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Authors: Louis Sachar

The Cardturner

BOOK: The Cardturner
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THE

CARDTURNER

ALSO BY Louis Sachar

Holes
Small Steps
Stanley Yelnats' Survival Guide to Camp Green Lake
Dogs Don't Tell Jokes
The Boy Who Lost His Face
There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin and New York

First published in Great Britain in June 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
36 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QY

First published in the USA in May 2010 by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House Inc., New York

This electronic edition published in June 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Text copyright © Louis Sachar 2010

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

The publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material:

Lines from
Cannery Row
by John Steinbeck – Penguin Modern Classics New Edition, ed. Susan Shillingford, published in Great Britain in 2000 by Penguin Books, page 107 lines 7-11, copyright 1945 by John Steinbeck. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

Bye Bye Blackbird
– Words by Mort Dixon/Music by Ray Henderson – © 1926 (Renewed) Ray Henderson Music Corp., Old Clover Leaf Music, Redwood Music Ltd. – All Rights Reserved – International Copyright Secured – Lyric reproduction by kind permission of Redwood Music Ltd.

Bye Bye Blackbird
– Words and music by Ray Henderson and Mort Dixon © 1926, reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W8 5SW

Bye Bye Blackbird
– Words and music by Ray Henderson and Mort Dixon © 1926, reproduced by permission of Warner/Chappell Music Ltd, London W8 4EP

All rights reserved

You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4088 1243 3

www.bloomsbury.com

www.louissachar.co.uk

 

Visit
www.bloomsbury.com
to find out more about our authors and their books You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can sign up for newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers

To Nancy Joe, Nancy Jo Gordy, Marilou Powell, Paul and Beth Tobias,

Jerry Bigler, Claudette Hartman, Alex Kolesnik, and Ruth Sachar.

It's been a joy sitting across the table from you

(even if a bit trying at times),

and to all my friends at the Austin Bridge Center,

opponents and partners alike,

and to anyone, anywhere, who is struggling to figure out

whether a bid of four clubs is Gerber or natural . . .

Table of Contents

A Note from the Author

1 My Favorite Uncle

2 A Turn for the Worse

3 By the Way

4 And, And, And . . .

5 Cliff

6 Are You Sure?

7 Teodora

8 The Club

9 Shuffle and Play

10 An Apology of a Sort

11 Tiger Woods's Caddy

12 The Basics

13 In the Garbage

14 National Championship

15 The Perfect Partner

16 The Milkman and the Senator's Wife

17 Finesse

18 The Housing Crisis

19 Captain and the Radio

20 Toni Castaneda

21 Fixed

22 The Blind Lady Bowler

23 Bidding

24 My Sick Fantasy

25 Lab Rats Pushing Buttons

26 Yarborough

27 A Phone Call

28 Toni's Grandmother and President Nixon

29 A Silver Ice Bucket

30 The Life of the Party

31 Smoking Ears

32 A Singing Pig

33 The Great Bridge Detective

34 Director, Please!

35 Toni and Cliff

36 Synchronicity

37 Trapp's Closest Living Relatives

38 Thank You, Partner

39 Two Idiots at Table Seven

40 The Subconscious Mind

41 Entourage

42 Annabel and Ike

43 IMPs

44 The Milkman's Clothes

45 Thugs in Business Suits

46 Nixon

47 Teodora's Tea

48 Quack of Clubs

49 A Monkey and a Typewriter

50 Ducking Smoothly

51 A Very Scared Little Girl

52 Deborah in the Closet

53 A Fresh Start

54 Transfer Bids

55 Post-mortem

56 Welcome to My World

57 Ninety-three, Ninety-one

58 In the Pantry

59 Looking at Colleges

60 Not a Wet Sock

61 They Need Us

62 Twenty-five Percent Slam

63 A Long Hesitation

64 The First Hand

65 The Donkey Hand

66 The Beer Card

67 A Message from Afar

68 Signals

69 Q

70 Canned Peas

71 Transportation

72 The Final Session

73 The Final Table

74 The Final Hand

75 Talk About Wow

76 Philosophically Bent

APPENDIX

About the Author

A Note from the Author

Imagine you were abducted by aliens and taken away to their home planet. After living there awhile, you learn to speak their language, and then actually become a pretty well-known author. You were a huge baseball fan back on Earth, so you decide to write a book about baseball. You know that none of your alien readers have ever heard of baseball, but you think it will make a great story, and besides, you really love the game. . . .

As you attempt to write it, you quickly find yourself entangled in words with multiple meanings, like
ball
and
run
. When you try to describe a triple play, you get so bogged down explaining the rules about force-outs that the excitement of the play itself is lost.

That was the predicament I put myself into when I wrote
The Cardturner
. It's not about baseball but about bridge, a card game that was once extremely popular but that, unfortunately, not too many people play anymore, especially not young people. In fact, the people who do play bridge seem to live in their own alien world.

My publisher, my editor, my wife, and my agent all said I was crazy. "No one's going to want to read a book about bridge!" they told me on more than one occasion.

Still, I really love the game. . . .

THE

CARDTURNER

1
My Favorite Uncle

Ever since I was a little kid, I've had it drilled into me that my uncle Lester was my favorite uncle. My mother would thrust the phone at me and say, "Uncle Lester wants to talk to you," her voice infused with the same forced enthusiasm she used to describe the deliciousness of canned peas. "Tell him you love him."

"I love you, Uncle Lester," I'd say.

"Tell him he's your favorite uncle."

"You're my favorite uncle."

It got worse as I got older. I never knew what to say to him, and he never seemed all that interested in talking to me. When I became a teenager I felt silly telling him he was my favorite uncle, although my mother still urged me to do so. I'd say things like "Hey, how's it goin'?" and he'd grunt some response. He might ask me a question about school. I imagine it was a great relief to both of us when my mother took back the phone. Our brief conversations always left me feeling embarrassed, and just a little bit creepy.

He was actually my great-uncle, having been my mother's favorite uncle long before he was mine.

I didn't know how much money he had, but he was rich enough that he never had to be nice to anyone. Our favorite uncle never visited us, and I think my mother initiated all the phone conversations with him. Later, after he got really sick, he wouldn't even talk to her. My mother would call almost daily, but she could never get past his housekeeper.

BOOK: The Cardturner
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