d been playing Little League and she was throwing ninety-mile-an-hour fastballs.” He couldn’t imagine what a fastball might mean in this metaphor.

The best was when Matty could get him to talk about what life had been like when Teddy Telemachus and His Amazing Family were on the road. But a lot of Frankie’s stories about their showbiz career were short on details, and those details started to repeat. That made some sense, since Frankie was a little kid at the time, but it was unsatisfying. Even more disappointing was Matty’s gradual realization that this glorious, colorful era, which loomed so large in his imagination, turned out, when he did the math, to have lasted less than a year.

Today, though, his uncle wanted to talk about Matty. He couldn’t stop brainstorming on the possibilities of Matty’s power, and describing the feats accomplished by Grandma Mo. His uncle was jittery with nervous energy, and seemed to grow more twitchy with each stop. “It’s not just about viewing things far away, Matty. It’s about being specific. It’s about focus. Like the telephone trick—did I ever tell you about the telephone trick?”

Frankie had, but Matty never tired of hearing about it. “It was usually the climax of the show, right? Mom would be backstage, and Dad would call up somebody from the audience, and tell them to write down details about their house, what was in their refrigerator, all kinds of shit. Put it all in envelopes. Then Mom would come out, sit down next to the person, and start talking. These people were amazed, Matty. She could tell them all about their lives, things only they would know. She didn’t even have to touch ’em!”

“What about the telephone?” Matty said, encouraging him.

“Okay, so sometimes—and I never knew why she did it sometimes and not others—she’d say, I see you left somebody home tonight. They’re at home watching television. It’s a man, yes? A man with reddish hair—or a blonde woman, whatever. And then Dad would bring out the telephone, and they’d run the sound through the speakers so everyone could hear, and Mom would say, Why don’t I call home for you? And bam, she’d dial the number without even asking ’em.” Frankie shook his head in remembered amazement. He was sweating even though the van’s air conditioner was blasting. “Brought down the house, Matty. When that guy or gal answered, just like she said they would? People went nuts. If she’d done that on TV, the Astounding Archibald would have looked like an idiot, and we’d have been world famous.”

“Mike Douglas!” Matty said.

“The same. Fucker played into Archibald’s hands.”

Finally, somebody had mentioned the television show. After the tape disappeared, Matty was afraid that he’d imagined the whole thing. “But why didn’t she come back out?” he asked.

“Blame Buddy. He kept her from coming out, and he ended the act forever. Nobody found out how great she was. How great we were.”

“But the government knew, right?” Matty asked. “She worked for them?”

“Who told you about the government?” Frankie was driving fast, changing lanes without even checking the side mirrors. “That’s top secret.”

“You’ve brought it up a couple times.”

“Right. Listen carefully, Matthias. Your grandmother, Maureen McKinnon Telemachus…”

“Uh-huh?”

“She was a spy. Maybe the greatest spy ever.” He glanced at Matty. “Oh, do not laugh, my friend.”

“I’m not laughing,” Matty said. And he wasn’t. But Mom said her brother was a bullshitter, and sometimes he worried that Frankie was more interested in a good story than in total accuracy. Then again, Mom was more interested in total accuracy than a good anything. “So,” Matty said. “Did she have, like, a gun?”

“What? No. She was a psychic spy.”

“Okay…”

“Remote viewing,” Frankie said. “We’re talking long-distance, highly targeted clairvoyance. Top psychics from around the country were recruited to locate and detect Soviet assets, stuff the satellites couldn’t find. Missile silos, nuclear submarines, science bunkers, all kinds of shit.”

Science bunkers? Matty thought.

“The Commies did it, too,” Frankie said. He wiped his palm on his pants, then switched hands on the steering wheel and wiped the other one. “They had their own psychics, working to jam ours. Classic Cold War, Matty. High-stakes ops.”

“Wow,” Matty said.

“But all that’s over,” Frankie said. “The wall’s down, and we won. New World Order. And the way I see it, it’s time for some peacetime dividends. Shit.” He almost missed the off-ramp, and jerked the van over. Matty grabbed the dash. Behind them a car honked, and Frankie flipped them the bird even though the driver couldn’t possibly see it. “The question you have to ask yourself is this,” Frankie said. “What’s the market value of your abilities?”

“Right. Sure.”

“You said you wanted to help your mom, right?” He’d confessed to Frankie that he was worried about her. “Then this is your chance. You being my apprentice, that’s great and all, a little cash, every little bit helps. But it’s not a game changer. It doesn’t get your mom out of that shit-hole job, and it doesn’t get you to college. You want to go to college, don’t you?”

“I guess.” He supposed he could go if showbiz didn’t work out.

“The thing is, you can’t go off unprepared. You can’t take your big shot unless you’re absolutely ready. I had my shot once. Your uncle Buddy—well, let me just say, your uncle hung me out to dry. But I have myself to blame for that. I got cocky, believed everything he told me. Thought it was all in the bag, a sure thing, and that makes a man sloppy. I didn’t practice enough. We’re not going to make the same mistake with you.”

Frankie pulled up to a shop called Aces of Pawn and parked in front of a fire hydrant. “If a cop comes, move the car.”

“But—”

Frankie hopped out. “Two minutes, tops!”

Matty turned on the radio to WXRT, but his mind was on what Frankie had been saying about his “big shot.” He pictured himself walking into his mom’s room, putting a bundle of cash in her hand, and saying, “Pack your bags. We’re moving out of here.” Seeing that relief in her face. After she lost her job in Pittsburgh, she’d started hiding her desperation from him. Not that she was cheery, exactly—she’d never been one of those Brady Bunch moms—but she deflected any of his questions about jobs or money with an air of boredom, as if explaining why the electricity had been turned off was a story too tedious to go into. Moving back into Grandpa Teddy’s house hadn’t made the anxiety go away, and for a while it was worse. It was only in the past couple of weeks that the cloud had lifted a bit. Twice now he’d come down for breakfast and caught her whistling. Whistling.

Still, they were broke, and he knew it. His job as telephone installation apprentice wasn’t enough. Frankie was right. He had to score. Score big.

Fifteen or so minutes later, Frankie banged on the back door of the van, and Matty scrambled out. Frankie held a dolly, upon which was a black cube about a foot and a half on each side—a safe. Matty opened the van door. Somehow Frankie managed to lift the thing into the back of the vehicle. Sweat poured off him.

“I need a safe for my training?” Matty asked.

Frankie grinned. “Practice for the real thing. You’re going to love the next part.”

They drove a few miles, to the bar they’d visited that first day of work—Mitzi’s Tavern. Frankie backed into a parking space. Matty started to get out and Frankie said, “Hold up. We’re just looking.”

“At what?”

“Your target.”

Matty suddenly realized what Frankie had in mind. “You want me to, uh, look inside their safe?”

“No! What good would that do? I want you to get the combination of their safe.”

“But how—”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself. I’ll teach you. I have the plan all worked out.”

“I can’t just rob a bar!”

“You’re not robbing anything—I am. And that, Matty, is not just a bar. That place is the headquarters of Bad Shit Incorporated. In the back room, Mitzi’s got a safe full of money she’s taken from a lot of hardworking folks. You know what street tax is?”

Matty was too shocked to even pretend to know.

“Protection money. Protection from her, and her brother. Every bar, brothel, and bodega has to pay up. If you don’t, they make your life difficult. Even shut you down. Trust me, when I ran Bellerophonics, they took a slice, right off the top.”

“Why don’t the cops arrest them?”

“You’re adorable.”

“I was just asking.”

“It’s Chicago, Matty.”

“That doesn’t explain anything.”

“It’s a quote. Or a paraphrase. Don’t you watch movies?” He took a breath. “Mitzi’s brother, Nick Senior, runs the biggest crew in the Outfit. Organized crime. They tell people, if you don’t pay us, then the disorganized criminals will have their way with you. They tell you, we’re the dogs that keep away the wolves. And do you know why people pay up, and don’t squeal? Because it works. Any two-bit thug knocks over a protected place, Nick Pusateri Senior will take them the fuck out.”

“So they’re not all bad,” Matty said.

Frankie blinked, then doubled back. “That’s not all they do. They’re also loan sharks. They loan money to people at high interest rates, and then if you don’t pay—”

“Why don’t these people go to a bank?”

“Because a bank won’t talk to them. Loan sharks lend money to people that no bank would. For example, entrepreneurs who, despite having a dynamite business plan and a clear vision of the industry’s future, are nevertheless turned down on a technicality, like, say, a bad credit history, or no collateral.”

“So loan sharks are a good thing, right?” Matty asked. “Otherwise they couldn’t get a loan at all.”

“Right, except—look. These people are sociopaths. You know what a sociopath is? No conscience. They’d strangle a kitten if it owed ’em two bucks. All they care about is one thing—their money. They don’t care if you get sick or if your business goes bankrupt and you have no way to repay them, they just demand their money.” Frankie nodded toward the tavern. “Now pay attention.”

A tall, bulky man was unlocking the front door. It was the bartender who’d poured Matty a soda. “Ten o’clock, prompt as hell. That’s Barney. Pretty much works from open to close. First thing he does is walk to a keypad a few feet inside the entrance and turn off the alarm. There’s another keypad at the back door.”

“You want me to find out that number, too?”

“You’re learning. I’d also like you to peek behind the bar. I know he’s got a fungo bat behind there, and maybe a—well, just take a look if you get a chance.”

“You think he’s got a gun?”

“Not that you have to worry about. Come on, what’s that look for?”

Matty realized he was thinking of kittens. “Isn’t there somebody else we could steal from?”

“That wouldn’t be ethical,” Frankie said.

Barney went inside and closed the door. “They won’t be open for another hour,” Frankie said. “Mitzi comes in the afternoon, knocks off around ten or eleven.” He started drawing the layout of the interior on the back of a Tastee Freez bag, starting with the public area Matty remembered from his visit. Then there was Mitzi’s office, a tiny kitchen and supply room, and a cleaning closet. Past the two restrooms was a fire exit that let out to an alley.

“That’s where the second keypad is. And that—” He drew an X on the back wall of the office. “That’s where the safe is, right behind her desk. You just got to watch her, as much as possible, and find out what that combination is.”

“And then what?” Matty asked.

“Then you leave the rest to me.”

That afternoon, Matty left Frankie’s garage, closed the side door behind him—and stopped. Malice sat on the back stoop of the house. She’d looked up from her book and frowned at him.

“Do I even want to know what you and Frank are up to?” she asked.

“It’s nothing, we’re just…you know…” He felt his face heat. “Garage stuff.” She looked impossibly cool in a black tank top and black jeans—maybe a different pair than last night. He was suddenly aware that he didn’t own a single pair of black jeans, and might never.

God, now she was staring at him like he was a dork. Get ahold of yourself, Matty. You have no idea what you can do yet.

“So what were you up to?” he said, summoning testosterone. “In the middle of the night.”

“Did you tell Frank?” she asked.

“Of course not!”

She thought this over.

“You’re welcome,” he said finally.

“You’re mad at me.”

“You could have waited, like, two seconds.”

“You weren’t invited.”

“So invite me.” This was, by far, the bravest thing he’d ever said to a girl. And then he immediately chastised himself: She’s not a girl, she’s your cousin.

Not a blood relative, he replied.

Shut up.

“Maybe next time,” Malice said.

“I’m staying over again tonight,” he said, putting half a question mark at the end.

“What? Why?”

He opened his mouth, shut it.

She laughed and raised a hand. “Oh, right. Garage stuff.”

“So tonight?” he asked, thinking: Second bravest girl/cousin statement ever. A new list.

She glanced behind him at the garage. “You won’t tell Frank?”

“I’m insulted you would ask,” he said.

Matty hadn’t counted on the difficulty of escaping the bedroom a second time. It had been so easy last night, but tonight it seemed as if no one would go to sleep. The twins got into a squawking slap fight, which forced Loretta to get up and separate them, and then fifteen minutes later Uncle Frankie clomped to the bathroom and back. Matty listened to all this from the lower bunk, with the covers pulled up to hide the fact that he was fully dressed—just in case someone decided to burst in and check on him.

Malice had told him to be ready by eleven. But at ten till, the twins were awake again in the living room, laughing instead of arguing, but still obstacles. The house was so small that they’d hear him even if he tried to go out through the kitchen. The window, then, was his only option.

He got out of bed and stepped up on the toy box. He pushed the sash as high as he could—which was still not all the way up. He’d need something like Uncle Buddy’s sledgehammer to manage that. Then he removed the screen and set it on the floor.

Are you doing this, Matty?

Yes, I am. And the name is Matt.

He put his head and shoulders through the window. Outside, the street was deserted, and Malice was nowhere in sight. Above the rooftops, the moon was wrapped in a blanket of clouds. He supposed he should be thankful for the extra dark.

His immediate problem was the six-foot drop to the ground, and the jagged artificial lava rocks that Uncle Frankie used as landscaping. The window was too small for him to get his knees through, so he’d have to Spider-Man it, headfirst.

He leaned out through the window, then reached down and pressed his hands to the brick. He dragged his crotch over the sill, bracing himself with his palms, and slowly brought one thigh through, and wedged his knee against the side of the frame. Then he shifted his weight, brought the other leg forward—

“Come on, already,” Malice said.

He pitched forward and crashed into the rocks. In an instant he scrambled upright. Malice had appeared, hands on hips. “I’m good!” he said. “I’m good!”

“Keep your voice down,” she said.

She strode away from him and he hurried to catch up. “So where are we going?” he asked. She didn’t answer. Up ahead, a car idled at the stop sign. A rear door opened and a girl jumped out, waving her hands at them. “Chica chica chica!” the girl said. “Ooh, and her little dog, Matty, too!” Bass throbbed from the open windows.

It was Janelle, the white girl who’d slept over with Malice at Grandpa Teddy’s house the night of his first OBE. He considered correcting her about his name, but then Malice was pushing him into the backseat and the girls were climbing in after him and they were off in a blast of static and piano and a rapper yelling, “Watch your step, kid.”

He decided to not take this as a warning from the stereo gods.

Two black boys sat in the front, bearing the brunt of the noise. The one driving was tall, his hair smashed against the roof. The one in the passenger seat turned to look over the seatback at them.

“Hey there, little dude!” the one in the passenger seat said, half shouting over the music.

Malice introduced them as the Tarantula Brothers, which made both the guys crack up. Matty laughed, too, because he was nervous, and then got angry at himself for being nervous. He then realized that his failure to say hello—or anything at all—had been transformed into an Awkward Silence.

“He just fell out a window,” Malice explained.

They drove across Norridge, or maybe out of it; in the Chicagoland sprawl it was impossible to tell. Malice was looser and happier than he’d ever seen her; she kept falling into Janelle, and the four of them—everyone except Matty—seemed to talk in a language composed entirely of in-jokes, sex slang, and the word “fuck.” He gradually caught on to a few things. The driver’s real name was Robbie and the passenger’s was Lucas; Malice had a crush on Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth; and Robbie was recently grounded by his father (a minister, or maybe a deacon) for listening to the Wu-Tang Clan.

