Jim Shepard - Flights

Ronnie flipped over his card after three face down: two as well. Biddy spread three more and turned over a nine. Ronnie did the same.

“Whoa,” Louis said. The rows of stalemated cards reached almost to the end of the table. Biddy was grateful for the extraordinary, and anxious to acknowledge it. He wanted an outside observer to lean over them and ask Ronnie if he realized the odds against what had just happened. But there was only Louis watching, attentive to everything and reacting to almost nothing. They sat around the Lirianos’ kitchen table, Ronnie waiting for Cindy, Biddy for Mickey.

Ronnie was drinking dark beer. They had themselves a little standoff here, he said. He laid three more out and edged the tip of his next card off the top of the pile and dropped it back, teasing. He put a head on his beer.

“C’mon,” Biddy said.

He smiled and flipped his card, looking at Biddy as he drank. It was a queen.

Biddy turned his over slowly, and then with a yelp as the image leaped at him: queen.

The door banged open, cold air filling the room.

“Don’t even ask,” Cindy said, sweeping into the kitchen. “I don’t even want to talk about it.” Her nose was red and her pants wet from the knees down, and she went right to the stove and put a kettle on. She pulled a mug out of the cabinet and dropped a tea bag into it.

“Have trouble with the car?” Ronnie asked.

She pulled at her scarf. “I’d like to push it off a cliff.” She piled her coat, hat, and scarf on the hamper in the hallway. “My legs are soaked. I’m gonna take a shower. Get the water when it boils, all right?”

The bathroom door shut and they heard the thump of her empty boots on the tile floor. After a few moments the shower went on.

Ronnie finished his beer and set the glass down carefully. The two queens still lay face to face atop the table-long lines of cards. “Whose turn is it?” he asked. He started a new line of three face down and turned over a seven. He seemed to be listening to something in the sound of the shower.

Biddy waited, not for the sake of dramatic tension, but for Ronnie’s attention to refocus on the game. He turned over the fourth card off his deck. It was a three of clubs.

“Three,” Louis said. “Ronnie wins.”

Biddy waited, and then pushed the long rows together into a pile in front of them. “I quit. I don’t feel like playing anymore.”

Ronnie looked at him. “No, let’s play. I win, right? My turn.” He turned over another card. Biddy watched him for a moment before continuing.

The teapot was whistling. Ronnie concentrated on the cards and they sat listening to it until Louis got up and turned off the heat and poured the water into the mug.

He won three or four in a row before the shower stopped. Ronnie’s concentration on it had affected Biddy and Louis as well, and they too were waiting, ready, as if Cindy’s emergence from the shower had a special significance.

The bathroom door opened and she appeared wrapped in a bath-sized white towel. A big orange cat on it looked at Biddy sideways. MOMCAT was written over its head, the large letters running down Cindy’s left side. She shuffled into the kitchen in her father’s slippers, big maroon things, and sat down at the table, hair dripping.

Ronnie’s eyes were on the cards. “You gonna sit here like that?”

She looked over for her tea. “It’s pinned.” She lifted the mug from the counter without rising and set it in front of her. “Who’s winning?”

No one answered. “Ronnie is,” Biddy said finally.

“What’s wrong with you today?” Cindy asked. She blew on her tea. “What’re you, mad because I’m late? How fast am I supposed to change a tire in thirty below?”

“I stopped by on the way home from the Tap last night,” Ronnie said, flipping over a six. “You weren’t here.”

She flinched. Ronnie, with his eyes lowered, missed it.

“So what time’d you come by?” she said. She tried to sip her tea but it was too hot.

“Two. Two-thirty. We closed the place.”

Louis stood up. “I’m gonna go watch TV,” he said uncertainly.

“What are you doing here today, guy?” Cindy asked Biddy, smiling. “Just come over to play cards with the Cincinnati Kid here?”

“My mom says I got to make up with Mickey,” he said. “He’s supposed to be back by now. I don’t even know why he’s mad at me.”

She lowered her chin to the hot mug and slurped some tea without picking it up. She focused on the beer glass. “You drinking in the morning now?”

Ronnie looked at her. “You don’t want to talk about it?”

She lowered her eyes. “It’s stupid. It’s not worth talking about. And it’s cold sitting around like this,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She took her tea with her.

“I’m gonna go,” Biddy said, standing before Ronnie could react. He didn’t seem to hear. “Tell Mickey I waited awhile.”

Ronnie stirred. “You going to walk all the way home?”

“It’s not too far. Bye.” He pulled on his hat and coat, holding both gloves in one hand in his rush to the door. “Bye,” he repeated.

“Uh-huh,” Ronnie said, looking at the sink. “Take it easy.”

He shut the door, the cold rushing through his open coat. He was two houses down when Dom’s car turned onto the street, and he ducked behind a tree instantly, not wanting to go back. He made certain no one in the car had seen him before edging around the other side of the trunk and starting down the street, kicking up snow as he went, his hands stuffed deep in his pockets.

The twentieth was a school day and when he woke up he padded downstairs to see if anyone had remembered his birthday. They hadn’t. His father was shaving and his mother sat in her robe at the table with the paper from the day before and some black coffee.

“What are you doing up so early?” she asked. “You can sleep for another half hour.”

He shrugged. “I know.” He put some water on, and a teaspoonful of Sanka into a cup with some sugar.

“You want something hot? Some farina?”

He made a face. “I’ll get some cereal.”

He poured the cereal and ate across from his mother, waiting, but nothing happened. Usually they said Happy Birthday, and his mother had once had special pastries for breakfast. Some years, though, they forgot, and this was one of them. He finished the Sanka, his feet cold in his slippers, and went upstairs to dress.

In school it was the beginning of the final week of Advent, and they returned to the chapel, where Sister had all four candles lit, and sang in the dark, starting with “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” and finishing, this time, with “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” Laura stood near him. Between songs she whispered, “Happy Birthday.”

When he got home, his father was in the kitchen and asked him if he wanted to go look for a tree. He agreed, surprised, dropped his book bag in a chair, and they left on the spot.

They searched through four different places, wandering up and down endless crooked aisles of trees, examining candidate after candidate that seemed fine to Biddy but never quite right to his father. When they left the fourth lot, he suggested one more place.

They didn’t find anything there, either. It was in Shelton, and by the time they pulled onto Route 8 for the drive back it was dark. Halfway home they stopped at a shopping center and his father ran in and bought razor blades, napkins, and camera film.

When they finally reached their driveway, it was ten after six. He wondered abstractedly if his mother would be angry at their being late.

Opening the back door, he saw his uncle’s car parked across the way in the Frasers’ driveway, recognizing it even in the gloom, and it hit him all at once before he stepped inside and the chorus of voices called “Surprise!” He remained in the doorway with his parents behind him, looking on a kitchen transformed with streamers, presents, faces. Two balloons drifted along the ceiling. Dom was there, Cindy, Louis, Teddy, uncles and aunts and cousins. Kristi, Simon, Ronnie, and Laura, holding her present against her leg. A white-and-brown cake lay centered on the table. The writing on the frosting was illegible.