My mother came home and told me she had just run into Mrs. Lombardi, who had invited us for lunch. I hadn’t been to the Lombardi house in three or four years.
When we arrived, the door to the room where they kept the board games was closed and lunch had already been set up in the dining room. The house hadn’t changed, still washed in a greyish-green light, the furniture dark and heavy; it was unsettling to be back. Teresa and her older sister Maria joined us.
Mrs. Lombardi and my mother did most of the talking—gossiping about the neighborhood and catching up on what was going on with the other Lombardi kids. Angela, still living in the attic, was working in the city now; Luca had been transferred to a firehouse in Brooklyn and he hated the commute; Antonio had just gotten engaged.
I didn’t say a word. I kept my eyes down.
After we finished eating, Mrs. Lombardi suggested we go to the living room and play keno. She’d started taking the bus down to Atlantic City with friends every other weekend and had become an avid gambler—penny keno and nickel slots. It was hard for me to picture her standing in front of a slot machine holding a plastic cup full of nickels, but I was happy for the diversion from the memories drifting through my head.
After Mrs. Lombardi explained the game, she gave each of us a certain number of pennies and we started to play. I lost the first few rounds, still figuring out how the rules worked, what the strategies might be.
The adults were still chatting and drinking coffee, but most of Mrs. Lombardi’s attention was on the game. She won more rounds than anybody else, and she was gleeful about it. I lost every round we played.
I liked to win, but I’d always been a good sport. Even when I lost at things I cared about, I rarely got upset. I lost at Monopoly, badly, on an almost weekly basis, which had become a running joke among my friends.
As the afternoon progressed, and my store of pennies was almost depleted, I started to get angry. I couldn’t hide it. When Maria joked about how seriously I was taking the game, I felt exposed and self-conscious. I felt them all looking at me, judging me and thinking that I was a spoiled brat who didn’t know how to behave.
My mother looked on as if she were just a spectator.
Mrs. Lombardi won another round, but before she could claim her winnings, I picked up the bowl full of pennies from the center of the board and carried it to the other end of the room. I tried to make a joke of it, but I felt the weight of this terrible thing that had happened, of an injustice I couldn’t understand or articulate. I wasn’t giving those pennies back.