“RZA’s from Pittsburgh,” Matty said, relieved to have something to add to the conversation.

“You listen to Wu-Tang?” Malice asked. He liked the amazement in her voice.

“They’re cool,” Matty said, not answering her question. “RZA lives in Pittsburgh” was a Key Fact at his junior high, and it was the sum total of his knowledge about both the rapper and the group.

Eventually they ended up at a Burger King. Malice and Janelle shared an order of fries and, at one point, a single fry.

“Fuck, ladies,” Lucas said. “Why don’t you just make out for the crowd?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Malice said. “Mike’s here.”

A pickup truck had pulled into the parking lot.

“Why don’t you go see your boyfriend, then?” Lucas said.

Malice held up a fry like a cigarette and said, “I think I shall.” She sashayed across the cement picnic area to the truck. No one had gotten out of the cab.

“Is that really her boyfriend?” Matty asked Robbie, on the theory that a preacher’s son was less threatening.

“Let’s just say they see each other on the regular,” Robbie said.

“Chronically!” Lucas said, and fell out laughing.

Malice stood at the driver’s side of the pickup, leaning into the window, her arms inside it. Then she pulled back and tucked something into the pocket of her shirt. A few more words with the driver, and then she was walking back to them, smiling. “All set,” she said.

The five of them got back into Robbie’s car and pulled out. “Kmart?” Lucas asked.

“No!” Janelle said. “Priscilla’s!”

“Not the fucking swing sets again,” Lucas said. “We’re going to get busted.” But minutes later they were hopping a fence and running across a wide yard to reach a playground in the shadow of a prison-like building: St. Priscilla’s Academy. Janelle and Malice ran for the swings, while the boys sat on the rusty merry-go-round.

“Those girls are crazy,” Lucas said. He held a cigarette to his mouth and leaned forward. Robbie lit it for him. “Kuh-razy.”

“So crazy,” Matty said lamely. The girls were now sitting on top of each other, trying to ride on the same swing. He couldn’t get over how different Malice was with her friends. She was happy. Robbie said, “Are we going to do this or what?”

Do what? Matty thought, but followed the group to the shadows below the walls of the academy. Malice produced a cigarette from her bra. No, not a cigarette.

“You know, you guys could pay every once in a while,” Malice said.

“Like it’s your money,” Lucas said, and they all laughed, even Matty, though he had no idea why.

Matty had smoked once before, in eighth grade, outside a CoGo’s, and had not detected any effect except dizziness. This time he inhaled with confidence, and then coughed for an uncomfortably long time. This brought out not laughter, as he’d feared, but concern, sympathy, and much coaching about technique. They kept handing the joint to him for another try. “Hold it in your lungs,” Janelle said. “That’s it.”

Malice patted him on the back after he managed to exhale smoothly.

“How do you feel?” Robbie said.

“Fine,” Matty said. “This is good stuff.” They all cracked up—but now he felt that they were laughing with him. He lay back on the cool cement and stared up at the sheer wall of the school and the black sky beyond. The clouds had pulled back, revealing bright stars.

He had no idea if this was good stuff, because he couldn’t feel any effect. Maybe he was immune. Maybe he was part of a special subset of the population with an innate resistance to the effects of marijuana. A mutant. A sober mutant. A sober, chubby, white, boring mutant. Captain Beige.

God he hated his body. It was kuh-razy that he had to carry this thing around with him all the time. What was the point of being a mind anchored to this dead weight—or dying weight, that was it, a blobby mass already becoming old, bubbling with latent cancers, each cell wall ready to rupture like a cheap sandwich bag and spill its chemicals back into the soil. If people had to be trapped inside something, why not a robot body made of something dependable, something solid, like that brick wall? God, the wallness of it, looming over him, holding up the night sky, a black ceiling decorated with star stickers. If he weren’t trapped like this he could climb that wall with his ghost fingers, so easy, like pulling himself, weightless, along the bottom of the pool, and then, at the top of the wall, look down at the school yard that had become as small as a child’s bedroom, the grass as luscious as carpet.

His body lay there, fat and unmoving as a Beanie Baby, but Malice and her friends were dancing, laughing, alive. Malice and Janelle swung each other around with half-assed square dance moves while Robbie and Lucas sang “You-ooh-ooh, why you wanna give me a run-around.” But there was so much more, beyond this yard. The sky lifted up and up like a box lid, teasing him, and he followed it up. Below him, the suburban landscape unspooled in all directions, porch lights and streetlamps as small as fireflies, and the highways winding through them, twin rivers of lights, white on one side, red on the other, flowing between the city and the suburban lowlands. He laughed to himself, surprised to find that he was happy, very happy, the happiest he’d been since moving back to Illinois. In the distance, the towers of Chicago waited for him like women in sequined gowns, all of them gazing up at their queen, the Sears Tower. Hello, ladies! How y’all doing tonight? Maybe he should—

Suddenly he felt himself yanked through the air. The world around him blurred—and then Malice appeared in front of his face.

“Get ahold of yourself,” she said, laughing. “You keep yelling like that you’re going to get us all arrested!”

Then she let go of him and he fell back against the lawn, giggling. He was back inside his big, blobby body. But that was okay. He’d found another way out of it.

7 Teddy

Love makes a man desperate. After he’d exhausted his scant resources—two phone books; a suspicious operator; a useless, fruitless, but cinematically romantic drive around Oak Brook—he was forced, at long last, to ask for help from Destin Smalls.

The previous time they’d talked it was the agent who’d called, pestering Teddy about the psychic activity among his descendants. Teddy may have implied that Smalls was a nosy, paranoid drama queen. Now it was Teddy calling, and the foot was in the other mouth.

“You’ve gone off your rocker,” Smalls told him.

“It’s a small favor,” Teddy said to him. “Hardly anything for a man with your connections.”

“What in the world do you want it for?” Smalls asked.

“Can you get it or not?” And within hours, Smalls arrived at his front door—but with company.

“Jesus Christ,” Teddy said. “You brought him?”

G. Randall Archibald—tinier, balder, and more mustachioed than ever—held out his hand. “A pleasure to see you again, Teddy.”

“The Annoying Archibald. My God, you look like the guy on the Pringles can, but with less hair.”

“And you still dress like an extra in an Al Capone movie.”

“Says the cue ball with Kaiser Wilhelm’s mustache.” To Smalls he said, “Did you bring it?”

The agent held up a slip of paper. “I want to talk first.”

“Of course you do,” Teddy said with a sigh. He led them to the back patio. The men settled awkwardly into their folding chairs. Archibald eyed the hole in the yard and said, “Burying a body?”

Teddy ignored him and nodded at the paper still in Smalls’s hands. “So?”

“Tell me what you want with it, first,” Smalls said.

“You scared the lady away before we could finish our conversation.”

“Then why don’t you just call her? I can give you her phone number.”

“I’ll take that, too. But I’d prefer to mail her a card. It’s more gentlemanly.” Teddy reached into the ceramic flowerpot that sat under the window, and came out with the plastic baggie that held his secret stash: a box of Marlboros and a Bic lighter.

“She’s married, Teddy.”

“I’m aware of that.” He lit the cigarette and inhaled gratefully. “You want one?”

Smalls didn’t pretend the offer was sincere.

“Archibald?”

“No thanks. Had a touch of the cancer a few years ago.”

“What kind?”

“Prostate.”

“I’m not asking you to smoke it in your ass.”

“There’s quite enough emanating from yours,” Archibald said.

“Can we please stay on topic?” Smalls said. “This woman’s husband is on trial for murder.”

“Innocent until proven guilty,” Teddy said. “I just want to help her out.”

Smalls leaned forward, the piece of paper in his hand like bait. “Two conditions. One, I never gave this to you.”

“And?”

“I want you to be straight with me.”

“You want to know about the kids.”

“No, I—has something happened?”

“I told you twice now, none of the grandkids are doing anything. Zip, nil, null.”

“What about the boy?” Archibald asked.

“Matty?” Fortunately, the kid was out of the house, working with Frankie. “Not a chance. His daddy was a no-talent Polack. It would take a lot to overcome those genes.”

“Not like your sturdy Greek genes,” Smalls said.

“What the hell, Smalls.” Teddy glanced at the door, making sure Buddy wasn’t standing there.

The agent raised his eyebrows. “They still don’t know?”

“Jesus Christ. It’s none of your business.”

“All right, let’s set aside the children for now,” Smalls said. “I have a different question.”

“You know, we could have had this entire conversation on the phone, and you wouldn’t have had to drive all the way over here with this pint-size William Howard Taft.”

“This is important,” Smalls said. “I want you to—”

“And how’d you get here so fast?” Teddy asked. “You two bunking at the Hinsdale Oasis or something?”

“Would you stop interrupting for one gosh darn second?”

“There’s no call for language,” Teddy said. Archibald chuckled.

Smalls took a breath. Then, in a quieter voice, he said, “I told you Star Gate was closing down.”

“And I bet Archibald’s wallet is still in mourning.”

“There’s only a couple agents left,” Smalls said. “You remember Clifford Turner? He’s detected an enormous spike of psychic energy in this area.”

Teddy laughed. “Cliff? He’s sweet, but he couldn’t detect an armchair if he was sitting on it.”

“Teddy, this is important. We’re trying to help you.”

“Help me?”

“Your children, at least. What if the Russians picked up that spike? What if, at this very moment, they’re homing in on this area?”

“Looking for my children?”

“No,” the agent said. “The next Maureen.”

Teddy laughed.

“Just because the Cold War’s over doesn’t mean the world’s any safer,” Smalls said. “In fact, with all this instability, threats can come from—”

“Destin. Please.”

“What?”

“Has it crossed your mind that you’re inventing all this spy drama because you’re terrified of retirement?”

“Inventing it?”

“Archibald’s in it for the money. But you, you need this for different reasons. You’ve been put out to pasteurize, you’ve lost the love of your life, your dreams have died—”

“You’re talking about me now?”

“So your life didn’t turn out the way you thought. So you didn’t change the world. So what? It was a pretty good run. And now you’ve got only one choice.”

Smalls raised an eyebrow.

“Embrace mediocrity,” Teddy said. “That’s my advice to you, my friend. Lower the bar. Accept the C-minus. Give up on the rib eye and order the hamburger.”

Smalls stared at him for a long moment, annoyed now but putting a lid on it. God damn, it was fun to wind the ol’ G-man up. Just like the old days. Having Archibald as an audience was the bonus.

Finally Smalls said, “I wish I was making all this up, Teddy. The world’s getting more dangerous by the day. Our enemies aren’t in submarines and bomber jets anymore. It’s not about missile silos, though God help me, the idea of a fragmented Soviet Union keeps me awake at night. No, our enemies are fanatics with fertilizer bombs. How can we protect ourselves against another Oklahoma City? How can ordinary intelligence suss out two men in a truck?”

Oh, speeches. Square-jawed Smalls was hell on speeches.

“Are you going to give me that address or not?” Teddy asked.

Smalls handed him the folded slip of paper. Teddy studied it without opening it. He thought Archibald would appreciate the move.

“So she does live in Oak Brook,” Teddy said.

Smalls seemed surprised.

“Educated guess,” Archibald said.

Smalls stood up. “I’m serious, Teddy,” Smalls said. “The stakes are high.”

Archibald said, “Another Maureen could make all the difference.”

“There is no other Maureen,” Teddy said, tucking the paper away. “And no next Maureen, just like there was no one before her. She was one of a kind. The Ace of Roses.”

He’d never seen a smoother operator, and the topper was the photograph gag Maureen pulled on that last day in Dr. Eldon’s lab. This was the third or fourth week in October 1962. The campus trees were ablaze, and the air had taken on that amber shimmer of a fall afternoon. Or perhaps it was only the stage lighting of faulty memory. It could have been gray and overcast, and his mind would have cast a golden haze over that last episode of unbridled play before Dr. Eldon’s program was yanked out from under him and everything got serious.

And it was play. A few months into the experiments, the subject pool was down to just Clifford, Teddy, and Maureen, and protocol had broken down completely. They still performed in a “controlled environment,” an observation room with a one-way mirror, behind which an assistant filmed them. But within the observation room it was anything but controlled. Teddy had nudged Dr. Eldon into abandoning his original test plans in favor of an “improvisational approach.” Cliff still did solo sessions, but Maureen and Teddy would come into the room together (another protocol breakdown that Teddy had encouraged, noting that psychic activity seemed to be stronger when they were in the same room), and do whatever popped into their heads. “What do you feel like doing today?” Dr. Eldon would ask them, and then Teddy (most often it was Teddy) would propose some new experiment, which of course he’d prepared for.

In short, the inmates had taken over the asylum.

A newcomer to the scam biz might suppose that scientists were the hardest to fool, but the opposite was true. Each letter after a name imparted a dose of misapplied confidence. PhDs believed that expertise in one field—say, neuroscience—made them generally smarter in all fields. Belief that one was hard to fool was the one quality shared by all suckers. And if the suckers wanted the results you were giving ’em—if they were already imagining the publications and fame that would come from proving psychic abilities were true? Everything would have been different if Eldon’s career depended on debunking Teddy and Maureen instead of confirming them. Hell, all the man had to do was hire a stage magician to watch them work and the psychics would be sunk.

Well, Teddy would be. Maureen he wasn’t so sure. What amazed him was how she could outperform him, even when he set up the scams. He’d practice pencil reading all week, come in with prepared envelopes, his pockets crammed with blanks and dummy cards—and Maureen would toss off some feat of casual clairvoyance that would knock his socks off.

“You’re killing me,” he told her. “Absolutely killing me.”

She laughed. Oh, he liked that laugh. They were strolling around that improbably sunny courtyard, on break after spending a couple of hours fascinating Dr. Eldon and the invisible assistant.

“You’re the one who’s killing them,” Maureen said. “You saw Dr. Eldon’s face when you guessed all three wishes.”

This morning it had been mostly Teddy’s show. He’d started with some matchstick divination, followed up with his go-to shtick with the hat and paper. The doc had been suitably impressed.

“Oh, that?” he said. “That’s just billet reading.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“One of the first tricks I learned. There was a kid in my neighborhood who did nothing but read magic books all day and get beat up on the weekends. Tiny little guy. I kept him from getting his noggin caved in, and he showed me the ropes.”

“So how’s it done?” she asked. “The billet reading?”

“The hardest part is palming the first slip. The rest of it’s just reading ahead.”

“I didn’t see you palm anything,” she said. “You never even touched the papers except when you held them to your forehead. Unless…”

“It was when I—”

“Shush, let me think,” she said. “It wasn’t when Dr. Eldon folded the squares and dropped them into the hat—he did that on his own. And when you dumped the messages onto the table, you were holding just the brim of the hat. Your fingers didn’t go near the table.”

“Do you want me to explain?”

“Hold on, bucko. Now, when the squares were on the table, Eldon touched them—you asked him to arrange them into a triangle—but you never did. No, the only time you touched them was when you held them to your forehead—and you couldn’t have read them like that.”

“Oh, my dear Irish rose, I’ve spent my nights at the gaming tables, and I can’t tell when you’re bluffing. I know you’ve got moves much more complex than what I’ve shown the old man.”

