Page 109 of A Dead End Wedding

"I'd love to. How do I get there?"

You could cut the tension with one of the cheese spreaders littering the dingy green felt table. The big man in the black cowboy hat slowly raised his head and speared Emily with his gaze. I realized I was holding my breath and forced some out of my lungs.

Emily was a tall, cool drink of water. Not a bead of sweat on her forehead. Not a frown line in sight. She was Slow Hand Joe.

Cool Hand Luke.

Doc Holliday with a minivan.

She was ice, and the cowboy was going down.

Two hours of Texas Hold'em, and I'm talking like a B Western.

I covered my mouth with my hand and turned my laugh into a cough, but neither Emily nor Cowboy – known as Vernon, the used-car salesman during the day – even glanced at me.

Finally, he spoke. "You're bluffing, Psychic," he drawled. "I call your two and raise you three."

By now, I knew that the two and three he referred to were two and three hundred dollars, which seemed to me like an awful lot to rest on a bunch of playing cards. To Emily, though, it was a friendly nickel and dime game, since she was used to thousands and tens of thousands resting on the turn of a card. The Turn was an actual term of art, by the way. It's the fourth card that goes in the middle. And the Button. It's the disk that shows who would deal if there were no dealer.

And the lake. Er, I mean, the River. It's the last card that goes in the middle (community card) in Texas Hold'em. It's the one that lets you know who wins, pretty much.

Emily distracted me from my thoughts by sliding the rest of her chips to the center of the table. The two men who'd already folded whistled. Emily just smiled that demure, PTA-mom smile. "I'm all in, Cowboy."

"Damn!" he muttered. He glared at his cards, then considered Emily, then glared at his cards some more. He stood up and walked around the table, then sat down and shuffled his cards around in his hand, then glared at them a little longer. Emily just sat there, patiently waiting, not a hair out of place.

I had to sit on my hands to hold still. There had to be nearly two thousand dollars in the pot, if I were calculating the chips right.

Two grand would buy a lot of paint for my car. Maybe I need to figure out how to play poker. Although the drive over here in that lovely sports car didn't exactly make me eager to get the Honda back.

Finally, Cowboy curled his lip and threw his cards, face down, on the table in disgust. "It's all yours. I'm done for the night," he said.

As Emily reached out to collect her winnings, I leaned over to peek at the cards she'd placed on the table. She caught my hand before I could turn them over and smiled at me. "You have to pay to look at somebody's cards, December."

"But the hand is over. You won, right?" I was just curious.

Cowboy laughed, all signs of annoyance gone. "You never, ever look at another player's cards, rookie. If we let our opponents see our cards when they didn't pay to look, they could figure out our strategies."

One of the more cautious men at the table spoke up, patting his few strands of wispy white hair down over his mostly bald head. "That's right. How you bluff, how you bet, all the stuff that makes each poker player unique."

I nodded. It made total sense. "I get it. It would be like allowing opposing counsel to see my trial notes. They get all the facts, by reason of civil procedure. But if they know my strategy, I'm screwed. Same here. We all know what cards are in the deck. But you each play them very differently."

I looked at Emily and grinned. "Is the rookie catching on?"

She looked like a proud mama. "Definitely. Ready to try a hand of your own?"

A huge yawn escaped before I could catch it. "Oh, wow. I think I'd better give high-stakes poker a try when I'm not dead on my feet. Especially with you card sharks," I said, grinning at the man on my left, who didn't look a day over ninety.

He flashed a huge toothless grin at me. "Good thinking, cutie. If I was only twenty years younger?—"

"If you were twenty years younger, you'd still be old enough to be her grandpa," Cowboy boomed. Then everybody started laughing. I shook my head and stood up, still laughing, and Emily stood up, too.

"I'd better go. PTA bake sale in the morning, and my brownies still need frosted," she said, which stuck me as surreal considering the fact that she was matter-of-factly sliding a mound of chips in her purse. "I'll cash this in next time. Thanks, boys."

They all stood up. "Thanks, Psychic. We'll get you next time," said Grandpa.

She smiled at him and gently patted his cheek as we walked past. "You always do, Mr. Spicey. You always do."

As we walked away, I heard them talking about her. "I love that girl. She puts the 'sweet' back in poker," Cowboy said, not bothering to lower his voice.

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