cornflakes were stale and chewy. The milk was on the turn. New outfits aside, it hadn’t been a good month money-wise, again. I knew that’s why we were doing this. Hannah had slot-machine eyes, especially now she knew Ernest was on his way out. She was desperate to get there and clean up. Beneath the surface she trembled with it, like a greyhound on the starting blocks, like a size zero bull at a gate.
“When did you last see him?” I asked.
“When did he abandon us? I don’t know. Thirteen years? Fourteen? Maybe twelve. When was it, Lowell?”
Lowell shrugged. “Beats me.”
I pushed my bowl away. “And why are you all dressed up, exactly? What’s with that?”
“We’ve got to look like we’re doing well,” she said, pinching a strand of tobacco from the surface of her tongue without smudging her lipstick, the same smashed cherry colour as her nails. “I don’t want him thinking we need his money.”
As if a new outfit could do that. As if a throw-up dress or a stomach-bug brown suit would hide our flock of overdrafts, a good silk blouse erase the sly and bottomless need from our eyes.
“Why do you care what he knows?” I said.
“We’re going in there with our heads held high,” said Lowell.
“And coming out with our hands full, right? To the victor the spoils?”
I didn’t want a thing from Ernest. I didn’t want to know him. I thought they should go without me. I had my eye on a clean conscience and the place to myself. I’d exercise control, build a fire in the grate and feed it kindling so it stayed small but never went out. I’d write letters to Thurston at all the addresses I could think of – the bar where Uncle Mac drank, the record store he liked in Echo Park, everyone at my old apartment building. I’d track him down so I could tell him what had happened, where on Planet Earth I was. I’d leave the lights off and the blinds down, be nothing but a glowing, empty house. I wasn’t interested in helping Ernest feel better about himself. I didn’t have room to play suck-up to my sick old stranger of a father for what he might be leaving me in his will.
“Do I have to come with you?” I said.
Hannah smashed out her dead cigarette on a plate like it had done something to offend her. She pulled on the other one so hard her cheeks caved in and I thought she’d smoke the whole thing down in one breath. She saw me, and I knew what she was thinking. Gone were the days when Little Miss Arson could be left alone in the house. There wasn’t enough insurance money in the world that would pay for that.
“Yes, you have to come,” she said. “It’s you he’s interested in.”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Since when?”
Her fingers drummed hard on the worktop and she declined, as usual, to answer the question. “It’s not optional. We’re not negotiating.”
“I’m a cone in your parking space,” I said. “That’s it, isn’t it? I’m a marker on your property.”
“Think of it as a holiday,” Lowell suggested, the shoulders of his suit rising up for no good reason to meet his ears, his right cuff already streaked with butter. “You can explore the garden. You can bring your bike.”
I looked at him. “What am I? Eight?”
“God forbid we’re there long enough for a bike ride,” Hannah said.
Lowell stuck with it. “You can walk, or swim in the river. Maybe he’s got a boat.”
“An outward-bound holiday in a dying man’s house?” I said. “Nice. Sensitive.”
Hannah smiled coldly at me.
“Let’s be honest,” I told her. “You’re going fishing and I’m the bait.”
“It’s remote,” she said. “It’s isolated. He’s got acres of land, and woodland. It’s a great place for a fire. You could light ten of the damn things out there and nobody would even notice. You’re coming and you’re going to like it.”
I didn’t look up. I kept my eyes on my cereal bowl. “Who else is going to be there?”
“Just us,” Hannah said. “Ernest’s been on his own for years.”
“How do you know?” I said.
She bent towards her reflection in the side of the toaster. It was warped and squat and gauzy. “I just do,” she said, baring her teeth to check for stains. “Trust me.”
My chair legs scraped loudly against the floor as I got up. “Why the hell would I start doing that?”
I rinsed my bowl in the sink. Through the window, I could see next-door’s cat lurking on the fence by the bird feeder, waiting to take one out mid-flight with a swipe of its paw.
It was the start of the summer. I had plans.
Hannah played with her lighter, grinding the flint back and forward with her thumb, holding the gas down, looking right at me over the flame.
“Is he at death’s door?” I said, and (may God forgive me), “Will it be quick?”
“Cross fingers,” she smiled, and Lowell got up to start packing the car.
We drove towards Ernest on a bright clear day. He said he woke up to the dry powder blue of the sky and he knew we were coming. The Severn Bridge looked like the entrance to Heaven in an old film I’d seen about a pilot who’d rather not die yet, thanks all the same, because he’s just met a nice lady and only recently started to enjoy himself. The service station on the other side where we stopped for coffee looked like the mouth of Hell.
Later, much later, I told Ernest this. We were playing cards. He said I played poker like a professional. Apparently, I shuffle like a croupier.
“And by the way,” he told me, “it’s only in a film you can decide not to die because your life has taken a sudden turn for the better.”
I smiled, and kissed him on the forehead, and fanned the whole deck of cards out with one snap of my hand.
It was Thurston who showed me how to handle cards. He knew hundreds of tricks. He had this one where the card you chose would end up ripped in half in your back pocket and he wouldn’t ever tell me how it was done. “Magic” was all he said whenever I asked him. He said his Uncle Mac taught him but I knew that was a lie because I once saw Mac try to shuffle a deck and it was like he was doing it with his feet. By then I knew that Uncle Mac wasn’t even his uncle, just some guy he’d met at a hostel, just another stray like me.
I thought about Thurston in the car all the way to Ernest’s place. I remembered the look on people’s faces when he pulled that card trick, the wonder, like he’d given them just what they’d been hoping for, like they were kids
