Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes (8 page)

“Oh!” That was fast. It was already my turn and I hadn't even looked at my cards yet. I looked then and saw I had a Queen and a Six: Sixteen. The dealer was showing a Ten and I wouldn't know until all the players had finished, what he was hiding in the hole.

“Card?” He tapped the chute some more.

Looking around the table fast, I saw a preponderance of low cards and, remembering some of what my dad had said, instinct told me the cards might be about to run high. I didn't want to take a chance on busting with my first hand, which would be demoralizing that early in the evening, so I held out my hand flat over the card as my dad had shown me.

“Pass,” I said.

The Voice was showing a combined Twelve. The only cards that could bust him were those worth ten, but he was taking his time deciding.

“Card?”

The Voice looked at my Sixteen rather than at his own cards, then he laid his hand out flat. “Pass.”

The dealer at last turned over his hole card to reveal a Six, so he and I were pushing at Sixteen, but House rules said the dealer always had to pull at Sixteen, stand on anything Seventeen or higher.

I felt another tingle inside as the dealer slid the next card out of the chute and saw that my dad had been right: it was a Queen. The dealer now had Twenty-six and was busted.

The Voice beside me let out a deep breath. Then he turned to me with a winning smile.

“Wow,” he said, “that's the first hand I've won all night. It must have been a stroke of luck, me sitting down at this table just in time for you to sit in my lap.”

His words made me feel good because what single woman wouldn't want to be thought of as good luck by a man who looked like The Voice? Plus, his words made me want to sit in his lap again. Plus, it'd been a long time since I'd sat in any guy's lap, so I was really wanting to sit there.

“‘Herein Fortune shows herself more kind than is her custom,'” I started to say, but then a new hand was before me on the table and I realized I'd better get serious and stop quoting ol' Bill. Sure, I'd felt great making the right decision and winning the last hand against the dealer, because if I'd asked the dealer to hit me instead it would have been me who busted. But let's face it, I had only won a single round, and one red five-dollar chip does not a Jimmy Choo buy.

I realized the only thing to do was to follow what my dad had told me: narrow my concentration down until it was the size of a dime, ignore the noise and the smoke and everything else that was going on around me except for what was happening right at that table, and just play. Hell, I was sure if my dad was right there, he'd tell me to ignore the beautiful sound of The Voice, as well. There would be time for that—or not—once I was finished with doing what I came there to do.

So the only thing for it was to concentrate totally on the hand that was dealt, making the best decision possible based on the cards I held and the cards I could see in front of the others.

Except there was no decision I needed to make because when I looked down, I saw the dealer had dealt me a Jack and an Ace: Twenty-one. It's the name of the game,
baby.

My first blackjack.

“You're better than a stroke of good luck,” The Voice said exultantly. “You're a talisman!”

I looked over at The Voice sitting next to me and the cards on the green table in front of him.

He had blackjack, too.

It's the other name of the game,
baby.

For the next hour, we played side by side. We each lost a few, but mostly we won, and I quickly realized he was a more adventurous gambler. I was adhering strictly to what my dad had told me in terms of strategy: when I increased my winnings at the table by fifty percent, I increased my bets to double; but when the ten-value cards and Aces were being used up rapidly, I reduced my bet to the minimum. The Voice, on the other hand, while keeping a close eye on what I was doing, steadily increased his bets. This meant that when we won, he won bigger; but when we lost, he lost bigger, too.

When the dealers changed shifts, I took the opportunity to count my chips and was surprised to see I was up to over seven hundred dollars; I even had a fair number of green chips now, valued at twenty-five dollars, that I'd been using for my bets for the last few hands.

“Don't you realize it's bad luck to count your winnings while still at the table?” The Voice said, leaning in to whisper from the side.

“Well, but how else will I know…?” I let my voice trail off, recognizing how absurd it would be to utter the complete thought, “But how else will I know when I've won enough to buy some Jimmy Choos?” The way I figured it, at the rate I was going, in another hour I'd have enough money to buy the shoes I so desperately wanted.

There was no time for that now, though, because the new dealer was the dealer from hell.

If the last dealer had looked like Danny Bonaduce all grown up, the new one was a thin Asian woman, resembling no one so much as that villainous lawyer who used to be on
Ally McBeal.
In fact, there was something about her that rattled me so much that when she dealt my hand—a Queen and an Eight—I got so nervous I started tapping my finger on the table, using the universal sign for “hit me,” and before I knew it I'd busted at Twenty-eight.

Ouch!

Then The Voice busted, too.

And we kept on busting until I was down to just over five hundred dollars.

Even though this was in no way going to get me the Ghost I wanted, and fighting the compulsion to stay right where I was every second, I pushed away from the table.

“Oh, no!” The Voice said, placing a restraining hand on my arm.

My, his hand was beautiful, like a world-class pianist's. And I'd bet my last five-dollar chip those nails weren't acrylics.

“You can't leave now!” The Voice said.

Oh, how I would have liked to stay, if only just to please him. But I had to go. I was following my dad's rules. “When you start to lose, walk away,” he'd told me, making the point that in some games quitters actually stood a better chance of prospering, at which point I'd pointed out that wasn't it cheaters that didn't prosper anyway? Whatever. Sure, if I stayed, I might win some back, maybe I'd win more than some. But the cards had turned cold on me and if I stayed, I could lose everything. Then where would I be? Besides, I was still ahead by over four hundred dollars from when I started. Washing windows, it took me a few days to earn four hundred dollars.

