Free Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

play.
    I tossed my hundred on the table as if I’d been tossing hundreds on blackjack tables all my life and felt a tingle inside as the dealer pushed twenty red chips back at me, valued at five dollars each. The table itself had a red sign on it, meaning it was a minimum five-dollar table. Red was my favorite color, despite that I hadn’t cared for any of the red Jimmy Choos, and I was feeling incredibly lucky.
    Let the games really begin.
    Apparently the last game had caused the supply of cards to go so low in the six-deck chute that the dealer needed to reshuffle, a dexterous display I really enjoyed, plus it delayed my moment of truth.
    â€œC’mon, c’mon,” Cigar Man muttered.
    I sniffed something unpleasant and realized that, underneath the Havana stench, Cigar Man was sweating like crazy. And when I looked over expecting to see a stack of chips in front of him at least as big as mine, I saw he had only one lonely red chip left.
    Apparently, red wasn’t his favorite color.
    When the dealer finished shuffling, he offered me the deck to cut. I knew, from my conversation with my dad, that as the newest player to a table, this might happen. But now that it was actually happening, I was unsure.
    â€œDo you want me to cut that into two piles,” I nervous-laughed, “or three? It is kind of a big stack…”
    â€œOh, Christ,” Cigar Man said, snapping his one chip back off the table as he heaved his bulk off of the seat, “I hate playing with pikers.”
    Well, at least with him gone, I could slip into that far-left seat, just like so…
    â€œYou can split the deck into as many piles as you’d like,” said this incredible voice in my ear, a voice good enough to blow Hall & Oates and Todd Rundgren off the stage at the Club BB King. “And while I really don’t mind your staying in my lap while I gamble, I do believe that two players gambling from one seat is kind of frowned upon around here.”
    â€œOh!” I reddened as I raised myself from the lap of the body that was connected to that amazing voice. “Sorry!”
    All I could think of that could have happened was that as I was sliding over from the left, he must have been sliding into the seat from the right and just got there before me.
    I cut the deck several times without counting, only looking to the side to check out the bearer of The Voice as the dealer began to deal.
    If Rivera were with me right then, I knew what she’d say. “Chica,” she’d say, “that guy is whack. ”
    At which point Conchita would probably slap her across the head. “What are you talking about, whack? That guy is more than just whack. He’s beyond whack.” At which point, I’d need to ask them to define whack for me again. Then I’d need to remind them that they were both lesbians, so why were they hornying in on my game anyway?
    And if my mother were here, my late mother, she’d have said the same thing she always said about my father: “He’s so dreamy.”
    And he was, he really was, with short blond hair, blue eyes and a strong jaw that made him look as if he’d just walked out of the pages of a Fitzgerald novel, not to mention he was wearing a tux that he wore like he owned, rather than rented it.
    Then Stella and Hillary would knock each other out trying to give him their phone numbers, leaving only Elizabeth Hepburn left to play the field and, given her track record, she’d probably slept with him at some point already.
    But since there was only me…
    â€œCome here often?” I asked, immediately wanting to slap myself in the head.
    â€œYes,” he said.
    The word yes is usually a positive thing; certainly it provides a more obvious conversational opening than a flatly dismissive no. But when I looked at him, I realized his yes just as well might have been a no, because his eyes were all on the cards, his gaze shifting around the