Chapter Ten
Lori
“I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve been looking unusually good lately,” said Sam as I examined my reflection on the back of a teaspoon.
I set the spoon down with an anxious feeling in my belly. “Do I not always look good?”
“I wasn’t saying that. I just mean you’ve looked particularly good in the last couple days. You’ve been curling your hair in the morning before you leave the house, and your face is a bit brighter.” She fixed me with a shrewd look. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think there was something going on with you.”
“You mean like a boy?” I laughed nervously. “Right now, the only man in my life is Mr. Neil Gaiman.”
“If you say so,” said Sam, as she returned to her dusting. “But you ought to know better than to think you can hide things from your own sister.”
She was right about that. Marshall had come into the store every morning for the past four days, and every morning I had sent him away without my number. By now, I ought to have been getting exasperated, but instead, I found myself studying my reflection in the mirror with an attention I didn’t usually give it. If Marshall was a few minutes later than usual, my eyes drifted to the clock on the back wall, wondering if he would be coming in at all or if he had missed our appointment.
Our appointment. That’s how I was beginning to think of it. As if they were meetings we had planned in advance, rather than the unwelcome intrusions they were.
I hated admitting that I had begun looking forward to these meetings because it seemed like such a girly thing to do, and unlike me. Boys were rude and smelly and not worth the effort. Especially not around here where it seemed all the boys played football and drove pickups and went line-dancing on Friday nights. There was a meme going around on Twitter making fun of boys who drink tea and wear nice pajamas, but I would have honestly preferred that kind of boy to the ones we knew here.
“Why do so many boys think they have to be stereotypically masculine?” I asked Sam as we cleaned the ice machine. “Just once I would like to meet a man who’s brave enough to say, ‘I read a lot and don’t go out much, I don’t really care for sports, and I couldn’t care less if you’re stronger than me.’”
“Here, here!” said Sam with a smile. “I know I keep bringing up Jamal—I’m sorry, I just really love him, and if it gets to be too much, you can tell me to stop—but he’s never felt the need to flaunt his masculinity in front of me. He’s so at home in his own skin. I’ve gotten some really—well, vicious remarks from other girls…”
“Oh? What do they say?”
“Just calling him limp-wristed, and a pansy, and saying he wouldn’t be able to rescue me in the event of a fire. But you know what? That’s fine. If I was planning on being rescued from fires, I’d have dated a fireman. The fact that he’s willing to sit down for six hours or however long and watch Brideshead or Pride and Prejudice, even though he doesn’t particularly care for Jane Austen, means so much more to me. When I ask him to watch a costume drama, he doesn’t take it as a threat to his manhood.”
“He isn’t restricted by traditional male stereotypes.”
Sam turned and pointed the sponge at me, her eyes bright. “Exactly! He isn’t affected by all the social pressure to do ‘manly’ things to prove you’re a manly man. He’s just himself, and if he does something, it’s because he enjoys doing it. He doesn’t care whether it’s a boy thing or a girl thing. Living here, I honestly didn’t think I was going to find a guy like that. I feel very lucky.”
“You should.” I wasn’t going to say it aloud, but I sometimes worried she had found the only one. Every other boy who came into the store was either a redneck or a jock or a religious fanatic—sometimes all three. It had taken me years to realize the sort of boy I wanted to marry: cultured, intelligent, considerate, thoughtful. I had known a few boys like that in college, but not many here. I was in the wrong place to be looking for the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.
But it was a curious thing that as the morning wore on, I kept scanning the parking lot for any sign of Marshall’s car.
“Still no sign of him,” said Sam at around ten. “You think maybe he gave up?”
“No idea who you’re talking about.”
Sam laughed. “Well, anyway, I’d hate to lose him. He was always good for a laugh, and he had a habit of buying the most expensive drinks on the menu. I really hoped you could keep holding out on him indefinitely.”
Cheryl, who was busily gnawing the corner of a cheese Danish, looked up eagerly. “Is that man still bothering you? When he came in here on Monday morning, I knew there was something off about him. He had one of the darkest auras I’ve ever seen outside of a big city.”
“Is that so?” said Sam. “I seem to recall you liking him quite a bit.”
“He did give Joe that enormous sum of money,” I reminded her, somewhat defensively. “Nobody who’s that generous can be entirely bad.”
But Cheryl shook her head. “Sometimes evil wears a handsome face and comes preaching good news.”
Brian, who had been sitting quietly beside her finishing a glazed muffin, glanced up in annoyance. “If that remark was directed at me or the Church, I take offense. Religious people have been a tremendous force for good in this world. Did you know that regular church-goers are overwhelmingly more likely—”
“I don’t deny it,” said Cheryl quickly. “Whatever our differences, we both share a belief in a world outside the mundane, a world beyond what we can see and hear. Materialists whose minds are clouded by this reality, who deny the world of the spirit, they are the true enemy.”