“Mr. Telemachus,” Maureen said in that mock-prim voice that made his skin tingle. “It’s your moves that are under inspection here. The folding business—that’s quite suspicious. Why the little squares?”

He started to answer and she held up a hand. “You do know what a rhetorical question is, don’t you? Try to be quiet for a single minute.”

They walked in silence. The people they passed were mostly students, much younger than Teddy, and most were men. He watched them steal glances at Maureen, and he thought, Yep, boys, the girl’s with me. If only she’d let him say so out loud! When in public, she wouldn’t allow him to hold her hand, or put his arm around her waist. Her mother, she claimed, would be scandalized, as if her mother had eyes everywhere in the city. Maureen had only allowed him to kiss her (and yes, a bit more) twice, and both times it was in the pitch dark of the building’s supply closet.

“The shaking of the hat,” Maureen said finally.

He laughed.

“I’m right!” she said. “That’s the only time I saw your fingers inside the hat at the same time as the papers.”

“Caught at the scene of the crime,” he admitted.

“And that’s when you nab one of the squares,” she said.

“And substitute one of my own, yes.”

“Where did yours come from? When did you fold it?”

He opened his hand. “Right here.” A folded square of paper rested in his palm. “I always keep a couple around.”

“All the time? You just walk around with paper in your pants—I mean, your pockets?”

“And a few other things. It only works if the trick’s over before the audience knows it’s started. It’s all about preparation.”

“That sounds exhausting.”

“And you just, what? Improvise?” In all their time alone together—which wasn’t much, only the minutes stolen during breaks and the few more after the day’s experiments were over—she’d never once given him a hint of her technique. It was a level of secrecy that he’d previously found only in paranoid, embittered cardsharks.

“How do you know what to write on your square?” she asked, refusing to be distracted.

“There’s nothing on mine. It’s blank.”

“But why would—?”

“Wait for it. When I dump the squares onto the table, two of those are the mark’s, and one’s mine.”

“I don’t like you calling Dr. Eldon a mark.”

“Shush,” he said, in the same tone she’d used with him. “I know which billet is mine because I put a little top crease in it. Barely noticeable unless you’re looking for it.”

“That’s why you have the squares—so your little imposter can sneak in.”

“And so the mark—excuse me, the honorable victim—can’t accidentally see that one’s blank.”

“But why the triangle business?”

“Because while everybody’s looking at him push the squares around, I’ve got one hand unfolding the first billet. It takes just a glance to read it—that’s why I only have him put two words down. And now the moment that seems to be the meat of the trick, from the audience’s point of view.”

He stopped talking. He was following a piece of advice given to him by his first magic teacher: whether it’s an audience or a woman, you have to make them ask for it.

But of course that didn’t work with Maureen. “That’s the read-ahead,” she said. “You’ve got one on your forehead, but you’re just pretending to read it—you’re telling us the one you’ve already read.”

“You’ve got it,” Teddy said, only slightly disappointed that he couldn’t do the reveal himself. “Then, after they confirm I got it right, I open the paper, nod knowingly, crumple it nonchalantly, and toss it in the hat.”

“By which point you’ve just read what the next wish is.”

“Always stay one step ahead of the audience,” Teddy said.

“And the last square on the table is the blank,” she said. “That’s very clever.” She looped her arm through his, and his blood whooshed like hot water in a Kenmore. They resumed their stroll.

“What if they look at the messages afterward?” Maureen asked. He could barely hear her over the roar in his ears. “They’ll notice the blank.”

“Oh, I never throw that last one in. I throw in the first message, suitably crumpled, and palm the blank.”

“You’ve got quick hands, Mr. Telemachus.”

If there is one thing more glorious than to walk arm in arm with a beautiful woman, it is doing so with one who’s flirting with you. He thought of the professor’s three wishes: “repaired furnace,” “grant approval,” and “publication permission.” So boring! God he hoped he never lived a life as small as Dr. Eldon’s.

“Now tell me your secret, Miss McKinnon,” he said. “How’d you do the photograph?”

Just before the break, Dr. Eldon had handed them a small photograph of a man sitting on a park bench. The picture had been taken from some distance away, but his short, triangular beard and slashing dark eyebrows made him as vivid as a Dick Tracy villain.

“I’d like you to concentrate on this man,” the professor had said. He was leaning over his desk, notepad and pen at the ready.

“Who is it?” Teddy had asked.

“I can’t tell you,” Dr. Eldon said. “That’s part of the test.”

Which was unusual. The professor hadn’t given them a test of his own devising in weeks. “What I need you to do is try to picture where this man is now.”

Teddy studied the photograph for half a minute, and then passed it to Maureen.

“Hmm,” Teddy said. “I’m sensing…a large building. An apartment? Or an office building?” Whenever Teddy was forced to do a cold reading, he just kept throwing out words until the mark gave something away. This time, though, the professor seemed to not know himself. Everything Teddy said he jotted down on the notepad.

“It seems to be an eastern city,” Teddy said. “Or southeastern? I can picture the sun coming up—”

“He’s on a submarine,” Maureen said.

Dr. Eldon looked up. “Pardon?”

Maureen’s eyes were closed. “Right now. He’s on a submarine, deep underwater. Near the Arctic Circle.”

The professor glanced toward the one-way mirror, then addressed Maureen more formally. “Perhaps you’d like to concentrate a bit more. Teddy, do you sense anything else?”

Her eyes snapped open. “I told you where he is,” she said before he could answer. The doc sighed, and started scribbling in his notebook. “Small room, curving metal walls. And above him, an expanse of snow and ice, which is why I said the Arctic. Though I suppose it could be the Antarctic.”

“Fine,” Dr. Eldon said. He wrote all this down reluctantly, like a man signing a confession. “Arctic or Antarctic. Anything else?”

Maureen closed her eyes, then opened them again. “He’s gone now. I think I scared him.”

“What?”

“He saw me. I think that’s why I honed in on him so easily. Are you looking for another psychic?”

“No, I’m not—at least I don’t think so. Can we please get back on track?” He should have been more excited, but instead he seemed shook up. Nervous. “Teddy, what did you see?”

“It was a metal room I saw, too,” Teddy said. “And I sensed the difference between the surface. I thought he was up high, in a skyscraper or something, but down low would make sense, too.”

Teddy did not dare glance at Maureen, afraid that she was glaring at him.

Dr. Eldon ran a hand through his thatch of hair and told them to take a recess. He said they’d resume in twenty or thirty minutes.

“Submarine?” Teddy said, as they walked arm in arm. “Submarine?”

She suppressed a smile.

“You have to admit, that’s a ridiculous answer,” he said.

“You certainly hopped on the bandwagon,” she said calmly.

“You gave me no choice! Next time, don’t say crazy stuff like that. Like that business about him being another psychic! Say probable things, likely things, and, most important, vague things. You don’t tell somebody their grandmother’s missing locket is, I don’t know, on top of Mount Kilimanjaro, being held by Winston Churchill.”

“Oh, Mr. Telemachus,” she said. “Why don’t you trust your own gift?”

“I do trust my gift. Which includes knowing when to let the mark fill in the details.”

She shook her head. “You just insist on doing everything the hard way.”

When they returned to the observation room, Dr. Eldon was gone. Standing in front of the desk, arms straight at his sides, was a man in a black suit. His face seemed to consist entirely of a square jaw and a high-top haircut.

Cop, Teddy thought. Pure cop.

“Where’d the doc go?” Teddy asked.

“Please, have a seat,” the man said.

“And you are?” Teddy asked. He was not about to sit, and neither was Maureen.

“I’m your new supervisor,” he said.

“Excuse me?” Maureen asked.

“Four weeks ago, the man in that picture boarded K-159, a nuclear submarine of the Soviet North Fleet. The boat is on a three-month tour that we believe will cross under the polar ice cap.”

“Who the hell is we?” Teddy said, though he was getting a pretty good idea. His stomach had gone cold. Scamming an egghead professor out of his grant money was one thing, but this? These people could look up his records.

“The man’s presence on the submarine was top secret, known only to a handful of people. Well, a handful of people outside Russia.”

“There’s something I need to explain,” Teddy said.

“Shut up,” Maureen said quietly.

“We have important work for you to do,” the stranger said.

“Sure, sure,” Teddy said. He patted Maureen’s arm and turned to go. “You’ll do swell, kid.”

“Both of you.” He held out his hand. “My name is Destin Smalls, and your government needs you.”

The problem with getting old was that each day had to compete with the thousands of others gone by. How wonderful would a day have to be to win such a beauty contest? To even make it into the finals? Never mind that memory rigged the game, airbrushed the flaws from its contestants, while the present had to shuffle into the spotlight unaided, all pockmarked with mundanities and baggy with annoyances: traffic fumes and blaring radios and fast-food containers tumbling along the sidewalk. Even an afternoon such as this, spent cooling his heels in a well-appointed park, under a sky as clear as a nun’s conscience, was chock-full of imperfections that disqualified it from top ten status. Why were the children on the soccer field so fat? Why couldn’t people keep their dogs on leash? Why did these moms insist on yelling so much?

Waiting made his fingers itch for cards. Before the accident he never went anywhere without a couple of decks in his pockets. He spent endless hours at diners and bars running through his repertoire—the second strike, the bottom deal, the Greek deal, the family of false cuts and false shuffles. The trick was not to make them look like tricks. Do anything that looked like a “move” and you were asking for a beating.

These days he was lucky he could still button his shirt. His hands had turned to claws. There’d been a few good years after the accident when he thought he was getting it all back, full recovery of motion, but then the arthritis kicked in, and his fingers developed a stutter that made him afraid to sit down at a poker table. Started popping Advil to keep the pain and swelling down. One morning a couple of years ago, he woke up and his right hand was frozen, as if it didn’t belong to him at all. He massaged it back to life before breakfast, but the freeze-outs became more common, then started creeping into the other hand. Post-traumatic arthritis, the doctor called it. Someday, maybe soon, he’d wake up with both hands turned to sticks like a God damn snowman.

And yet, and yet, the day might still become a runner-up. Because at this moment, the woman he was waiting for stepped out of her Mercedes E-Class wagon. Her youngest son had already jumped out of the backseat and was running for the field. She called him back (Adrian, that was his name), put a water bottle in his hand, and sent him off again.

Teddy took a breath, feeling as nervous as the first time he’d asked Maureen for a date. Then he rose from the picnic table and removed his hat. The motion, as he anticipated, was enough to get her to glance at him.

She looked away, then turned toward him again, squinting.

“Hello, Graciella,” he said.

She didn’t answer. It wasn’t possible that she didn’t remember him, was it? He started toward her, and was relieved when she didn’t jump into her car and floor it.

“Do you have a grandchild playing?” she finally asked.

“I have to come clean, my dear. I came here only to see you. I thought we should talk.”

“How did you—have you followed me here?”

“When you say it like that, it doesn’t sound entirely respectable,” he said.

“I’m going to watch the game,” she said. She opened the back of the wagon and reached in for something. “You have a good day, Teddy.” Clearly dismissing him, but all he could think was: She remembered my name!

“It’s about Nick,” Teddy said.

She went still, like a woman who’d drawn a spade that sabotaged her diamond flush, but was determined to play it out. He felt terrible for disappointing her. If there was any doubt that he knew about Nick Junior and his murder trial, he’d just removed it.

She straightened. “I’m not talking about my husband. Not to you, not—”

“Nick Senior,” Teddy said.

“What?”

“There are some things about your father-in-law you should know.”

Several emotions moved across her face, fast as wind whipping across wave tops. Just as quickly she mastered herself, looked at him down that strong Roman nose.

“Such as?” she asked.

“I can explain. You mind if I watch the game with you?” he asked.

She studied his face for a long moment. Then she shook her head, not so much agreeing to his request as resigning herself to it.

Eight-year-olds playing soccer, Teddy decided, was a lot like a pack of border collies chasing a single sheep, except that the dogs would’ve used more teamwork. Graciella’s son was somewhere in the red-shirted faction of the mob. All the boy-tykes looked alike, however, and all the ponytailed girl-tykes looked alike, so the best he could do was sort the mass into subsets of indistinguishables.

“Good job, Adrian!” Graciella yelled. Teddy couldn’t tell what that job might have been. But he did notice that none of the other parents had come over to talk to her. They formed their own clumps, talking among themselves, or else exhibiting a laser-like focus on the game that prevented them from even making eye contact with Graciella and, by extension, him.

“So you’ve got a lot of friends here,” Teddy said.

Graciella spared him a glance. “These people aren’t my friends.”

“Afraid of the mobster’s wife, eh?”

“As far as they’re concerned, Nick’s already convicted.”

“But you’ve got hope.”

If she’d been a pale woman she would have blushed, he was certain of it. “I shouldn’t have written that down,” she said. Meaning her third wish: NOT GUILTY. “I don’t know what I was thinking, talking about that stuff with strangers.”

“Strangers? I’m a harmless old man.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” she said. “The harmless ones don’t try so hard to pick up women at the grocery store.”

He laughed. “True enough, true enough.”

“You knew who I was, didn’t you? Before you even walked up.”

“No! Hand to God, I had no idea. It wasn’t until I saw a story about the trial that I put two and two together.”

She wasn’t ready to believe him. He started to explain, and then several nearby parents shouted at once; exciting things were happening on the field, evidently. Graciella stood up and he sat back, content to watch her watch the kids. He used to do the same thing with Maureen. When the act was on the road, they’d be at some hotel pool, and she’d be on alert, keeping them (well, Buddy mostly) from drowning, and he’d be watching her. God she’d been beautiful.

“So how do you know Nick Senior?” Graciella said finally.

“I used to play cards with him,” Teddy said, which was not a lie. “And some nights I’d bring his pizza home to the kids.”

“I’ve heard about that pizza,” she said. “Nick Junior said his dad wouldn’t let him or his sisters eat in the restaurant, but sometimes he’d bring home leftovers.”

“That sounds like him,” Teddy said. “I used to see how he treated little Nick. Back in the day, it was fine to spank your kids. Beat them even. But sometimes Nick Senior—well, I wouldn’t be surprised if your husband grew up hating him.”

“He doesn’t hate his father,” Graciella said. She put a spin on the word “hate” that made it seem as if several other options were available.

“That’s good, that’s good,” Teddy said. “Fathers and sons, that’s tricky business.” He considered what he wanted to say. He was glad they were having this conversation with lots of noise to cover it and no one too close, yet in sight of lots of people, so that she’d be reluctant to slap his face. Finally he said, “I saw in the papers that your Nick’s going to take the stand. Testify in his own defense.”

“Maybe. According to his lawyer.”

“So he’s not?”

“I’m not talking about this with you, Teddy.”

“Because I’d be awfully relieved if he didn’t.”

This made her raise an eyebrow.

“You know what everybody’s saying,” Teddy said. “A lot of speculation about what he’s going to say, and who he’s going to say it about.”

“My husband’s going to say whatever he wants to say to defend himself.”

“Of course he will, of course he will, that’s perfectly—”

“Why the hell do you care what he says?”

