If I'd Known You Were Coming

Sleight of Hand

1 1 4 Sleight of Hand It was summer. I was newly twelve, though my father—just before going—had said, “You are almost a woman.” And then there was a man, the man who kept me for several days. A friend of my father’s—that is what he told me. He was in the house before I was, waiting. He knew my name. “Dolores,” he said, as though he’d just finished setting the table. “Who are you?” I asked, putting my hand to my throat to feel the question. “Charlie,” he said. He knew that I lived alone with my father, that my mother was dead to us, and that my father would be away for some days. He S l e i g h t o f H a n d 1 15 had a southern accent, a long draw on the o’s of my name. My father had taken me to Mississippi when I was ten or so, to see the casinos that line the muggy, mosquitoed coast; not to show me where, but how he grew up, the rattle and click of the roulette wheel. I remembered lunch with a man who was not a relative, a man who had a southern accent, but I could not find his face, only that he sat on his hands while he chewed. “Charlie,” he said again. “Your dad’s friend.” I’ve read that a gambling addict is someone who remembers the triple cherries, the quadruple sevens, the double-down that had him ahead five-times what he walked in with, but who is quick to forget all the other plays, the losses that are inevitably more frequent than the gains. My father was a gambler, a card-counter, but also a magician. “There is no magic,” he would say, “only the sleight of hand— something taken away is replaced by something else.” My friend Loraine is staying with me now. Loraine is a real estate agent four hours north of here, but she wanted to be out of town while her soon-to-be ex-husband moved his things, taking them to Self Storage, before parking his car in the same driveway Loraine waited in a month ago—needing to confront him right outside the other woman’s apartment. Self Storage. This is a phrase that always stops me. Last week, over dinner, Loraine said she was mad at me, upset that I was selling the house and that I hadn’t asked for her help. In the car it was, “A woman with a house is more marketable, Dolores.” “She has curb appeal?” I asked, already tired of the conversation . I told her she could field the offers. I would fire the agent I’d just hired. “It’s a mistake,” she said. “What about the dog? You need the yard.” 1 1 6 S l e i g h t o f H a n d “The dog,” I explained, “doesn’t stay in the yard.” The dog has taken to jumping the fence whenever I leave, roaming the streets, mapping out all the alleyways, until he hears the familiar squeal of my brakes and comes bounding from one direction or the other, tongue limp with thirst, his paws up on the window. I wondered then if he would recognize Loraine’s car, if he watched me get into it earlier that night. I scanned the road ahead, worried her car would be the car to hit him. We turned the corner and found he was waiting at the door. “But where will you go?” she asks, teary, as if this house is the only house. The house I once shared with my father—and then my father’s friend, for those five days—is small and open, each room easily visible from every other. But Charlie kept me tied down in one place, on my own bed, my mouth full with his undershirt. The daylight reflected off the water of the canals, skipping crescent winks across the all-white walls, letting me know when a rowboat had passed, that there was the ripple of another life just outside. A flock of wild parrots—lost from their cages—watched and jittered at the window, squawking asides. At night there was nothing : grayness, the weight of a full grown man stranded across me, sleeping, wrestling terrors, then sinking deeper, stinking of our vinegar: booze, smoke, sweat, and the metallic stench of blood. I...