I didn’t finish cleaning the garage that night after all. Instead I went inside and fetched beers for Phil and his friends. Besides Jack there was Ted, Mike and Arnie. Except for Jack, they were all truckers. I kept the chip bowl and the pretzel bowl filled to the brim. I ordered the pizza when they got hungry for something bigger and greasier. And I watched Phil play poker.
At first it was confusing. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I didn’t think I’d ever figure it out. I watched Phil win hands and lose hands. I watched him fold sometimes before a hand was played out. He did a lot of things when he played. They all did. They munched handfuls of pretzels. They fiddled with their poker chips. They swigged beer. They ran their fingers through their hair. They scratched themselves all kinds of places. Maybe some of it meant something. Maybe it didn’t.
Then came a hand where Phil bet big. Ted laughed.
“Phil’s bluffing again,” he said. He raised Phil’s bet.
I glanced at Jack. He was looking at Phil as if he was the only person in the room. He was staring at him, hard. So I looked at Phil too. When I did, I saw him do something that made me almost fall over, as if someone had just kicked me hard in the gut and all the wind had come out of me. After that I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
Mike studied Phil for a minute.
“Face it, Phil,” he said. “It’s not your night, and the bluffing isn’t going to help.”
Phil matched Ted’s bet. Then he said, “Hell, might as well make it interesting.” He raised and then he looked at Arnie, who did the same thing.
Then it was Jack’s turn. He said, “Fold,” and threw down his cards.
Phil laughed and raised again.
Ted looked at Jack and folded.
“Wuss,” said Mike. He called. So did Arnie.
Phil won with a straight flush, king high.
“Damn,” Mike said. “I could have sworn you were bluffing again.”
I glanced at Jack. He had known that Phil had a strong hand this time. I was positive he had. And I was pretty sure I knew how he knew.
I hung around for the rest of the game. For a while I wasn’t really paying attention. I was too stunned by what I had seen. I was remembering so much that I started to feel like Phil’s garage before I’d cleaned it. There were so many memories and they were all about to cascade down around me and bury me.
When the game finally broke up, everyone was talking and fooling around and I couldn’t get Jack alone. Finally everyone left. I hurried to catch up with Jack, who was on his way to his pickup.
“Hey, where are you going?” Phil said when I bolted out the door. “You’re supposed to be helping me tidy up.”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I called to him, even though I had already decided that I wasn’t going to help him with anything ever again.
I caught up with Jack just as he was slipping the key into the ignition. He opened his window.
“You knew he wasn’t bluffing,” I said. “You knew it.”
Jack didn’t say anything.
“It was his face, wasn’t it? Before, he was watching everything that was happening. He was really paying attention.But when he pulled some good cards, all of a sudden he had a blank look on his face, like he didn’t care anymore, like whatever. And his lips.” I had noticed that right away. “He licked his lips a couple of times, right?”
“With Phil, mostly it’s the lips,” Jack said. He grinned at me. “You should take up poker. You’re pretty observant.”
There was also the other thing Jack had told me to watch for. He said I should look at what Phil did with his cards at the end of a hand when he was playing with Jack and when he was playing with me. I had done exactly what Jack had said.
“At the end of a hand with you, Phil throws his cards onto the pile where all the other cards are,” I said. “With me, he puts his hands over the cards and he slides them in to where my cards are and then he sort of blends them in with the rest of the deck.”
Jack didn’t say anything.
“What does it mean, Jack?”
“What does what mean?” Jack said.
“He puts his hands over the cards when he plays with me.”
“Covers them up, you mean,” Jack said.
I nodded.
“Like maybe he’s hiding something,” Jack said. He turned the key in the ignition. “I know he’s your dad, David—”
“He’s my stepfather.”
Jack shrugged. “It’s not my family. It’s none of my business. I shouldn’t get involved.”
I waited.
“But some things are wrong,” he said. “And I can’t just stand back and watch them happen. That’s why I told you what to look for.”
Maybe that’s where Jack was different from me, but I didn’t say anything. Instead I went back inside. I looked at the mess in the living room. There were empty beer bottles everywhere. And ground-up potato chips and pretzels all over the carpet. Plus dirty paper plates and napkins, dirty glasses, and some pizza grease stains on the table that my mother would freak over if she ever saw them, because this was her table—or so she always said. She had picked it out. Phil had probably paid for it. She always made a big deal over using coasters and place mats so that the table wouldn’t get marked up.
“Come on,” Phil said. “Help me tidy up.”
“I just spent all night cleaning the garage,” I said. “You tidy up.”
I knew that Phil was angry because his face got all red.
“I’ll play you for it,” he said. “If you lose, you do the cleanup by yourself.”
“Two out of three,” I said so I’d have a good chance to watch.
I won the first hand. I didn’t see Phil do anything out of the ordinary. At the end of the hand, he threw his cards in.
On the second hand, Phil licked his lips when he fanned out his cards and again after picking up three cards. He won that hand. He slid his cards in.
The same thing happened on the third hand. Phil licked his lips. I don’t think he even noticed he was doing it. He won again.
“I guess that settles it,” he said.
He started to slide his cards into the middle. I reached out and pushed his hand away from the cards. I guess he didn’t expect that because he looked startled. I grabbed his cards before he could react. He tried to snatch them back, but I got up from the table and ran into the kitchen.
I had started with five cards. I’d discarded three and drawn three more. When the hand was over, I threw my cards onto the discard pile. Phil had also started with five cards. He had also discarded three and thrown them onto the discard pile. So there should only have been five cards under his hand as he slid them across the table. But instead there were eight—the five that made up his winning hand and that he had showed me, and three more. Where had the extra three cards come from? There was only one explanation.
Phil came into the kitchen. He glanced at the cards in my hand. I stared at him.
“You cheated,” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
“All this time you’ve been playing hands with me, you’ve been cheating.”
He tried to laugh it off. “It’s not like I was stealing from you, Davy,” he said. “It’s not like we were playing for money.”
“You cheated,” I said again. I couldn’t believe it. Well, maybe that wasn’t exactly true. Maybe it wasn’t a huge surprise to me that Phil would do something like that. But I felt like an idiot for being cheated by him all this time and never knowing it. “I’m going to tell Mom,” I said. I probably sounded like a baby saying that, but I wanted her to know what kind of jerk she had married.
“She won’t believe you,” Phil said. “Not after I talk to her. That’s the trouble with being a pain in the ass, Davy. She knows you don’t like me. She knows you never listen to me. Now, as far as she’s concerned, you’re just going to kick it up a notch and start telling lies about me. Keep it up and nobody’s going to be sorry when you’re finally old enough to move out.”
I looked at Detective Antonelli.
“Is that why you did it, David?” he said. “Because you found out that your stepfather was cheating you at cards?”
“I didn’t do it,” I told him. “I didn’t do anything.” And, boy, that was the truth.