Damn. He’d made her angry. “Graciella, please. I don’t want to step out of line. But I wanted to offer some advice.”

“You want to offer advice,” she said icily. “To me. About my family.”

He forged ahead. “Tell your husband not to do it.” She opened her mouth to object and he said, “Please, trust me. Your husband may not want to go to jail, but if he does this thing, I’m afraid of what Nick Senior will do.”

“He won’t be doing anything,” she said. “The police have a lot of security around my husband.”

“I mean to you, Graciella.”

She stared at him, and he couldn’t read her expression. Fear? Anger? Some cocktail of them both? He pressed on.

“The police can’t help you. Witness protection won’t help you. Read the papers. Reggie Dumas, the last guy who testified against the Outfit in the eighties? He was in WITSEC. Two years later, they found his body in his backyard—in Phoenix. It took them years, but they got him, all the way out in the desert.”

“I’m such an idiot,” she said, almost under her breath.

“Don’t be hard on yourself,” he said. “Not everyone—”

“You work for him, don’t you?”

“Pardon?”

Looking at him now, her mouth a hard line. That cocktail was at two parts anger, one part fear. “Is this about the fucking teeth?”

“Teeth? What teeth?”

She stared at him.

“Graciella, please. I just wanted to warn you. I don’t think you understand what Nick Senior’s capable of.”

“Oh, I know he has a temper,” she said.

“A temper? The things I’ve seen him do. Do you know what degloving is?” He raised a hand. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have brought that up. The point is, your father-in-law’s a sick S.O.B.”

“Are you done talking about my family?”

“It’s your family now. But if your husband sells out his father on the witness stand, you’re not the family anymore, not as far as Nick Senior is concerned.”

Graciella stood up. “Get out of here,” she said.

He pulled himself out of the chair. “Please, I only came because—”

“Get out.”

Now the parents were looking at her—and, by extension, him. He straightened the Borsalino and lowered his voice.

“You have no reason to believe me,” he said. “I’m a cheat and a storyteller. I used to make my living conning people out of their cash. But I promise you, I’m telling the truth. I don’t work for Nick Senior. I’m just here to help.”

He held out a playing card. “I’ve written my number on this. If you need me, call.”

She refused to take it from him. He placed it on the lawn chair, tipped his hat, and walked toward his car. Behind him, a shout went up on the field, and red-shirted children celebrated and green-shirted children despaired, or vice versa.

In the months after he and Maureen were recruited and packed off to Maryland, their romance accelerated on its own, like a bike going downhill. It wasn’t only that they spent so much time together—working side by side every day at Fort Meade, taking the same bus back to Odenton, going home to neighboring apartments. The move itself had changed Maureen. Finally outside her mother’s influence, as she said, she’d blossomed. She laughed more easily, seemed less careful about every sentence she uttered, no longer seemed to worry what strangers on the street might think of them holding hands. And at night, Mo lit up like a kerosene torch. By spring they were making love with the lights on.

He wouldn’t have traded these months for anything, but he had to admit that the daily routine bored him, made him feel like he was working a straight job, something he’d vowed never to do. He also had to admit that for a straight job, it was pretty bent. Most days the work consisted of lying on couches talking aloud, while a fellow psychic recorded his “observations.” Later, Smalls would evaluate the observations for “hits.” Maureen and Teddy, the two stars of the show, had scores that were about the same but for opposite reasons. Maureen’s observations were highly specific, so that when she hit, her concrete statements came off as undeniable facts. Teddy’s answers, however, were artfully vague, so that it was near impossible for him to be completely wrong.

For some reason, Smalls had not recruited Clifford Turner, who had demonstrated some actual psychic ability—and that reason was that Turner was black. Smalls had let his prejudice do his thinking for him and had hired instead two white men who were self-deluded yahoos. Bob Nickles was a retired electrician who claimed to be an electricity douser; Jonathan Jones was a young man who’d been “discovered” by two Stanford professors after scoring high in a series of guessing games. Their primary qualifications seemed to be (a) luck, now run out; and (b) their golden-retriever-like enthusiasm. Nickles and Jones would babble on about whatever came to mind, often subconsciously riffing on whatever cues Smalls had let slip about the assignment. A stray mention of “sand” was enough to send them conjuring camels and Arabs all afternoon. What bothered Teddy was not that these two nimrods honestly thought they were having psychic experiences, but that Smalls did, too. Some days the G-man rated their results higher than Teddy’s or Maureen’s.

The rampant gullibility seemed to permeate all levels of government, fueled by fear of the Russians. The Soviets were pouring money into psi research, and the U.S., Smalls explained, had no choice but to respond in kind. All the intelligence organizations and every branch of the military were financing parallel secret programs. Some of them were focused on mind control, others on mind reading. Smalls’s team was in charge of remote viewing. He’d been given a dusty barracks building at the fort, enough money for a secretary, a junior agent, and four psychics, and all the office equipment he could scavenge from INSCOM and other army detachments. The program had no name, so everyone just called it “the program.”

The infuriating thing was that with all this government money flying around, so little of it was going to the ones doing the work—the psychic operatives. They were paying Maureen and Teddy peanuts. When Teddy pointed this out to Smalls, the man went into a speech about duty, protecting the country, and the threat to democracy itself. Asking you to forgo your fair share for the good of the nation, the company, or the church was a common enough scam, but telling you to go broke for the sake of an abstract philosophy? That took balls.

The real money, Teddy quickly figured out, was going to consultants and third-party contractors. Case in point: The morning before the night Teddy proposed to Maureen, they arrived at the barracks to find several workmen in orange coveralls setting up stacks of electrical equipment. Smalls called the seven members of the staff into his office. “I’ve got some good news,” he told them. “Management is very excited about the results that we’ve achieved so far. We’ve been given our own funding line, and an official code name. As of today, we are Aqueduct Anvil.”

“Wow!” Jones said. “What does it mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Smalls said. “It was next in the book.”

“What book?”

“The book of available code names.”

“You have a book of pre-generated code names?” Teddy asked.

“If you don’t, then everybody picks names like ‘Thunder Strike.’ In other news—”

Teddy raised his hand. “Can I tell people I’m in AA?” he asked innocently.

“Don’t tell people you’re in anything,” Smalls said.

“Can we still call it ‘the program’?” Bob Nickles asked.

“Then they’ll know we’re in AA,” Teddy said. Only Maureen and the secretary laughed.

“In other news,” Smalls repeated, desperately trying to regain control of the meeting. He never laughed at Teddy’s jokes. Any sense of humor in the man was short-circuited in Teddy’s presence by his jealousy. The poor lug was sweet on Maureen, but couldn’t admit these unclean thoughts to himself, and so had to take out his frustrations on her charming, loudmouthed beau. It didn’t matter that Teddy and Maureen’s relationship had been classified top secret by the woman herself; Smalls could sense it.

“Management also approved an expansion of the program,” Smalls said. “We’re going on a hiring spree.”

Smalls had gotten permission to test army personnel and read them into the program if their scores matched the desired “psychological profile.” Teddy assumed that meant gullibility.

“Test them how?” Maureen asked.

“That’s an excellent question,” Smalls said. “Thank you, Maureen.”

God help us, Teddy thought.

Smalls gestured toward the door. “Here is the man who can answer your questions.” Standing there, hands clasped behind his back, was a short man in a black suit. His hair was wispy on top, but his mustache was as thick, oiled, and pointy as a silent film villain’s.

“This is G. Randall Archibald,” Smalls said. “And he has a device that will revolutionize psi research.”

“You don’t say,” Teddy said.

The mustachioed man surveyed the room. “My torsion field detector can measure psi ability with ninety-five percent accuracy.”

“Ninety-five point six,” Smalls said. “How about we begin with you, Teddy?”

“Say what?” Teddy asked. He glanced at Maureen. She suddenly took an interest in her shoes.

“You of all people have nothing to be afraid of,” Archibald said with the tone of a physician hiding a large syringe behind his back. “Not a talent as powerful as yourself.”

Coming home did nothing to improve Teddy’s mood. Buddy was crouched in the living room, sweaty and distressed, trying to rewire a lamp. (Why? Was it broken? If it hadn’t been it was now.) Frankie sat at the kitchen table, three empty beer bottles in front of him, sucking down his fourth.

“What are you doing here, and what have you done with my beer?” Teddy asked.

“I dropped off Matty. He’s a hell of a young man. Good worker, enthusiastic, and ready to push himself. Not like most kids.”

“Right,” Teddy said. “Not like the kind who hang around your house, expecting a handout.”

“Exactly.” Frankie finished his beer, got up to pull another one from the fridge. “A real go-getter.” Under the table sat a cardboard box.

“What the hell is that?” Teddy asked, knowing full well what the box was.

“I brought you a refill,” Frankie said.

“No.” Teddy shook his head. “No no no no.”

“You know this stuff is good for you. It’s got—”

“Antioxidants! Jesus Christ, I know. Take it out of here, Frankie. I got enough God damn antioxidants to drown a steer.”

“If you become one of my down-line distributors, the price gets even cheaper.”

“We’ve talked about this. That’s your scam, not mine.”

“All I’m asking is for once in your life you show a little support.”

“Once in my—is that what you said? Once?”

“I don’t mooch off you,” Frankie said, in denial of all historical records. “We all know you’re loaded—”

“I’m not loaded.”

“—but at least I don’t squat here, eat your food, expect you to take care of me.”

Teddy opened the high cabinet and brought down the Hendrick’s bottle. “So what you’re telling me,” he said, pouring three fingers into a thick-bottomed glass, “I buy one more box from you, that’s it, you’ll never ask for anything again?”

Frankie frowned. “What’s the matter with you?” He wasn’t used to sarcasm from Teddy, whose habit in these post-work sessions was to listen quietly. Two or three times a week Frankie would do this, come in after work, start holding forth on herbal supplements or real estate taxes or whatever had gotten into his brain or under his skin, and consume all Teddy’s Heinekens and Ritz crackers. He was in no rush to go home to Loretta, probably because he didn’t want to get stuck watching the twins or taking them to gymnastics practice. He’d keep talking until the beer or Teddy’s patience ran out. Then Teddy would clap his son on the arm, agree with whatever his last point was, and head upstairs for a nap. (Though it wasn’t so much a nap as a retreat.) He’d decided years ago there was no profit in arguing with the boy, and no way to stop his yammering any more than he could start Buddy talking. Theoretically, Buddy would be the perfect sound-absorbing device for Frankie’s verbiage, but ever since the riverboat the brothers could barely look at each other.

“I’m fine,” Teddy said. “Just fine.” He handed Frankie his gin glass and nodded at the fridge. “You’re closest, drop some ice in there.”

Frankie did as he was told. He popped the last three cubes from a tray and slid the empty container back into the freezer.

Jesus Christ, Teddy thought, I’ve raised a family of Visigoths.

“So you’re going to buy the box?” Frankie asked.

Teddy leaned forward. “Let me tell you a story.”

“Ugh.”

“That’s right, it’s my turn. You know what everybody told me when your mother died?”

Frankie all but rolled his eyes. “That you should give us all away.”

“Damn straight! Pack you all off to social services.”

“Or Mom’s family.”

“You’da liked that. Raised by a bunch of mick alcoholics.” Frankie made a face and Teddy said, “That don’t make me racist. Some Irish do drink like God damn fish. Your mom’s ma, God rest her soul, was a teetotaler, but her pa? Hard-core alkie. And her brother was a fall-down drunk.”

“I thought Mom’s brother died in high school—”

“Sure did.”

“—of leukemia.”

“Alcohol-related leukemia,” Teddy said. “That’s your genes, there, Frankie boy. Better watch yourself.”

Suddenly Buddy charged into the kitchen, looked around wildly, and then lunged for the phone. It rang just as he picked it up. He stared at it a second, then held it out toward Teddy.

“Hello?” Teddy asked.

“So your calling card is a two?”

“Graciella,” he said. Couldn’t help smiling.

“I would have thought you’d pick an ace at least,” she said.

Teddy ignored Frankie’s questioning look, then walked outside with the phone. God damn he needed a cordless in this house full of people. “See, if I give you an ace, you’d think I was bragging,” he said. “I could go down to a face card, but then there’s no room to write. But the deuce, well, it may not look like much, but it’s wild.”

“So,” Graciella said. “Degloving.”

“Ah. As I said, I shouldn’t have brought that up.”

“Tell me the story, Teddy.”

“Not over the phone. How about the diner by Dominick’s?” Where we first met, he didn’t add.

“They don’t have a bar. I’m going to need a drink.”

“I know a place,” he said.

“I’ve already called the babysitter,” she said.

He went back inside, resumed his seat. Took a long, bittersweet sip of the Hendrick’s. Leaned back.

Frankie was looking at him with an odd expression. “What just happened?” he asked.

“Nothing, my boy. Nothing.”

“You’re smiling at something.”

Teddy swirled his glass, thinking.

Frankie nodded slowly. “So…”

“All right, all right,” Teddy said with an artificial sigh. “One box.”

On the bus ride home from Fort Meade, Maureen was silent, her expression distracted.

“Don’t you worry,” Teddy told her. “That machine don’t mean a thing.” She didn’t answer. Because of course it did mean something, because Smalls believed in it. And how could he not? The results corresponded with all his biases.

G. Randall Archibald had tested each of them. They didn’t start with Teddy, because Jonathan Jones was so anxious to go first. Archibald fastened electrodes to the boy’s arms and temples, then plugged him into the stack of electronic devices—which in aggregate evidently formed this torsion field detector. The boxes hummed and whirred and emitted a smell of hot rubber. Archibald asked Jones to go through a remote-viewing exercise, and the staff watched tensely as the dials of the machine twitched and swung. Afterward, Archibald wrote down numbers on a pad, harrumphed to himself, and then called up Bob Nickles. The retiree performed about the same as Jones.

Then came Maureen. As soon as she closed her eyes to concentrate on a target on Russian soil, the gauges slammed to the right like Barney Oldfield’s speedometer.

Archibald seemed shocked, and mumbled something about recalibrating the device, but Smalls reassured him. As far as he was concerned, the detector was right on the money.

Teddy went last. Archibald taped the electrodes to Teddy’s skin, turned on the machine…and waited. The gauges didn’t move. Teddy made a joke about Maureen burning them out, and no one laughed, not even Maureen. A second round of testing with the group returned similar results: Jones and Nickles were active but feeble, Maureen was a powerhouse, and Teddy was a dud.

“It’s the oldest scam in the book,” Teddy said to Maureen, still trying to cheer her up as the bus rumbled toward Odenton. “That guy, Archibald? He’s going to make a mint ripping off the government. It’s a better deal than being a psychic, that’s for sure. He’s taking Smalls for a ride. There’s no better sucker than a man with signing approval on a governmental line item.”

Still Maureen didn’t speak.

“Okay, does it work?” Teddy asked rhetorically. “Maybe.” That was a lie, but for her own good. “It sure was right about you, though.”

Maureen finally looked at him, and he was shocked to see that her eyes were gleaming. It tore him up to see her holding back tears. Worse than full-fledged crying. She said, “You believe in me now?”

