Free The Fundamentals of Play by Caitlin Macy Page B

pass.
    “I’d be happy to,” Kate said. “What’s his number?” and her eye got that prankster’s glint in it. “Chattie, let me go!” She was on her feet. “Come now, George, give me his phone number.”
    “Crank call?” Chat inquired merrily.
    “It’s all right, Kate,” I said, knowing she would ignore me. “He’s not
that
bad.” She got the number from information and made a pouting face when Daniels failed to pick up. I saw my livelihood snatched away as Kate began to leave her message: “Hi, this is Annie Roth and I met you about a week ago? At that Fordyce party? It was
great
talking to you and I’d love to, you know, finish what we started.I don’t know what your schedule’s like—I hear you’re a total slave driver—but please give me a call as soon as you can.”
    “Annie’s going to
kill
you!” cried Chat. I made a weak effort to keep up, laughing hollowly. And yet I wasn’t sorry she had made the call. I thought of Daniels coming home to the blinking light, playing his messages, racking his addled brain, but though I projected the most personal kind of sympathy onto the man, I began to glow with a strange kind of gladness, with the leaping us-against-them superiority of being in on a joke.
    “See, George?” Kate joined us at the table. “I put my money where my mouth is, didn’t I?”
    “I hope you washed it first!” Chat said, and cracked himself up. “Money’s dirty, you know.”
    Hearts was still our game, and Kate played the quick, sure game I remembered from Chatham—she sat right up at the living room table, back straight, feet on the floor, and threw the cards down with a snap. She played each hand hard, to win, but she wouldn’t stop to think, and when she lost, it was from careless mistakes. Beside her, Chat was cold and methodical, inexorably sipping his drink; and across the table from them, I did all right. My problem was that I hedged my bets too much (I don’t mean literally; there is, of course, no betting in hearts), but I felt rusty after Paris and wouldn’t shoot the moon for fear I would fail and embarrass myself.
    So the three of us were evenly matched—too evenly matched, perhaps: I found myself thinking we could have used someone or something to shake up the game. As it turned out, though, I was the one to do it. After a couple of hands, I ducked a trick full of hearts and made the mistake of attributing the move to a classic Nick Beale strategy I had learned to imitate long ago.
    “Nicko all the way, baby!” I shouted, tallying up the scores.
    “That
is
Nicko’s move,” Kate said slowly as if to herself. “He always holds the queen and the ace, but I get rid of them as fast as I can.”
    The present tense threw me, and I took it to mean she had seenNick recently. “Where is Nick now?” I asked, shuffling the deck. “Does he ever come through town?”
    Chat took a slow sip of his gin. “This could use another lime, Kate,” he said.
    Kate looked up brightly. “Could it? I’ll get you one. Don’t get up—let me get you one.”
    She rose from the table and I shuffled the cards feeling I had made a blunder of some kind, and disliking that feeling with friends. “Does he ever come through town?” I repeated.
    “George, have you ever heard of making polite conversation?” inquired Chat.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, surprised by his tone, as he had never taken it with me before.
    “There are certain things you don’t want to go dredging up.” He had pushed his chair back from the table as if to give me a little talking-to, and crossed his legs at the knee, the way some men won’t.
    “Of course not,” I agreed. “But—”
    “When she talks about him that way,” Chat instructed, checking my protest, “it’s not a good sign, all right? It’s not something you want to dwell on. Her doctor thinks—”
    “Her
doctor
?” I interrupted.
    “Look, she’s over it now,” Chat said dismissively, lowering his voice with a glance toward