Sam gave a loud and contemptuous snort, to which Cheryl responded with a look of indignation, and an argument would likely have broken out if Marshall hadn’t entered the room at that moment.
He was wearing a white and blue seersucker suit with a checkered tie and an odd smile on his face. Seating himself at the bar next to Cheryl, he ordered a venti iced Americano and an egg muffin to go.
“You mean you’re not going to stick around today?” asked Sam in a teasing voice. “Shame.”
“No, I don’t plan to stay long,” he replied, his eyes fixed on me. “I don’t think I need to.”
This wasn’t the same Marshall who had slunk away in defeat the day before. There was something different about him; he was confident and self-possessed in a way he hadn’t been previously. It made me nervous, like he knew something I didn’t. I felt a shiver of foreboding as I turned and began mixing his drink, aware that his eyes were still on me.
“So, what’s the game plan?” asked Sam. “Are you going to tie her up in a sack and take her home until she gives you her number?”
I turned to Sam, looking offended. “You’d try to stop him, wouldn’t you?”
Sam shrugged. “I’d do what I can.”
But Marshall, it transpired, had other plans. “No, I want to make a deal with you,” he said in a level voice. “And I think if you listen, you’ll be very interested in what I’m about to propose.”
“Well, you’ve got my attention,” said Sam.
And she wasn’t the only one. Cheryl and Brian and the rest of our customers were all turned facing Marshall, eyebrows slightly contracted. “Tell us your proposal,” said Cheryl eagerly.
“Be careful,” said Joe in his wheezy voice. “I’ve played against that man before, and I wouldn’t bet against him.”
But no one listened to Old Joe.
“What do you have in mind?” I asked Marshall.
“The deal is this,” said Marshall, loudly enough to be heard across the room. “I have here a deck of cards—a standard set of fifty-two, no tricks or gimmicks—and I want to challenge you to a game in which we compete to see who can draw the highest card. I’ll draw one, and you’ll draw one.”
“And what do you get if you win?” I asked.
“I get to take you on a date.”
“That figures. And what do I get if I win?”
“If you win,” he said slowly, apparently relishing the genius of his plan, “then I’ll go away and never darken the door of this bakery again.”
The brilliance of it was that he knew I couldn’t say no, not when I could banish him forever with the turn of a card. It was a risk, though. Instinctively, I turned and looked to Sam for guidance.
“I think it’s a great idea, personally,” she said. “You should go for it.”
“Yes, please,” said Brian, leaning forward with a look of excitement. “This I have to see.”
The rest of our customers chimed in their agreement—all except Cheryl, who sat shaking her head. “I warned you before, that man is up to no good. If you play, you play at your own risk.”
That settled it, then. Feeling oddly defiant and wanting to prove Cheryl wrong, I turned to Marshall and said, “I’ll do it.”
“Really?” He seemed surprised, like he hadn’t been expecting his plan to work.
I nodded. “But we’re only playing one round, no do-overs, and you have to promise me that if I win, you’ll go away and stop bothering me.”
Marshall smiled, an odd gleam of triumph in his eyes. Extending his hand, he said, “Deal.”
I shook his hand, my pulse racing, nervously wondering what I had just agreed to.
Silence fell for a moment as the room seemed to hold its breath, suspended. I glared through the kitchen window at the trees now green with spring as though imploring them to come and rescue me.
Gentleman that he was, he allowed me to draw first. Fearing some trick and not wanting to draw from the top of the pile, I removed a card from the bottom and turned it over. It was a queen of diamonds.
I held it up in one hand so the rest of the room could see, feeling relieved and a little disappointed.
Marshall, ever the showman, made a show of being nervous. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. This may be the last moment we ever spend together.”
“Shame!” said Sam again. She really seemed to have taken a liking to him.
The room fell silent again as Marshall reached for the deck. As the rest of us held our breaths, he slid a card out from the middle and placed it face-down on the counter, then slowly turned it over.
It was a king of spades.
Stunned and defeated, I threw myself down on the counter. Sam reached over and patted my shoulder reassuringly.
Marshall, knowing that he had won and presumably wanting to leave while the taste of victory was still fresh in his mouth, bowed and said, “I guess I’ll be seeing you Saturday,” then turned and left.
Old Joe waited until he had left before crowing, “I told you! I knew he was going to pull something, and I was right. I don’t know how he did it, but I know there was a trick somewhere. There had to have been.”
Sam, however, was more resigned. “Looks like we need to take you shopping,” she said, then returned to her sweeping.