{December 24}

I didn’t do anything on the day of Christmas Eve. At one point I tried to think about if I wanted to get anyone anything—specifically, if I wanted to get Cygnus anything—but by that time it was too late, and Yoru seemed to be very adamant that it didn’t matter all that much, so I dropped the subject. Everyone kept telling me this wasn’t a big deal, but I was used to that being a coded cover-phrase for the exact opposite, so it took a bit of prodding for me to really get it.

We played some blackjack that night—with mild drinking for me and varying levels of sloshed for Cygnus, Ava, Benji, and Yoru—and we were all more or less being merry. For the first time since I’d arrived, everyone was there, and everyone played. Bell went to the effort of putting on a slightly more appealing face, which was unnerving for me but appeared to be par for the course for everyone else. Maybe they were just more used to it than I was.

Bell didn’t drink.

I did my best to stay more or less sober so I could stay on top of my dealing game for the two non-regulars. Both of them knew I was the dealer whenever we played, and while Benji clearly thought it was weird, he got over it after a few drinks. Bell saw it and just smiled a little frustrating quiet smile and said nothing.

God.

At one point during the night, when Benji was far too many drinks in, he said to me: “Hey, Erika.”

“Yeah?”

I loved being the dealer. It was a control thing, and nothing more. Being in control of something concrete, something real—even if that thing was a luck-based casino game—was a level of validation that I craved and never received. I needed to know I could pilot something other than myself.

I feel I can be outright about that, given how little else I could control in my life.

“You’re so fucking good at this,” Benji said. Barely on the edge of slurring; the emphasis on “fucking” seemed to not be as intentional as he meant.

I glowed, looked away—and then forced myself to look him in the eyes. I said, “Thank you.”

“How did you learn?” he asked.

Normally, I wouldn’t have answered that question. But I watched Yoru hit on soft-sixteen and flip a nine for the fourth time that night and I realized that no matter what I said, it had to go over better than that.

I said the truth: “My dad taught me when I was nine.”

“Nine?”

I picked up everyone’s cards and started the shoe’s last hand. Not quite at the end, as I was taught, but by my eyeball, the last one before the divider.

“His friend Dan got sick of having to manage the game every time they played. He knew my dad knew how to deal and he was just being quiet to skirt the responsibility. One night they got into a big argument in the basement, and everyone left the house in a big huff. I was awake then,” I paused, realizing I was just telling the whole story, and that everyone had stopped fidgeting with their cards.

Yoru said, “And?”

I blinked, took hold of the beer on the floor next to me, took a long drink, and continued. I was going to tell this damn story. Nobody was going to remember it anyway. It didn’t matter.

But it mattered to me, a bit. I wanted to be in control. This was a way to take it.

A safe way, and no one would really remember.

That was the thought, anyway. In hindsight, the only person there who was drunk enough to have their memory affected was Benji. Not even Ava, who was pretty hammered by most metrics, was at that point yet.

“And I went downstairs,” I continued, slowly. “To get a drink of water, and also to see what everyone was raising a big fuss about. My dad was there, and he was drunk, and he told me—”Erika,” he said to me, “Tomorrow, when you get home from school, do you want to learn how to deal blackjack?””

“Honestly,” I said, grabbing part of the shoe and absentmindedly bridge-shuffling it. “I didn’t really want to learn how to deal blackjack. I wanted to—and I guess it was just, um, a kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing, because this was something I went back and forth on all the time—what I did want to do was spend some more time with my dad. I was in a “Dad really does care about me” phase, each phase would last maybe two or three weeks, and I wanted to make an effort because it seemed to me like he was making an effort. Obviously, he was just drunk and frustrated that Dan was bailing on him, and if either of us had...if either of us were in a regular state of mind, we’d realize how insane what we were asking of each other was. My dad was asking me, in all seriousness, his nine-year-old daughter, to deal blackjack for his friends on Friday nights. And—I was just going to say okay, because this seemed like the kind of thing I could be good at mechanically, and it would at least give us a good two hours tomorrow where neither of us were thinking about how disabled I was.”

I stopped. There was more to the story—a lot more—but this was already the most I’d talked in a long time. I doubted anyone on the team had heard me talk this much in one go.

I put the piece of the shoe down and took my beer off the floor for another sip, for strength.

This was my chance, I’d realized—if I could make it through this whole story intact, I’d become one of them. I would be a part of the team with no holds—assimilated completely, with no regard to myself. This was a side of me they’d never seen before.

All I had to do was finish the story. They were hanging on my every word.

Eyes on me.

I swallowed.

“So the next day when I got home from school, I sat down with him—and even though he was really drunk last night, he’d revisited the idea sober and thought it was still good. I knew that before he’d even really said anything, since he’d used some of his tiny amount of vacation time to cut work a few hours early so he could be at the kitchen table when I came home. So he had a tiny shoe there—just two decks shuffled together, much less than regulation—and he told me, “This is called the shoe,” and for some reason nine-year-old me just thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Just—a stack of a hundred and four cards shuffled together, called a shoe. Isn’t that just the funniest thing in the world?”

Nobody else agreed.

I went on: “So my dad got to see me laugh for the first time in God knows. Maybe he’d forgotten I could. Maybe he didn’t try to. Maybe—God, I don’t know,” I said, trailing off.

I’d lost my train of thought. “Um...”

“Dad’s teaching you blackjack,” Ava said. There was no bitterness there. Maybe she’d drowned it in the alcohol—or maybe she was learning something.

I was almost there.