“Babe, you’re asking a born second-deal man whether he believes in psychic powers. I know every trick in the book, and the ones that aren’t in the book? Well, I know enough to watch the left hand when the right one’s waving around. And kid, I’ve been watching every move you’ve made since last summer.”

He sighed. “But God damn if I could catch you. Every day in Dr. Eldon’s lab you had me turned around, mystified, and befuddled. And then we got out here, and I thought, at last, I’ll be able to watch her every day, there’s no way she could fool me every minute. Smalls maybe, but not Teddy Telemachus. And you know what? I was right.”

“What? I never—”

“You didn’t fool me, Maureen McKinnon, because you weren’t trying to. You’re the real thing. It took me long enough to believe it—it’s against my nature. I’d be damned if some blue-eyed Chicago beauty was going to make a mark out of me. But you, you’ve got the goods. You’re an honest-to-God psychic. And I’m in love with you.”

She sat back in the vinyl seat, and now a tear had escaped to track down her cheek. He was mystified again. Was she happy or upset? He decided to go with happy, because the alternative would crush him.

“And what about you?” she asked finally. “Is the machine right about you?”

“You already know,” he said. “I’ve told you every trick I’ve used.” All but two, he thought. The one he pulled this morning, and the one he was about to perform. He was going to do it later, over dinner, but she needed a little magic right now, on this bus crammed with soldiers and secretaries.

“Regard this ordinary chapeau,” he said, and doffed his fedora. “Absolutely nothing inside.”

She dabbed at her eyes with the knuckles of one hand. “Not now, Teddy.”

He reached inside. “And yet, something appears out of nothing.” He lifted his hand and showed her the black velvet ring box in his fingers.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“It’s a little cramped, but I’ll try to get on my knees.”

“No. Please.” She covered his hand with her own, pushing his fingers against the box. “I have to tell you something.”

“As long as it ends in ‘yes.’ ”

“Something’s happened.” Her face was so serious. “No. Someone has happened.”

His chest tightened. “Another guy?”

“Or girl,” she said. “We won’t know for a while.”

“Oh,” he said. Then: “Oh!” Then: “Oh my God!”

She watched him, still not smiling. Waiting for him to make himself clear. He said, “Are you sure? Have you talked to a doctor?”

“I didn’t have to,” she said. “I can see it.”

“What?”

“It’s not just remote things, Teddy.” She touched her belly. “I looked, and it was right there.”

“Jesus Christ on a stick,” Teddy said. He breathed out, looking at the seatback in front of him without seeing it.

“You can take it back if you want,” she said.

“What?” He couldn’t seem to catch his breath.

“The ring.”

She wasn’t making any sense.

“I need to know what you’re thinking, Teddy. I can’t see inside your brain.”

“What do I think?” He turned to her. His tears and the bright bus window behind her had made her face into a blur haloed in sunlight—a stained-glass angel. “I think this kid’s going to be the greatest thing in the world!”

“Welcome to the Hala Kahiki Lounge,” he said to Graciella. “The finest tiki bar in Chicagoland.”

She eyed the room’s bamboo paneling, the fringed lamps, the plastic, grimacing gods lining the walls. “I’m guessing it’s the only one?”

“Perhaps, perhaps. But don’t disparage an establishment merely because it’s outlasted its peers.” Patti the waitress greeted him with a kiss on the cheek and showed him to his usual table. He ordered a rum they flew in from Barbados. Graciella stuck with bourbon.

“So,” she said significantly, midway through her second drink.

“It’s really not a story for polite company,” he said.

“All day I sit in court listening to terrible stories,” she said. “And every night I talk to my divorce lawyer. I haven’t been in polite company for a long time.”

“You’re leaving Nick Junior?” He tried not to sound happy about it.

“If I can without killing him.” She waved a hand. “This story of yours. Get cracking.”

“Right.” He stirred his drink, deciding where to begin. “I told you I used to play cards with Nick Senior? There were a few of us who got together every week for a regular game at his place.”

“The pizza restaurant,” she said.

“Nick had a big table in the kitchen. He’d make pies as we played, open up the wine…”

Graciella gestured with two fingers: speed it up.

“Well then. One of these guys in the group, let’s call him Charlie, he was one of Nick’s best friends. They’d known each other for years, and Charlie did some work on the side for Nick. Nothing violent, but not exactly legal. They’d had this deal for years, no problems. Well, we show up for poker night, and there’s tension in the air. Seems Charlie has screwed up, and screwed up bad. A job went south, one of Nick’s friends got hurt, and Charlie lost a bunch of money that belonged to, well, certain people—”

“I know what the Outfit is,” she said.

“Of course you do, of course you do. And you’ve heard how much they care about their money. So Nick’s making a pizza for the group, white flour up to his elbows, and he starts asking Charlie about how he screwed up. Charlie’s nervous but he’s playing it cool. And Nick keeps talking at him, and the whole time they’re talking Nick’s running dough through the pizza roller—you know what that is?”

She shook her head.

“A big machine, with two rollers like metal rolling pins, squashes the dough. It gets going pretty fast, too. And suddenly two guys at the table grab Charlie by the arms and bring him up to the machine.”

“Oh God,” she said. Getting it now.

“Both hands,” Teddy said. “Shoved them in there. First thing that happens, the fingers get crushed flat. The rollers jam up on the wrists, but keep pulling. Then the skin rips off, all the way down to the fingertips.”

“Like a glove,” Graciella said quietly. She swallowed the rest of her drink.

“I’m sorry I had to tell you that,” Teddy said. “But when I think of you, and your boys…”

“No. It’s all right,” she said. She looked into the glass as if it was about to magically refill. “My husband didn’t kill Rick Mazzione,” she said.

“I didn’t say he did.”

“He’s an idiot, and an asshole, and he may have done plenty of other things—but not that one.”

She reached into her big purse, pulled out a green bag, a soft-shell, insulated lunch box with cartoon characters on the front. “I’d like to show you something.” She unzipped the bag. Inside were a blue plastic freezer pack and a clear plastic sandwich container. She pushed the container over to him.

He opened the lid, and inside were half a dozen gray pebbles. No, not pebbles.

“Rick Mazzione’s teeth,” she said. “Nick Senior would very much like them.”

“Why?”

“It’s a long story,” she said, and called for another bourbon.

8 Irene

She waited fifty feet from Gate C31, half hidden by a column, as the passengers from Flight 1606 disembarked. She felt like a grocery store dog, one of those jittery creatures tied up outside the glass doors, desperately scanning each human face for its master: Are you the one I love? Are you?

Then she thought: Oh God. The word “love” is in my head.

She was not in love. How could you fall in love with an AOL icon, or a few hundred screenfuls of text? The thrill she felt every time a computer informed her that she did, indeed, have mail was as palpable as a lover’s touch.

People kept pouring down the Jetway. It was an early morning flight, and many of the passengers were mussed and sluggish, as if they’d woken up to a fire alarm; they reached the main corridor and peered left and right and left again, trying to get their bearings, before lurching off. The business travelers, however, were all business, from their business jackets to their business skirts and their shiny business shoes. They sliced through the crowd of civilians like business sharks.

Last Dad Standing—aka Joshua Lee—was one of those business types, a man who traveled across the country all the time in, yes, business class. She was terrified, though, that she wouldn’t recognize him. He’d sent a picture of himself standing in the shade of a palm tree, but her black-and-white ink-jet printer had turned it all into a low-contrast smear, so she’d left the printout at home. The harder she tried to keep the picture in mind, however, the more she doubted her memory.

But there was another reason failing to recognize him terrified her. After they’d been talking online for more than a week, they’d had this exchange:

And she’d thought: Not exactly? What did that mean? They’d stolen her?

She almost typed back, “Of course her parents are Chinese.” Then the penny dropped. Joshua Lee.

She felt a rush of embarrassment: retroactive, conditional embarrassment. Had she ever said something bad about Chinese people? Or Asians in general? She mentally scrolled back through the messages they’d exchanged. But of course a racist wouldn’t even remember if she’d said something off-color.

Then she became doubly embarrassed when she realized he must be waiting for her to respond. And probably laughing. What a jerk, to tell her this way! Quickly she’d typed back:

They exchanged biographical details like trading cards. He was third-generation Chinese, she was third-generation on the Irish side and who-knows-how-many generations on the Greek side (Dad was hazy on his family history). Culturally, the widest gulf between them was southwestern versus mid-. (They ignored Male versus Female and White Collar versus Working Poor, and she didn’t bring up Sane versus Psionic.)

She tried to tell him his race didn’t matter, that he didn’t even need to mention it, but he said of course he did; it would have been the first thing she noticed if they’d met face-to-face…

…which was what they were about to do.

The flow of exiting passengers slowed to a trickle, then stopped. Half a minute later, a pair of flight attendants came out, wheeling their micro bags behind them. Where was he? Did he slip past without her noticing? Or was he not on the flight?

“Irene?” a voice said.

She turned, and looked up into Joshua Lee’s smiling face. Of course she recognized him. He was exactly himself.

She lifted her arm as if to shake his hand, then realized that was ridiculous. She leaned forward and hugged him. His chest was solid. And his hand against her back, so real. The thereness of him shocked her.

“So this is you,” he said.

“It’s me,” she said.

“It’s so good to—”

“No!” she said. “You promised.”

“Right,” he said. “The rules. No pleasantries.”

“And no emotion words.” She winced apologetically. “I know it’s weird.”

He started to say something, then stopped himself. “Is hunger an emotion?”

“Edge case,” she said.

“Can I ask if you’re hungry? Would you like something to eat?”

“I’ll allow it,” she said.

“Because I’ve got three and a half hours before my flight, and I want to try that sandwich you were talking about—the combo.”

“Oh, you can’t handle the combo. Besides, it’ll take us a half hour to get to my car, another twenty minutes to drive to the restaurant—”

“That’s plenty of time.”

They walked toward the exit, her skin inches from his. She’d been so wrong. Hunger was no edge case.

One night in the chat room, he’d mentioned that he frequently came through Chicago on the way to New York and sat through long layovers. She ignored the hint. He brought it up a couple more times, and then finally came out and said that he was flying through O’Hare next week and wanted to see her. She tried to explain that this was impossible, and that led to a long discussion of what he called her “trust issues” and she called her “reality issues.”

But he wouldn’t give up. He wore her down, and eventually she agreed to meet him at that airport, but only if he followed certain rules.

As they drove out to Johnny’s Red Hots, trying to fill the silence without tripping over her conversational rules, she realized she’d made a terrible mistake. “Total honesty” was not what she was asking for; that was what they already had, when they were online together, talking in the dark through their keyboards. She was asking for something impossible: earmuffs that filtered out untruths yet let the rest of his voice through.

Johnny’s had just opened for lunch. She wasn’t hungry, but she ordered fries to be sociable. He ordered the combo and carried it back to the table in wonder.

“I can’t believe this is allowed by state law. You can’t just put a pile of shaved beef—”

“Italian beef,” she said.

“Italian beef on top of a sausage—”

“Italian sausage.”

“Right, and then they just let you eat it?”

“In Chicago,” she said, “meat is a condiment.”

Food was a safe topic. As were weather, traffic, air travel, and everything else they didn’t want to talk about. She wanted to ask him if he’d spent as much time picking out his clothes this morning as she did; if she looked like, sounded like what he expected; if he was as nervous and giddy as she was. But all that was off the table, by her own decree. When Joshua finished the combo (and he did finish it, sopping up the juice with the last of the soggy bun and popping it into his mouth like a born Southsider), she realized that even with the drive back and the walk through security, they had an hour to fill and nothing to fill it with.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done this.”

“What are you talking about? I’m glad—” He stopped himself. No feeling words.

“See?” she said. “I’m a basket case.”

He thought for a moment. Then he reached across the table and put his hand over hers.

“No talking, then,” he said. “Let’s just look at each other. And later—”

“Later we can say everything online,” she said.

“Like good online Americans,” he said, and she laughed.

“You can keep holding my hand, though,” she said.

“I should really go wash off the grease.” And that was the truth.

They drove back in a silence that was thoroughly drowned out by the roar of blood rushing through her. There was something she needed to tell him before he went, something that could end the relationship before it started. After shuffling through the metal detectors, they walked hand in hand through the terminal to his next gate.

“I have to tell you about who I am,” she said. “About my family.”

“I know all about the Amazing Telemachus Family,” he said.

She stopped, let go of his hand. “You do?”

“I asked around, and a friend of mine knew all about you. I figured you were waiting for me to look you up. When you finally told me your last name, you made it sound notorious.”

“I did not.”

He gave her an amused look. “Am I lying?”

He wasn’t. She felt a hot dread, nine-year-old Irene stepping before the cameras.

“So what do you think?” she asked.

“Without using feeling words?” His voice was amused, his eyes kind. She couldn’t see a hint of the disdain she’d imagined.

“Right,” she said. “Rules.” She put her arm through his, and they resumed walking.

“I do have a lot of questions, though,” he said.

“Let’s talk about it later,” she said. Everything was easy in front of the screen, their words zipping effortlessly between the satellites. They’d talked about his divorce, her near-marriage to Lev, his stressful job and her mind-numbing one. Mostly they’d talked about their children. He had joint custody of his ten-year-old daughter, Jun, and worried about the effects of the divorce on her. Irene fretted about Matty, master of sulking and secrecy, who was spending an inordinate amount of time alone in his room.

Her family’s history in the psi business had been the only topic she hadn’t had the courage to bring up, and now that he’d hauled it into the light she couldn’t believe she’d held on to the secret so long. The thing about skeletons was, you never knew how much space they were taking up in the closet until you got rid of them.

Right now she needed to walk without words, arm in arm with a handsome man who was inexplicably willing to put up with her insane demands, who was not freaked out by her history as a pint-size mind reader.

A man who was about to leave her.

She and Joshua stood without speaking, and as the time to board approached she leaned into him. He put his arm around her.

There you are, she thought. The scent of him touched off something in her back brain that made her think of sunlight and wood and salt.

The PA blared. “That’s me,” he said.

“I know,” she said. She did not want to let go of his arm. But she did it. That was the Irene thing to do.

“Thank you for coming out here,” he said. “Taking time off.”

“I figured the grocery store could get along without me,” she said.

“I’m coming back through again on Thursday,” he said. “Maybe we could do this again? It’ll be in the afternoon, so maybe we could, I don’t know, have a drink. Go someplace nice?”

“I’m sorry this was so weird,” she said.

“It wasn’t weird at all.”

The PA called his section again. He looked over his shoulder, and when he turned back he saw the change in her. She couldn’t hide it.

“Oh, Irene.” He thought she was sorry to see him go. She was, but that wasn’t why she was holding back tears.

Then she saw him understand. “Fuck,” he said quietly.

The first lie hung in the air between them. It had been weird. Crazy weird. And he’d been too afraid to tell the crazy weird woman who’d driven out here to meet him.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”

He stopped himself in another lie. Because he did mean it, and he knew that she knew that he meant it. Both lies were too small to worry about. It was that they were the first in an unstoppable cascade of untruths and half-truths and polite lies and outright deceptions that would pile up around her until she couldn’t see him anymore. She’d been caught in this avalanche before. She didn’t think she could dig her way out a second time.