“Sorry.” With reluctance, I peeled his fingers off. He had some grip! “I really do have to stop now.”

“How about just one more—?”

But the dealer from hell cut him off.

“Bet?” she commanded me, pointing one talon at the table in front of me.

“No, thanks.” I forced myself to be firm. “No.”

“Bet?” she commanded The Voice, shifting her finger to him.

The Voice smiled ruefully before pocketing his chips. Even though his losses had been more spectacular than mine, his wins had been that much more so, and I figured he had at least a thousand dollars in his pocket.

“Sorry,” The Voice said to the dealer. “But if the lady goes, I go. After all, I can't keep winning without my talisman.” Then he tossed one of his twenty-five-dollar green chips on the table as a tip for the dealer. “Perhaps another time.”

Hey, it was impressive he was such a great tipper, and I liked to tip well, too, but I could have used that chip right then.

Oh, well. It was time for me to go.

I was a few tables away, when I felt that firm hand on my arm again.

“Hey,” said The Voice, “what's the big hurry?”

“I don't know…I just thought…” Then I blurted out, “What's your name?” I couldn't help it. I needed to find something to call him in my mind other than The Voice.

He smiled. “Billy Charisma,” he said.

“Of course. Why didn't I think of that?”

“And yours?”

“Delilah Sampson.”

“Ah.” He smiled again. “Your name is both strong and weak. If I stick with you long enough, will I lose all my hair?”

I'd actually heard that one before, or at least something similar.

I shrugged. “Maybe just all your chips.”

“Well, that would certainly be devastating. Although, thanks to you, I had a very good night. Before you came along, the night looked to be a lousy day at the office. But after you showed up?” He twinkled his fingers in the air. “It turned magical.”

I wasn't used to a man, let alone such a gorgeous man, paying such attention to me. And I knew I should have encouraged him, since who knew when, if ever, Fortune might shine so again? But I'd come there as a woman with a mission and a sort-of posse, and a woman with a mission and a sort-of posse I was still.

“That's great,” I told him, feeling like Cinderella as the clock strikes midnight, “but I really need to go. I'm with some friends and I need to go find—”

But he'd already flagged down a cocktail waitress, ordered two glasses of champagne.

“Surely your friends can wait a few more minutes,” he said. “We need to celebrate our success. Always have to celebrate the small successes. Pity we have to pay for the celebration, though,” he said, handing enough chips to the waitress to cover the tab. “If we'd ordered them while still at the table, we'd have been comped. Eh, cheers!”

I drank.

A part of me knew it was time to find the party I'd come with, and yet I felt very much as though I'd been deer-in-the-headlightsed, like Billy Charisma was too bright a thing and I too dull to even speak.

“So, tell me, Delilah Sampson,” he said, taking a sip from his own champagne, “do you have any nicknames?”

“Nicknames?” I was getting duller by the minute.

“Yes. It's just that the name Delilah brings up too many bad associations for me. You know, bad nights in Vegas, Tom Jones and all of that.”

I tried to think. I'd never been much of a nickname person, not the kind of cool person to have a really cool nickname like Legs or Bright Eyes or Pepper. “The girls I work with call me
chica
sometimes.”

He thought about it for a moment. “Nope,” he decided. “It shouldn't be anything I need to pronounce with a Spanish accent.”

“Well, my dad always calls me Baby.”

What can I say in my defense? I certainly wasn't about to tell him Hillary sometimes called me Shit For Brains.

“Baby?” He tried the name out, studied the high ceiling beyond the smoke clouds, nodded. “I
like
Baby. I think then that from now on I'll call you—”

“There you are,
chica!
” It was Rivera. She spoke to me as though this gorgeous guy I was standing next to wasn't even there; which I guess, to her, he wasn't. “Boss ate some kind of bad clam when she was eating with Hillary. Either that or she choked on the prime rib and Hillary had to do the Heimlich. I forget which. Anyway, it's time to go.”

“Are you sure Stella doesn't suffer from emphysema?” I asked, concerned.

“Huh?” Rivera said.

I explained how just recently I'd seen the author John Irving getting interviewed by Jon Stewart on
The Daily Show.
Irving had related an anecdote about being out to dinner with his mentor Kurt Vonnegut when Vonnegut had started choking. Irving, unwilling to let his mentor die while dining with him—talk about someone thinking everything that happened around them was about me, me, me (or them, them, them)—he immediately started performing the Heimlich. But Irving is a short man, Vonnegut a tall one, and Irving's first efforts…well, let's just say he did
not
apply the pressure to Vonnegut's stomach. So then Irving, a man with a lot of wrestling in his past, somehow got Vonnegut down on the floor on all fours, whereupon he proceeded to continue to Heimlich him. At one point, Vonnegut managed to gasp, “John, I wasn't choking on anything. I have emphysema.” As punch lines go, it was a doozy.

Rivera gave me a strange look. “
Chica,
I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about, but we gotta go.”

And with that, barely giving me a second to throw a goodbye wave over my shoulder to Billy Charisma, she tugged me away.

Back out in the entryway, the rest of our group was waiting for us. But they certainly weren't bored. They were standing on the edges of a huge crowd whose attention was focused on someone in the center.

In the middle of the room, replacing the Balloon Lady from earlier, was The Yo-Yo Man.

Oh my God! It was The Yo-Yo Man!

At least that's what the sandwich-board sign on the easel said:
Chris Westacott, The Yo-Yo Man.

“Oh my God!” I shrieked at my gal pals. “It's The Yo-Yo Man!”