“Right,” I replied, even-tone. “We talked about the rules and the strategy, and—well—I wasn’t struggling in school, really, my grades were fine as much as grades mean anything when you’re nine, so remembering rules and strategies and stuff was easy for me. It all made sense, the—you know—the probabilities and the places you stand on terrible hands and stuff. Standing on thirteen when the dealer is showing a five, and stuff like that.”

Started shuffling again.

“We spent the week, that afternoon and some time after dinner, talking about card games. He taught me how to deal hold ‘em too. He hated five-card so I don’t know that one, but he taught me both of the games he liked. He skipped bowling on Wednesday to teach me how to deal poker. That was the only time he ever did that.

“I was terrified of actually doing it, though,” I went on. “Of being down there with his friends. They were all nice enough people, honestly—a little crass, a little rough, but everyone at the factory was like that. They were all nice enough people, really, but I was still scared because I knew that what I’d be doing was really weird, and I didn’t want them to think less of me. I think they all—um—they all took pity on me or something, or they took pity on my dad since he—um...”

That wasn’t part of the story, I supposed. I accidentally locked eyes with Bell and decided, spur-of-the-moment, that even with all I was sharing, I could keep my personal opinions on my father to myself. It didn’t matter, really, since I’d never see him again—but if Bell was allowed to be some strange enigma to everyone at the Radiant, then I could carve out some of that secrecy for myself, too. My dad was functionally dead; maybe actually dead, by now. I was never quite sure if he’d throw a party or hang himself if he woke up one early summer morning and found me gone without a trace.

Windows open, curtains gently wavering in the breeze. Cars whooshing past outside—but no Erika, no Erika anywhere.

Hal Hanover was alone again, and Erika was but an ended nightmare.

My breath caught and I remembered where I was.

“On Friday he brought me downstairs,” I said, slowly. “Said to Dan, “Look, man—you're not gonna have to deal tonight,” and when Dan saw me come down in a tiny child-size tux vest—which I’d asked for, a sort of costume so I could treat this like some kind of make-believe, and my dad actually got for me, which was...just completely out-of-the-blue—when Dan saw me he almost fell out of his chair.”

I snickered a bit. Maybe because I was more drunk than I meant to be now, but in hindsight, his reaction was kind of funny. It was sitcom stuff. The kind of thing that never happens, but you point to and laugh at on TV. In my memory I could almost hear the laugh track—me standing there holding my dad’s hand in a brand-new vest, Dan, Earl, and Davy all sitting around the table staring—Dan frozen in disbelief with Earl and Davy exchanging glances and laughing.

Kid blackjack dealer; a perfect Disney channel spin-off. Two seasons and a TV movie.

I expected to be embarrassed beyond words. I expected to never speak again.

My dad squeezed my hand.

“Dan was never the type to mince words, none of the factory guys were, and he said to my dad: “Good joke, man,” and Hal said it wasn’t a joke, it was real. So Dan replied, “this is cute and all, but it’s also kinda fucked up, Hal,” and my dad just took my hand again—not my shoulder—and said, “Look—we’ve been working on this all week, why don’t we give it a try just for tonight.”

“And if you’re waiting for the punchline,” I said, looking at the mix of neutral-to-lightly-horrified faces, “He said after that: “It’s not like she’s gonna drink with us.””

Nobody but Bell and I found that funny. Not funny enough to lose my composure, but enough to snicker to myself again. And the jury was out on whether or not any expression of emotion Bell had was genuine.

God. I was someone else that night.

It hurts to recall all of this.

“Well,” I went on. Now I started to shuffle the full shoe, in sections since we had no automatic shuffler, “After that, Earl said, “Well, why not let her try a sip of some of your beer,” and my dad said no, and Earl said his son tried beer when he was ten, and I was about that age, right? And my dad said it was different for girls, and Earl said, “Well, who’s wearing the tux here—you or her?” And he burst out laughing, and Davy started laughing too—and once he was done Earl said that the tux looked great on me, and why don’t we give this a try after all. And Dan was still sort of uncomfortable but he went with it. And—well—I did great. They tested me a little, asking me for advice when we all knew they knew what to do, and I knew all the stuff. And—I don’t know if they were surprised that I could do it or surprised that Hal actually took the time to comprehensively teach me everything. But at the end of the night, Dan asked me if I could do it again the next night.”

I cut each of the shuffled, roughly single-deck sized portions of the shoe in half, rearranged them as randomly as any person can and started shuffling them together again. “We went like that for a few weeks, and then my dad had another bright idea—if I was already dealing the casino games, maybe I could serve the drinks too. He suggested it as a joke, I think—but I was willing to do basically anything to cash in on this wave of my dad’s attention while it lasted, and this wave was so long I was starting to think it could be forever as long as I didn’t screw it up, so I agreed to it, and he was kind of surprised that I was taking it seriously, but I took everything seriously—even my table “humor” was mostly just saying dumb shit with a straight face, as you guys know.

I stacked the shuffled shoe sections on top of each other and loaded it back into the holder. Took some cards out and dealt the next hand. “And…well, after a while my dad got used to me doing all those things and we stopped seeing each other as people again, but…for four or five months there, I think it was the closest we ever got to, um, to him being a dad and me not being a defective.”

Ended up with myself showing a six.

I looked over at Benji. “What’re you doing?”

He blinked. Looked down at the cards in front of him.

“Um...” Benji looked at the cards in front of him like they were an arcane language. He mumbled, “Hit.”

“On sixteen against a six?”

“Fuck it,” Benji said. He’d gone glassy-eyed. I wondered if he was feeling ill.

I gave him a five.

“He does it again, folks,” I said, glancing around. “Anything to say for the cameras?”