When she was young, she thought she’d gotten the best talent in the family. No one could take advantage of her. No one could pull the wool over her eyes. While everyone else meandered through life as prey for hucksters and con artists and cads, she was fully armed with x-ray specs and a shoulder-mounted bullshit detector. She was the girl who could not be fooled.

God, what a fool she was.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Irene, please, I don’t want to leave like this.”

“It’s okay,” she lied. “It’s okay. I just can’t—”

Can’t what? she asked herself. Can’t do this again. Can’t even start this.

“I just can’t.” And then she walked away before more words, his or hers, could trip her up.

She drove home slowly, for safety reasons. The state of her soul was not fit for Chicago traffic. When she finally pulled into the driveway, she sat for a long time, staring blankly over the steering wheel. Then Buddy stepped out of the front door wearing an apron and oven mitts. He waved for her to come in.

“Well, fuck,” she said.

Inside the house, the air was thick with the smell of warm cookies—white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. A dozen were already on the cooling rack, and Buddy was pulling another pan from the oven.

“I need all of these,” she said. He nodded.

Mom had directed her cooking lessons at Irene, but it was Buddy who’d memorized her recipes. He would make them, but only on his schedule. You couldn’t ask him to make Mom’s pepper steak, or the bean and bacon soup, or the macadamia nut cookies. You had to wait for the whim to strike, then hope you were around to reap the benefits.

Mail sat on the counter. She shuffled through the stack, dreading a bill addressed to her, but the only thing of interest was a fat envelope for Teddy, from ATI—Advanced Telemetry Inc. He’d gotten these envelopes for years, on a monthly basis. He never opened them in front of her, and she thought she knew the reason why.

Matty appeared in the kitchen door, still wearing the yellow Bumblebee shirt Frankie had gotten him. “What is that?” he asked.

Buddy shut off the oven, grabbed three semi-cooled cookies, and walked out the back door. That was the other thing about his impromptu cooking events: cleanup was on you.

On the table was a note in her father’s wobbly scrawl: “Irene—Dinner Wednesday Palmer’s. Dress nice.”

“What’s this about?” Irene asked. Matty shrugged, reached for a cookie. His hair was mussed, and a pair of zits decorated his chin, but his father’s bone structure hid beneath the baby fat. The kid had no idea how handsome he was going to be.

“These are pretty incredible,” Matty said finally.

“I was about to say, you shoulda tasted Grandma Mo’s, but Buddy’s may be better.”

“So was it a job interview?” he asked.

“What? Oh, the skirt.”

“And the makeup.”

“I wear makeup.”

“Not since Pittsburgh. And, uh, it’s all smeared.”

She dabbed at the corner of her eye. “It’s not been a good day,” she said. She put on a smile to reassure him. He didn’t look convinced. “So how was your day? Is Frankie behaving?”

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

“Neither did you. How about this—we go one for one. You answer mine, I’ll answer yours.”

“Like you’re really going to answer my questions.”

She laughed. “I will!”

He frowned, looking for loopholes in the deal. Teddy would have been proud. “All right,” he said. “But there’s a three-question limit.”

“You strike a hard bargain, Mr. Telemachus. So is that your first question—was I at a job interview?”

“You’re just going to say no, then ask me a question. So let’s make this short-answer: Where did you go?”

“To see a friend.”

“Was it the guy you talk to on the computer?”

“How did you—? And that’s two questions.”

“I’ll use both of them to hear this,” he said. “And it wasn’t hard to figure out. You’re on the computer all the time. I figured it had to be a guy.”

“I could be a lesbian,” she said.

“Really?”

“His name is Joshua.”

“Josh-u-a,” he said. “Josh. The Joshinator.”

“So how is it working with Frankie?” she asked. She could see that he wanted to bolt from the table.

“It’s fine,” he said. Then realized that wasn’t the truth. “It’s…intense.”

“Intense how?”

“Two questions,” he said.

“I also think this answer is worth it.”

“It got…I don’t know. Uncle Frankie expects, like, a lot out of me? I don’t think I can do everything he wants me to do.”

“Oh God, is he trying to rope you into that UltraLife stuff?”

Matty looked embarrassed.

“Jesus, you’re a kid. I’m so sorry, Matty. I’ll tell him to keep you out of it.”

“No! I mean, he’s not involving me in that. It’s just that working with him is hard, because he’s so…”

“Intense?” Irene said. “And grandiose?”

“That’s it,” he said. “Intensely grandiose.”

“I shouldn’t have pushed you into working with him,” she said. “I just thought you’d like it.”

“You didn’t push me into it. I want to do it, to make you some money—”

“Make me some money?”

He flushed again. “Make us some money, I mean.” That was the truth as well.

“Honey, that’s not your job,” she said. “I make the money. You’re the kid. I don’t want you to go through what I did.”

His eyes widened. “You mean like the ESP stuff?”

“No, I mean—” She wished he wasn’t so excited by the showbiz history. “I had to become an adult before my time. When Mom died, I was just ten, and suddenly I was the one having to take care of Frankie and Buddy. Even your grandfather.”

Matty picked up another cookie, looked at it for a long moment. “Frankie said Grandma Mo was so powerful the Russians had to kill her.”

“Frankie’s a conspiracy theorist. He also says the Astounding Archibald killed her. Or is Archibald a Russian spy now?”

“I know but…”

“But what?”

“She was a spy, right? She worked for the CIA?”

She worked for Destin Smalls, Irene thought. “She was employed by the government. I’m not quite sure which agency.”

“So did they, like…train her?”

“What?”

“I mean, someone like that, they would have taught her how to—”

“They taught her nothing.”

Irene’s anger came sudden as the bite of glass under a bare foot. There was something she’d forgotten. Something about Destin Smalls. But the memory refused to show itself.

“Mom?” Matty looked concerned.

“She was a natural talent,” Irene said. She cleared her throat. “They took advantage of her, and used her, and then she got sick. No big mystery.”

Irene remembered that morning, seven months before her mother died, that Irene found her sitting on the edge of the bed, crying. Then she’d wiped away her tears and driven off with Destin Smalls. That memory, at least, was clear and sharp.

“Why are you asking about this stuff?” Irene said.

“No reason,” he said. A lie.

“Stop it. There’s a reason.”

“This isn’t fair,” Matty said. “You have an advantage. But you lie to me and I’ll never know it.”

“I’ve answered all your questions truthfully and to the best of my ability,” she said.

He twisted his mouth into his thinking face. Planning his next move. “Okay, so this Joshua guy. Do you love him?”

She wiped her face with her napkin. “I’ve only met him in person once,” she said. “Just this morning.”

He laughed. “You are really not answering the question.”

“It doesn’t matter if I love him,” she said.

A memory was unspooling out of the dark: Destin Smalls and her father, standing in the living room, both of them looking at her.

“It’s not going to work out,” she said. She recognized doomed romance when she saw it.

Destin Smalls picked up her mother every morning, and dropped her off every afternoon. She learned to hate the arrival of his car, a gleaming hulk with a grill as wide as a whale’s baleen, and the way her mother hurried out to it. Eager. Laughing sometimes. In the afternoons Irene would watch from the front window as her mother sat in the car with Smalls, talking and talking, delaying her return to the house, her return to her children and husband. Her return to her duties.

Her mother seemed exhausted by whatever she did all day with Destin Smalls. When she was too tired to make dinner, she’d sit in the kitchen with Buddy on her lap, and instruct Irene on how to cook, only getting out of her seat in emergencies. When Dad came up out of the basement for the meal, he’d heap praise on Irene. She was happy to do the work, until the day she told her mother she’d rather play with her friend.

“We’re not playing now, we’re making dinner,” her mother said.

“Marcie’s waiting for me,” ten-year-old Irene said. “You make dinner.”

“Just put the ground beef in the pan,” her mother said, exhausted.

“First, brown the meat,” Buddy said. He was standing beside her chair, arms draped over her shoulders.

“That’s right,” their mother said.

“This isn’t fair,” Irene said.

“First brown the meat!” Buddy yelled. He didn’t like it when anyone argued with Mom.

As the summer wore on, her mother sometimes wouldn’t stay in the kitchen as she cooked. Mom would hand Irene a recipe card and then go up to her bedroom to rest. Irene liked it better that way.

One morning in late July or early August, her mother was still in the bathroom when Destin Smalls pulled up in his shiny huge car. Irene watched him from the living room, his big rectangle face swimming up to the windshield like a pale fish, peering up at the house. After a few minutes, he stepped out of the car. Irene jumped back from the window. His silhouette glided across the curtains. And then he rang the doorbell.

Irene ran up the stairs and knocked at the bathroom door. “Mom?”

There was no answer.

“Mom? Mr. Smalls is here.”

“Tell him I’ll be down in a minute,” Mom said. Her voice was brittle with false cheer.

When Irene returned to the living room, Buddy was opening the door.

“Hi there, Buddy.” Smalls reached out to rub the boy’s head. Buddy ran into the next room. He hated anyone touching him.

“She’s not ready yet.” Irene pointed at her mother’s chair, even though her father’s was closer. “You can sit there.”

Mr. Smalls sat on her father’s ottoman, facing the stairs that led up to the bathroom—and the stairs that led down to the basement, where her father was sleeping.

“So how’s school, Irene?” Mr. Smalls asked.

“It’s summer,” she said.

“Right, right.” He glanced toward the stairs leading to the second floor.

“She’ll be down in a minute,” Irene said.

“I thought I heard voices,” her father said. Teddy stepped into the room. He wore pajama bottoms and an undershirt, and his cheeks were shadowed. “How are you doing, Destin? Business good at the spook shop?”

“Good to see you, Teddy.” Destin stood and extended a hand. Her father hesitated, then shook. He’d taken off the bandages a few months earlier.

“I was just talking to Irene here,” Mr. Smalls said. “She’s turning into a lovely girl.” He looked down at Irene and smiled a false smile.

“Are you in love with my mother?” Irene asked.

“What?” Smalls said.

“I said, are you—”

“Of course not!”

Her father was staring at her. He knew exactly what she was doing.

From upstairs came the sound of water running in the sink, and then the door opening. Each sound seemed unusually loud. “Sorry I’m running late,” her mother said, and stopped on the stairs. She frowned. Looked at Dad, then at Destin Smalls.

“Mr. Smalls is a liar,” Irene said, and walked out of the room.

Later in the week she came home from Aldi’s to find Teddy pacing the living room. “Where have you been? We’ve got to be there by six!”

Oh, right. Wednesday dinner at Palmer’s to meet his “sweetie.” Somehow, somewhen, Teddy had started dating. She thought she knew why Teddy wanted Irene to meet the woman, and hoped she was wrong.

“Give me a minute, Dad. It’s been a long day.”

“Just get into the best dress you got. No—second best. She’s the star, not you.”

Teddy, of course, was already wearing his most expensive suit, a gunmetal-blue number with navy pinstripes, and one of his more diamond-encrusted watches. Teddy Telemachus never took second billing. “Now hurry up!” he said. “I don’t want her waiting for us.”

Her being the “sweetie.” He still hadn’t explained why he wanted Irene to come out to a restaurant with them.

“Jesus, all right already. Could you at least put in a Tombstone pizza for Matty?”

“I can’t cook,” Teddy said. “Not in this!”

“I’m pretty sure I can put a pizza in the oven,” Matty said.

“Good man,” Teddy said. “Just don’t eat the whole thing, okay?”

“Damn it, Dad!” Irene said.

Irene went upstairs, but all she could think about was going into the basement and turning on the computer. For the past two days she’d kept edging up to it, warily, as if peeking over the lip of a cliff, only to back away before she lost her footing. But a half hour later she’d approach it again, as if to remind herself that the fall could kill her.

She imagined an inbox filled with confused messages from Joshua. Or worse, an inbox with no messages from Joshua. Logging into the chat room was out of the question. If she did, she’d immediately start talking to him, which would lead to her promising to meet him at the airport on Thursday, and once she was face-to-face with him, the whole process would repeat, from first touch to hormonal tsunami to the sudden apprehension that their relationship was doomed. The only sane thing to do was nip that Wagnerian cycle in the bud. Kill the wabbit.

She put on one of the dresses she used to wear to work, back when she worked in a place that didn’t require polyester smocks. Smocks were the official uniform of those hanging on to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder; a parachute that would never open. Joshua said he worried about money, but he was in no danger of plummeting into poverty.

She emerged from the bedroom to find Teddy bouncing on his feet at the bottom of the stairs. “Is this okay?” she asked him.

“It’s kinda dowdy,” he said. “Perfect choice.”

He drove, cursing traffic the whole way. She’d never seen him this nervous. “So how did you meet this woman?” Irene asked. “You hanging out in some senior center you haven’t told me about?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there. It’s a great story, great story. Almost destiny.”

They didn’t walk into the restaurant until ten after six. Dad scanned the lobby and bar for the mystery woman, and was relieved that she hadn’t arrived yet. Irene apologized again for making him late, but he waved it off.

“Six-thirty reservation for Telemachus,” Teddy told the hostess.

“Six-thirty?” Irene said.

“I knew you’d be late,” Teddy said.

Their table was available now. Teddy hung his fedora on the brass hat rack, and Irene wasn’t a bit surprised that there were half a dozen hats already there. Palmer’s Steakhouse was Teddy’s favorite restaurant because the rib eyes were thick, the drinks strong, and the prices cheap. The average age in the dining room stayed north of sixty.

Dad positioned Irene to his left and reserved the chair on his right for his guest. The waitress was pouring water before they’d pushed in their chairs. Teddy had a thing for the waitresses, an all-Ukrainian squad with severe cheekbones, chain-smoker lips, and great legs. They moved the plates on and off the table like it was some kind of Olympic event. Nobody dawdled over the salad at Palmer’s. While you were taking your last sip of soup, the bowl would be gone before you put your spoon down.

“G and T?” the waitress asked him.

“You know me too well, Oksana. But I’m going to hold off ordering until my friend arrives.”

“Another friend, eh?”

“I’m his daughter,” Irene said.

The waitress shrugged and walked away. Teddy laughed.

“I don’t even know why I’m here,” Irene said. “What’s this woman’s name?”

“There she is now.” Teddy stood up and buttoned his coat. He met her halfway across the room and took her arm.

Irene had expected that Dad might go for a younger woman—someone in her sixties, perhaps. This woman looked to be holding tight to her early forties with the assistance of good makeup, Tae Bo classes, and money. That little black dress would have cost the entirety of Irene’s little blue paycheck. What the hell was going on here?

Dad escorted her to the table. “Graciella, this is my daughter, Irene.”

Graciella. That name seemed familiar. “A pleasure to meet you,” Irene said, and shook her hand. Then it was just a matter of waiting for the first lie. Three…two…

“I’d say that Teddy’s told me all about you,” Graciella said. “Except that he didn’t say a thing.”

Honesty, right out of the gate. Whaddya know.

