Five
"Can I go?" the little girl asked. "If you play your cards right," said the man she'd later think of as her father. The little girl went to find the deck of playing cards, which she never knew to have a box, only a series of belts in the form of double-looped rubber bands. The corners of the cards were rounded and soft, like fingertips. On their backs was a little girl about the same age as the little girl. She was seated on a wooden stool, frowning over her cards. Some fell to her lap and feet unnoticed. She held no hearts or diamonds, only clubs and spades. She appeared to be playing alone.

The little girl laid cards out carefully on the table in front of the man. Now and then, she glanced up to watch him watching her. "Am I playing them right?" she asked.

He was laughing too hard to answer her, so she repeated the question.


Ten
In the new house, the man the girl knew as her father bought a desktop computer on which she played many games of Solitaire. The computer offered her a variety of decks to choose from: clownfish, a robot, a palm tree, a castle. A seashell shaped like an ice cream cone. Her favorite was the one she also thought was the ugliest: a white man's hand, holding three Aces. Occasionally, the missing Ace poked from his striped Oxford sleeve, briefly revealing the shoulders of a bright red heart. The bald display of deceit felt somehow honest to her.

An only child, she'd been taught to play Solitaire with a physical deck and knew it as a lesson in the tedium of loneliness. The game felt less pointless on the computer, measured against a clock. The computer shuffled and dealt almost instantaneously, and the cards never slipped out of place. Each landed lock-step at the bottom of the intended column as long as she hovered and released it over the correct one. She cursed herself whenever she dropped a card too soon in her hurry and it was sucked back up to the draw pile, where she'd have to squander seconds returning for it.

Those long, dark evenings, her face lit by the screen, she forgot her loneliness. The mouse clicked away under her right index finger as she tried to beat her own best time, as if the random draw of the cards didn't factor into her speed. With the clock ticking, she couldn't waste time considering otherwise.


Nineteen
The house rule was that if you got euchred after calling trump, you had to play the next game naked. The college had a penchant for nudity, and the cross-country team was no exception. The young woman would never know if this was specific to the school or more broadly characteristic of small Midwestern liberal arts colleges, lacking in cheap entertainments besides drinking and euchre. There were two annual nude/semi-nude traditions that she was aware of, one sanctioned and one not. The unsanctioned one took place at noon on the first Saturday of December. She'd only witnessed it from the dining hall, whose windows overlooked the track. The Naked Run, it was called. The sanctioned one happened at night in March and raised money for charity. The Nearly Naked Run, it was called. People ran in teams. Balloons and such were strategically placed.


When she and Marissa got euchred after she'd called hearts one Saturday night, January of her sophomore year, she assumed she wouldn't be the only one naked. But Lawson said the rule only applied to the person who called trump. Marissa looked sorry, but not too sorry.


There was nothing to be done about it, the young woman decided, but to get it over with. At least her lower half would be hidden by the table's shadow. As she peeled off her clothes, the people she thought of as her friends clapped and screamed.


Twenty-five
She learned seven-card stud from her first husband's family, one Thanksgiving in Knoxville, betting with piles of pennies. No one expected her to bluff, even after she'd won many rounds by bluffing. Maybe she should have known then.


Thirty-seven
After the man she knows as her father dies, the woman tells her second husband the first story about the cards, as a way of explaining herself. She tells him her father repeated this story throughout her adulthood as a way of explaining what she'd been like as a child. Telling the story, she realizes that when her father was narrator, the repetition of the question was the story's punchline: Am I playing them right? With her as narrator, the punchline becomes the absence of an answer.

She still has the deck in a drawer, wrapped with a desiccated rubber band. She found it a few years earlier when they cleaned out her mother's house. She shows it to her husband, as if the artifact proves the story's truth, though he shows no sign of doubting her. The cards' rounded edges remind her of the soft pages of a book she recently checked out of the public library, a first edition of The Waves from 1931, its cover's edges worn to bare cardboard from being held by so many hands. She returns the deck to the shadow of the drawer without removing the rubber band.


Seventy-eight
Maybe when she's an old woman, she'll play cards again. Solitaire, if there's no one to play with. Naked, but only if she feels like it. The rubber band will snap and crumble into pieces in her hand no matter how carefully she tries to unwrap it. The edges of the cards will be just as soft as they were when she was thirty-seven, or five, but her own fingertips will be rougher, her skin dried out like an old rubber band. She will have to lick her fingertip to separate the cards. She will not know if she's playing them right.


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