Irene said, “Well, Dad didn’t even tell me your name till just now.”

“I’m not surprised,” Graciella said. “I think he likes to play the mysterious man in the hat.”

“I’ve made a mistake,” Dad said jokingly. “Dinner’s over. So glad you two met.”

The waitress materialized at the table. “Drinks now?”

“Oh yeah,” Irene said. “We’re going to need a lot of drinks.”

The meal proceeded with Palmerian efficiency, propelled by the fast hands of Oksana. The conversation weaved between the flying plates on a river of alcohol. Graciella was a drinker, and Irene was happy to keep pace while she tried to suss out who this woman was and what she was doing with her father. When she fibbed, it seemed to be mostly for politeness; the big lies, Irene suspected, were lies of omission. She mentioned kids, and said they were all fine (kids were never all fine), but the husband was absent from the conversation—despite the wedding ring on her hand and an engagement diamond the size of a meteorite.

Dad had turned courtly and solicitous—to Graciella anyway; Irene was left to order her own drinks. Dad laughed at everything the woman said, kept touching her arm, recommended favorite menu items like he was on staff. After they’d ordered dessert (“The lava cake’s stupendous,” Teddy announced), Graciella excused herself to the ladies’ room.

“So,” Teddy said. “Do you like her?”

“What the hell are you doing, Dad?”

“Try to calm down. I know it’s difficult for children when their widowed father falls in love, but I was hoping you could—”

“Back the hell up. You’re in love with her?”

“I am,” he said with formality.

“Are you sleeping with her?”

“That is none of your business.”

“Dad, she’s married.”

“Not wisely, and not well. Nick Pusateri doesn’t deserve her.”

“Who’s Nick—?” And then she remembered where she’d heard the name. “Shit. Is Graciella the mobster’s wife?”

“Don’t be judgmental. It’s not attractive.”

“You’re banging a gangster?!”

“I’m not banging her,” Teddy said. “Besides, I’m pretty sure she’s throwing no carnal thoughts in my direction. I’m”—he made a vague gesture with three fingers—“cute.”

“You’re also twice her age.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t fall in love with anyone unless they’re at least half my age plus seven. Bare minimum.”

“You just decide who you fall in love with, huh?”

“You should try it sometime. Walk into a grocery store—not that awful place you work, I recommend Dominick’s—and pick out a stranger. Look for the beauty in them. Look at the way they hold a melon. Listen to the way they talk to the clerk. And say to yourself, I love this person.”

“You do this a lot?”

“Every day.”

“You’re going to get arrested.”

“It would be worth it,” he said.

“Fine. You’re an emotional daredevil. All I’m saying, you couldn’t try to jump into the pants of somebody who wasn’t Lady Macbeth?”

“Lady Macbeth wouldn’t wear pants.”

“Listen to me, Dad—you can’t be trying to screw a gangster’s wife. It’s suicidal.”

“And you’re not listening to me.” He glanced toward the restrooms to make sure Graciella wasn’t on her way back. “It’s not about screwing and banging and—where did you get such a filthy mouth? It’s not about sex. I haven’t used my dick in so long I wouldn’t know where to find it. I sent it out for a pack of Camels in 1979 and it never came back.”

“I really don’t want to be talking to my father about his dick.”

“Irene, this is about finding someone. You find someone and you make them the most important person in your life—even if just for a little while. A day! An hour even! Tell me how that’s a bad thing.”

“The bad thing is when the important person’s husband shoots you in the back of the head.”

“Fair point,” he said. He still had one eye on the entrance to the restrooms.

“What am I doing here, Dad? I’m the last person you should bring along if you want to stay with this woman.”

“She’s coming back,” Dad said. “I just need to know one thing—do you like her?”

Irene sighed. “I kinda do, actually.”

“Perfect,” he said.

And suddenly Irene realized that she’d been tricked into something. What, she had no idea.

She’d discovered a fact of modern life by standing at a cash register for hours: mindless work could nevertheless fill up your mind, like radio static. If she stayed busy—pushing canned goods down the chute with her left hand while busily ten-keying the prices with her right, making small talk, sorting cash—then she didn’t have to think about what day it was, what time certain flights landed, or how she was going to die alone.

“You getting a cold, doll?” Phyllis asked from the next register.

“I’m fine,” Irene lied.

Phyllis harrumphed. She was a champion harrumpher.

Irene had stayed off the computer for four days, a new record since the day it arrived. Her father was delusional about choosing to fall in love, but maybe the opposite was true: you could choose not to fall in love. All she had to do was keep totaling the cans of Aldi cola (twenty-two cents apiece), keep boxing the groceries, and send each customer out of the store with a cheery goodbye.

“Kill the wabbit,” Irene said.

The customer, a woman who was too old to date her father by twenty years, said, “Pardon?”

“Nothing,” Irene said, and presented her the receipt as if it were a winning lottery ticket. “Have a nice day.” On to the next customer.

But there was nothing on the conveyor belt. Irene looked up, and the next customer was a man in a business suit.

“Joshua? What are you—?”

He put a finger to his lips.

She stepped around the deck of the aisle, embarrassed by her polyester uniform, her pulled-back hair. She hadn’t even put on mascara. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

Without saying a word he stepped to her. Raised his eyebrows. Waited.

Shit. He was right. No more words.

She pulled his face to hers and kissed him.

9 Frankie

How the hell did coaches stop themselves from killing their star players? Frankie wondered. At first you’re in love with everything they can do for you. You start dreaming about glory. You can hear the roar of the crowds. But then you start depending on them. You need them. And eventually, as the training wears on, the star begins to doubt you. They have ideas of their own. And every time they don’t do what you ask them to do, you feel like they’re taking something away from you. Stealing glory.

“Listen, Matty. All you have to do is watch me open the safe, then come tell me the combination. If you don’t practice, it’s never going to work. Trust me. I’ve been through this.”

“I am practicing,” Matty said. He sat on the safe, arms around his stomach, staring at the garage floor. “Just…not in front of you.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“It’s not you. I can’t do it in front of anybody.”

“How do you know unless you try? I’m beginning to think you don’t have what it takes, Matty.”

“I’ve gone really far, Uncle Frankie. The past couple weeks. All on my own. So I’m ready to try Mitzi’s Tavern.”

Frankie was stunned. “Right now?”

“Tonight. Or tomorrow night. It depends.”

“On what?”

The kid flushed red.

“Jesus, okay,” Frankie said. “You do what you do. I believe in you. You’re my Walter Payton, Matty. I know you can bring this home for us.” He rubbed a hand across his face. He was sweating again. Was he sounding too desperate? “Just let me know if I can help. Or something.”

“I just need one thing,” Matty said.

Yes!

“Name it,” Frankie said.

“I need money,” he said. “Fifty bucks.”

“What? Why?”

“Please. You can take it out of my cut.”

“All right. All right. If my star needs cash, cash he will receive.”

The summer of 1991, he made the garage into his own private Bellagio. He’d gotten ahold of a real roulette wheel that was used by St. Mary’s church for their Vegas Night fund-raiser, as well as a felt cloth layout with all the bet markings on it, and set it up on a table that was the right height. He even borrowed a box of chips from his dad’s stash, just for flavor. Then, for hour after hour, he’d spin the wheel, send the “pill” rolling along the track, and then try to push it, just like he pushed the pinball around on the Royal Flush game at the skating rink.

Grabbing the pill, though, was a lot trickier than moving the pinball. For one, it was lighter, just an ounce or so, and too much of a nudge sent it flying out of the wheel. But worse, it was plastic. Frankie had always had a better feel for metal.

He couldn’t affect the little white ball at all. It would bounce over the frets, fall into a random number…and sit there, ignoring him. “Fuck you,” he said to it. “Fuck you and your little white ass.”

He would have given up immediately if it weren’t for Buddy’s vision. Loretta was pissed about how much time he was spending in the garage. She had two toddlers in the house, getting wilder by the day. There was no way they could afford twins, not on his salary. Bellerophonics was failing, and he was borrowing from the Pusateris to keep it afloat. He’d told no one this.

He needed a win. He needed those stacks and stacks of chips.

If, according to Buddy, Future Frankie could control a roulette table, that meant Current Frankie just had to learn how, right? But nothing was happening. It wasn’t “hard work,” because it wasn’t working at all. The ball wouldn’t even slow down for him in the track. The damn thing wouldn’t so much as tremble in his presence.

“Fuck you!” he screamed at it. “Stupid fucking piece of plastic crap!”

He went to Buddy and told him the deal was off. “Your vision’s bullshit,” he said.

Buddy said nothing. He was on the back patio, doing his newspaper thing, flipping back and forth through the pages, frowning and shaking his head, like an old man who can’t believe what the world’s come to.

“Buddy, look at me. Hey.” Frankie put his hand in front of the page. Buddy swung his big face toward him. “I can’t do it,” Frankie said.

“You’re guaranteed to win,” Buddy said.

“If it’s guaranteed, why bother to learn to push at all? Maybe I just win by luck.”

Buddy shook his head. “No. You drive me to the casino. You play for two hours. You get stacks of chips. The only way that happens is if you control the ball, just like you used to at the rink.”

“It’s not working,” Frankie said. “I can’t do it with that stupid fucking plastic thing.”

“Be the ball,” Buddy said.

“That’s fucking Caddyshack,” Frankie said. Buddy had watched that movie dozens of times.

“Love the ball.” Buddy stood, folded the paper.

“Yeah, but what if I choose not to do it?” Frankie said. “Your vision can’t make me.”

“Shut up,” Buddy said.

“But—”

Buddy wheeled on him, jabbed a finger in his chest. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” Three angry jabs. He was near tears.

“Jesus Christ,” Frankie said. “Fine. I’ll try.”

He went back to his garage, listened to the clacking spin of the wheel, the tinkety-tinkety-tink of the pill as it found its home. Nothing he did slowed it down or sped it up or bounced it into the numbers he wanted. “Motherfucker!” he screamed.

His problem in the past had always been confidence. Just having somebody looking at him while he worked was enough to make him nervous and lose his touch. And if those people wanted him to fail, if their negative vibes were coming at him like fucking Astounding Archibald’s on The Mike Douglas Show? Game over.

But maybe this was a different problem.

Love the ball.

Frankie picked up the roulette ball, held it up to his face. Took a breath.

“I would like to apologize for calling you a motherfucker,” he said.

He began to carry the pill around with him. He’d roll it around in his palm until he could feel it warming to his blood. He’d clean it with chamois. He talked to it the way he used to talk to the twins when they were in Loretta’s belly, telling them the story of Castor and Pollux.

Loretta, speaking from somewhere on the other side of her belly, said, “What did you just call them?”

“Castor and Pollux? The greatest twins in Greek myth?”

“Hell no.”

He’d have to win her over. The same with the pill. “Just tell me where you want to go,” he told the ball. “Or just the neighborhood.” Predicting the exact number where it landed paid thirty-five to one, but that level of precision wasn’t required, and wasn’t even the smartest way to go about robbing the bank. He could bet one of the dozens (say, numbers one through twelve) and that would pay off two to one, and no one would suspect him. Once he got confident he could play a street of three adjacent numbers for an eleven-to-one payout, or a two-number split for seventeen to one.

The problem, of course, was that adjacent numbers were never adjacent on the wheel. The one and the two, for example, were across the wheel from each other. There was one bet, though, that could help him out.

“I have a suggestion,” he mentioned to the pill casually, as it contemplated its drop into the wheel. “Why not drop into the basket?” The basket was a special bet that paid off eleven to one on the single-zero, one, or two—and the single-zero and the two were side by side on the wheel.

He watched the pill lose momentum, and then plunk across the frets like a banjo player. Finally it came to rest like an egg on a pillow.

Zero.

After he finished whooping and jumping around, he picked up the pill and kissed it. “Thanks, pal,” he said. “Good job.”

He sat in his van a half block from Mitzi’s Tavern, watching guys walk into the bar sad and exit sadder, like penitents going to confessional and coming out sentenced to a thousand Hail Marys. Fridays were payday—or rather, pay up day. A lot of these guys owed their whole paychecks to the Pusateris and were hoping they’d be allowed to take a slice home.

Frankie was one of those guys. His problem was, he didn’t have the dough. Again.

Nick’s rule was, Don’t make me come looking for you. So even if you couldn’t cover your payment, you had to show up to Mitzi’s, explain yourself, and take your punishment. First time, you got her I’m-Not-Angry-I’m-Disappointed speech. Second time—he didn’t know what happened the second time. But he was about to find out.

He walked across the street like a man with a bomb strapped to his chest.

Inside, it was so dark he could barely make out Barney behind the bar. Frankie took a stool and waited for his eyes to adjust. “Is she free?” he asked. He knew she wasn’t. He could hear Mitzi in her office, yelling at the guy ahead of him.

Barney didn’t look up. He was squinting at a Reader’s Digest over the tops of his glasses, which somehow made him look even more like Droopy Dog.

“Bud Light,” Frankie said.

Barney turned a page. “You won’t be here that long,” he said.

Frankie started to object, then figured there was no percentage in pissing the man off. “Good point,” he said.

Here was the difference between Frankie and the poor bastard getting chewed out, and all those other bastards who’d gone in before him: Frankie was practically family. Teddy had worked for Mitzi’s brother back in the day, and Frankie had been coming in this bar since he was a kid. Mitzi liked him. That fondness, he figured, was credit that could earn him a grace period of at least a week. Even if Teddy had no idea this was happening.

The door to her office opened, and a young guy with tight jeans and an even tighter shirt came out. A big Italian goombah, six-foot-something, with too much gel in his hair. Tears were running down his cheeks. He hurried out to the door and vanished in a flash of daylight.

“You’re up,” Barney said.

He eased himself off the stool. The room telescoped, and the path to her door became a great distance. His legs walked it against his will.

The Alton Belle floated in the shallow Mississippi like a star-spangled wedding cake. It was a replica of a nineteenth-century paddle wheel steamer strung with lights and pulsing with disco music, promising some kind of Mark Twain–meets–Vegas grandeur. Frankie was so nervous he felt like throwing up.

Buddy, though, was vibrating with excitement.

“This is how you saw it, right?” Frankie asked. They hadn’t left the car yet. Frankie had driven the four and a half hours, of course, because Buddy had never learned to drive.

“Exactly,” Buddy said. “This is exactly right.”

“Stacks of chips,” Frankie said.

“Stacks,” Buddy confirmed.

They joined the stream of people walking the gangplank. They had a half hour before the boat left the dock for its first cruise of the night; by law the casino had to be on a functional, moving ship. Inside, it was incredibly loud, bells jangling as if every God damn player was a winner, just scooping coins from the slots. Even with all the mirrors, the place seemed much smaller than Frankie had pictured it. Every available space was crammed with slot machines, and every slot machine seemed to have an old person leaning on it as if it were life support.

“Where do we go?” Frankie asked. Buddy didn’t seem to hear him. “Where is the roulette table?” Frankie said, louder.

Buddy shrugged. “I don’t know this part.”

“Wait, there are parts you don’t know?”

“This way,” Buddy said, ignoring Frankie’s panic. The big man pushed through the crowd, Frankie following close in his wake. They were aiming for the middle of the boat, but walking in a straight line was impossible; they kept getting diverted by banks of machines, all clanging, beeping, and flashing for their attention. You could almost fool yourself into thinking you were in a tiny Vegas casino, if not for the customers, who were 80 percent midwestern shit-kickers: John Deere caps and St. Louis Cardinals T-shirts, flip-flops and basketball shorts; even guys in overalls. If the taxpayers of Alton, Illinois, were expecting high rollers, they were in for a disappointment. None of these yokels were James Bond.

Buddy checked his watch, then led them up the grand staircase to the A deck, where they found an array of blackjack tables, a long craps table, and two roulette tables. At the chips window Frankie handed over his life savings—two thousand and five hundred dollars—and the woman handed him back a crushingly small stack of chips in a plastic tray. The entirety of his hopes and dreams was smaller than a box of Girl Scout cookies.

“Where’s yours?” Frankie asked his brother.

“You don’t need any more,” Buddy said.

“According to the vision,” Frankie said.

“Right,” Buddy said.

Chips in hand, they walked up to the tables. “Which one?” Frankie asked.

Buddy frowned at him.

“Which roulette table?” Frankie clarified.

Buddy studied them both, and then pointed to the one on the left.

“Are you sure?” Frankie asked. “Because you don’t look too sure.”

Buddy said nothing.

They approached the chosen table, Frankie’s fingers tight around the tray of chips. Only one other customer stood at the rail. The croupier, a tall black woman, called for bets. Frankie looked at the wheel and froze, his heart pounding. Frankie grabbed his brother’s arm and yanked him back into the crowd.

“What the fuck is that?” Frankie demanded. Buddy didn’t know what he was talking about. “That wheel! It’s too big!”

Buddy shrugged.

“And the ball’s bigger, too!” Frankie said. “I don’t even know how much it weighs! Why didn’t you tell me they came in different sizes?”

“It’s all going to work out,” Buddy said.

“What fucking use is a fortune-teller who can’t tell me how to win the fucking fortune!”

Buddy grabbed him by the shoulders. “Listen to me.”

“What?”

“Stacks of chips. Piled high. That’s what I saw.”

The steam whistle blew, and the floor trembled. The boat was under way for its hour-long cruise.

“Now is the time,” Buddy said. “Right now.” Buddy was so intense. And talkative. He’d barely spoken since Mom died, and now he was issuing orders like General Fucking Patton.

“Okay,” Frankie said. He took a breath. “You saw the stacks, though, right?”

“Shut up,” Buddy said.

Frankie moved up to the table but did not signal to bet. A couple more players had joined in, a woman in a low-cut tank top and her lower-browed boyfriend. The Cro-Magnon placed a couple of twenty-dollar chips on red, and the croupier called for last bets.

Then the spin. At least the sound was the same as the church set in his garage. Frankie kept his eyes on the white pill racing along the track.

“Be the ball,” Buddy said in his ear.

Love the ball, Frankie thought.

Of course the casino wouldn’t let him touch the pill. He’d have to befriend it from a distance. “Who’s a good boy?” he said under his breath. “You are. Yes you are. Land on black for me, okay? Black, black, black…”

The croupier glanced at him, then looked back to the table and called, “Black! Twenty-six!”

The Cro-Magnon grunted. Frankie smiled. “Good boy,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later, Frankie and the pill were the best of pals.

Mitzi sat behind her desk, hardly anything visible but that wizened face and a pile of hair, like a shrunken head. “What, no gifts?” she asked.

Frankie tried to smile.

“Because I got to tell you, that philo-ultra-magic whatever put me regular as a Swiss clock.”

“Really?” He felt an egg-sized warmth high in his chest. Hope, or heartburn, or both. “I’ll bring some over next time.”

“And what do you got for me this time?” she asked.

He opened his mouth, but words failed to arrive. He lifted his hands. They hovered there for a second, and then settled nervously on his knees.

Mitzi didn’t seem surprised. She’d probably read the news on his face as soon as he walked in her door.

“You’re at forty-four thousand, five hundred and eleven,” Mitzi said.

Jesus, the interest was killing him. “I know,” he said.

“And seventy-eight cents.”

His hands came up again, failed to get any lift, and came down hard. “I know that’s serious money.” He took a breath. “I was just wondering, maybe you could—”

She cut him off. “I can’t do anything for you, kid. You did this. And now it’s out of my hands.”

“I just thought that maybe, I don’t know, since we’ve known each other so long, you could maybe talk to Nick Senior? Put in a word?”

Mitzi stared at him. “A word? What word would that be? ‘Abracadabra’?”

“Our families go way back, right? Teddy and Nick Senior—”

“You don’t know shit about Teddy and Nick.”

“Okay, sure, Dad didn’t tell me everything, mum’s the word, right? I don’t ask for specifics, and Dad’s a pro, he don’t tell. I just thought if you ask your brother to let the son of an old friend—”

“No, Frankie. You’re going to talk to Nick.”

“What?”

“And he’s not in the mood for this shit. It’s a bad time. You read the papers?”

“The trial,” Frankie said.

“They say Junior’s going to testify against his own father,” she said. “Family turning on family. So you really want to appeal to history, you go right ahead and try that. But if I were you, I wouldn’t show up with your hat in your hand—not unless you got at least ten grand in there.”

“Ten?”

“Ten is the minimum to keep Nick from going ballistic. Bring twenty.”

“Where am I going to get twenty grand?”

“You’ll think of something,” Mitzi said.

You bet your ass I’ll think of something, Frankie thought.

Later, whenever people talked about the best times of their life—a topic that often came up in the bars he frequented, among people whose inventory of great times was pretty thin—and it was Frankie’s turn to lie, he’d tell people about the day his twins were born. But the twins’ birth was two minutes of mucus-coated awe after eighteen hours of Loretta thrashing and cursing like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. No, the best time of his life was the first hour he spent at the roulette table in the Alton Belle riverboat casino in September 1991.

His first bet was on the basket, the zero-one-two combination. The croupier scooped up his chips and placed a marker there. Buddy stood behind him as the pill circled the track, and when it dropped onto the zero, his brother grunted in satisfaction. Frankie could hardly contain himself. Fist pumping may have been involved. He’d only bet a hundred in chips, but at eleven to one he’d just made back a third of his stake.

“Take your time,” Buddy said. Advice that was undercut by the fact that Buddy kept checking his watch.

Frankie decided it would be too risky to keep winning on the same numbers, so he put two hundred down on the first dozen. The numbers one through twelve were scattered around the wheel, and in order to win he needed to get the pill to drop at the right time; one number early or late was no payout. The first time he missed by a digit. He’d felt the pill that time, almost like it was rolling in the palm of his hand. The heavier weight, he realized, made it feel a little closer to the pinballs he used to have such rapport with.

“It’s good to lose a few,” Frankie said to Buddy. His brother nodded, not worried at all.

Frankie put two hundred more down on the dozen, same bet as before, and the next spin came up on the black six. Two-to-one payout, four hundred bucks.

The pill loved him. Wanted to please him. It would slow down or speed up as he desired, happily bound over nonpaying slots and rattle home in his favorite numbers. Frankie kept his bets small, trying not to attract attention, but the urge to push all his chips onto, say, double-zero was nearly irresistible.

An hour in, Frankie was holding fifty-three thousand dollars in chips. The waitresses wouldn’t stop bringing him drinks—he was ordering gin and tonics, his dad’s drink—and a crowd of other players had gathered around the table, trying to absorb some of his luck. Everybody was trying to play with him, chips all over the layout. Why the hell hadn’t he done this before? Frankie thought. He should have moved to fucking Reno ages ago!

“This is a great gift, Buddy,” Frankie said. He was tearing up he was so grateful. And maybe a little drunk. “Thank you.”

Buddy seemed embarrassed. “It’s nothing.” He picked up a stack of chips, and started counting them into his hand.

“What are you doing?” Frankie asked.

“I need these,” Buddy said. “Exactly one thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars.”

“What for? Wait—is this another part of the vision?”

“Definitely,” Buddy said.

Far away, the steam whistle blew again; the boat was approaching the dock. The first cruise was over, and the next one would be starting up soon. Frankie didn’t want Buddy to leave him—he’d been counting on his brother to keep everything in line with his visions. But Frankie had to admit, he had the roulette portion under control. And if Buddy had a scheme for another part of the boat, slots or Keno or craps, Frankie shouldn’t stand in his way. Any game in the casino was vulnerable to his brother. Any jackpot was there for the taking.

“You go do it, Buddy,” Frankie said. He handed him another five hundred in chips. “Knock ’em dead.”

Buddy looked at the extra chips, then set them back on the table in front of Frankie. “I’ve got what I need,” he said. “Just keep playing. Don’t stop.”

The croupier sent the ball spinning and called for bets.

“Wait,” Frankie said to Buddy. “I’m supposed to go for one more hour, right? Where do I find you after?”

Buddy checked his watch. “I’ll find you,” he said, and headed into the crowd.

Frankie didn’t like it, but he kept his cool. And after a few more spins, it was clear his friendly relationship with the pill was intact. Other players started to copy his bets, and he could feel the crowd’s attention on him. It was like being onstage again with the Amazing Telemachus Family, but better. He was the solo act. The closer. The top bill. If only his mother could see him now.

“Twenty-eight,” Frankie said. “Straight up.” One number, thirty-five-to-one payout.

The croupier gave him the merest glance, and Frankie could read her disapproval. Well, fuck you, lady! he thought. I’m here to win. I know it, the crowd knows it.

Then the pill dropped onto the twenty-eight, and the laughter and applause broke out around the table. Someone clapped him on the back. The woman next to him, a chubby redhead with friendly green eyes, giggled and rested a hand on his forearm.

On the next bet, Frankie said, “Let it ride.” The redhead gasped. Very satisfying. Myriad hands pushed chips onto the layout, everybody wanting to get on the party bus. He barely needed to look at the wheel to tell the pill where to drop.

The shouts went up like fireworks.

He suppressed the urge to take a bow. In front of him was more money than he’d ever dreamed of making.

A man in a dark suit and gold name tag had appeared behind the croupier, whispering into her ear. The croupier nodded, then stepped away from the table. The man with the name tag waved another croupier forward, this one a burly white man.

The new croupier called for bets. Frankie took a small stack, just a thousand bucks, and bet on red. It was a double-or-nothing payout, like hardly playing at all, but it gave him time to think. This time he didn’t try to control the ball, just let it run around the track, off the leash.

“Red! Thirty-two!” the croupier said. Another win. The floor manager or pit boss or whatever he was had not left the table. He looked at Frankie with a blank expression that could have meant anything.

Shit, Frankie thought. Now even blind luck was fucking him over. He needed to lose, and now. He left the small stack on red, and matched it with another thousand. The crowd seemed disappointed. To go from a straight-up bet to a time-waster?

He couldn’t leave the table, though. That would break the vision. And what would happen then?

“Tissue, champ?” It was the redhead.

He’d started to sweat. Nixon-versus-Kennedy sweat. He took the handful of Kleenex and mopped his eyes. The pill was humming along the track, and he was thinking, Black black black black—

“Red!” the new croupier said. “Red seven. Seven red.”

“Fuck,” Frankie said.

“What’s the matter?” asked the redhead.

“Pick a number,” Frankie said. Belatedly he put a smile on his face.

“I think you’d better do that,” she said.

“Please. Any number.”

“Twenty-one,” she said.

“Great.” Frankie pushed five thousand onto twenty-one, then watched with dread as the croupier replaced the stack with the marker. The pit boss was staring at him. Frankie glanced at his watch. He just needed to last five more minutes. Five minutes! Then he could cash out and get the hell out of here.

The redhead gripped his arm more tightly as the pill slowed. “Come on, twenty-one!” she said.

“Jesus, just shut up,” he said under his breath.

“What did you say?” She pulled her arm away.

“Nothing, just—” His eye was on the ball. Months of practice had taught him to judge velocity. And God damn if the pill wasn’t heading for the neighborhood of twenty-one: nineteen, thirty-one, eighteen, six…and then it dropped. Twenty-one.

“FUCK ME!” Frankie shouted.

Later, he realized that it looked very much like a bomb going off. The roulette wheel jumped ten feet into the air and spun away like a flying saucer. The pill shot into the crowd. Every chip around the table—Frankie’s huge stacks, the croupier’s supplies, the winnings of every player at the table—exploded ceiling-ward and rained down. Every customer within fifty feet of the table became a shouting, grasping, delirious animal.

The redhead looked at him in shock. “What did you do?” she said.

Firm hands grabbed him under his arms. Two large men in dark suits had seized him. “This way, asshole,” one of them said, and they hauled him toward a door.

“It wasn’t me!” he shouted. “It wasn’t me!”

He left Mitzi’s Tavern, thinking about big numbers. Big numbers and contingency plans. How the hell was he going to raise twenty grand? There was only one way.

“God damn it!” He’d pulled into the driveway and had banged into a line of big plastic buckets, sending them tumbling. Farther up the driveway sat bags of cement mix, a stack of blond lumber, and a pallet of something covered by a tarp. He backed up and parked in the street.

Buddy squatted by the front door of the house. He was hammering away at a wooden frame that he’d erected around the cement step. Frankie marched down the driveway, heading for the garage and the back of the house, ignoring him.

Buddy put down his hammer and stood up. “He’s not there.”

“The Buddha speaks,” Frankie said. Then: “Who’s not there?”

Buddy said nothing.

Frankie walked toward him. It looked like he was building a form to repour the cement step, which had been listing for the past decade. But why now? Why anything, with Buddy. “Why do you care who I’m looking for?” Frankie asked. “Maybe I’m looking for Irene.”

Buddy squinted at him. Then Frankie realized that Irene’s car was nowhere in sight.

“Okay, fine,” Frankie said. “Where’s Dad? And don’t you fucking shrug at me.”

Buddy stood very still, emphatically not shrugging. After thirty seconds, Buddy said, “It’s all going to work out.”

“Really? Work out?” Frankie stepped close, getting in his space. “Work out like the fucking casino?”

Buddy blinked down at him.

Jesus Christ, all Frankie wanted to do just then was clock him. But he’d never laid a hand on his brother. When they were kids, Buddy was too small to smack, and then, suddenly, he was much too big. At any size, though, there was no point to it. It’d be like punching a golden retriever.

Buddy’s gaze went glassy, like a TV show had clicked on in his head.

Frankie snapped his fingers at him. “Hey. Retard.”

Buddy focused on Frankie. He frowned.

“Why’d you do it?” Frankie said. “Come on. Just come clean.” Buddy had never told him where he’d disappeared to with his stack of chips. Never told him why he’d sent him to the Alton Belle in the first place. He was supposed to be rich, damn it. Bellerophonics would have been saved, and he wouldn’t be in hock to the fucking Outfit and wondering if the next time he stuck a key in the ignition the van was going to explode.

Buddy said, “It’s all going to—”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” Frankie said. “Of course it will.”