Free A Handbook to Luck by Cristina Garcia

slavishly followed one weight-loss regimen after another, including the dreadful Riviera diet, which had him eating nothing but mussels for lunch.
    Now, instead of reminiscing about his triumphant tours of the Caribbean, Papi rhapsodized about fine cuts of aged sirloin, platters of
chicharrones,
the marvels of crème fraiche and tiramisu. Should Enrique be insensitive enough to order dessert in his presence, his father would accuse him of outright sabotage. Papi even started smoking to curb his hunger. Really, he was becoming an unreasonable man.
    â€œ
Coño carajo,
look at this,” Papi said, pointing to an article on page 26 of the
Las Vegas Review-Journal.
“Cuba’s new constitution enacted. Ha!”
    â€œCould you pass me the sugar bowl?” Enrique watched his father’s anger spike perilously.
    â€œÂ¡Qué desgracia!”
Papi looked as if he would split in two. Anything even mildly supportive of the Cuban Revolution had this effect on him. “Another hoax in the name of patriotism!”
    â€œRemember your blood pressure.” Enrique handed his father a glass of water and waited for the paroxysm to pass. “Besides, you need to stay calm. Ching Ling Foo never lost his temper.”
    Fernando’s grand plan—beyond the fading dream of a democratic Cuba—was to unveil his Chinese persona and svelte new physique this summer at the outdoor arena reserved for rock concerts. The climax of his act would be the recreation of Ching Ling Foo’s notorious bullet-catch trick, a feat so dangerous that it had killed fourteen magicians in the hundred years since its debut. The publicity from its revival, Papi hoped, would jump-start his career and put him back in the limelight, where he belonged.
    â€œCan you help me rehearse later?”
    â€œI’m meeting Professor Smedsted at four.” Enrique was being tutored by the math chair at the University of Nevada, who’d taken him under his wing. He finished buttoning his flannel shirt and gathered his books.
    Next fall he would be applying to colleges. He was on the honor roll but he had no real extracurricular activities to offer admissions committees. Enrique suspected that they would be less than impressed by his poker skills or a recommendation, however effusive, from the owner of the Diamond Pin Casino. Between school, his job, and watching out for his father, he didn’t have time for much else. Not even a girlfriend.
    Enrique dreamed of going east, to New York or Boston, somewhere far from the Las Vegas heat. He’d received brochures from MIT after he’d scored a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT. Enrique had taken the exam a year early, at Smedsted’s insistence, just to see how he would do. The casinos were also courting him. They knew they could get him cheap. They dangled a few hundred dollars here and there for consulting jobs: fine-tuning the odds in their slot machines, figuring out the systems of gamblers winning too consistently against the house.
    â€œMost of the Great Court Conjurer’s tricks are simple, deceptively simple, but nobody has seen them for many years,” Papi said, growing more animated. “Forget the empty pyrotechnics onstage nowadays. Audiences are so bewitched by second-rate magicians that they’ve forgotten the joys of simple wonder.”
    â€œI have to go now.”
    â€œOkay, give me a kiss.”
    Enrique hesitated.
    â€œ
¿Qué?
You’re too old to give your father a kiss?”
    â€œBye, Dad.”
    The building manager, Mr. Smite, was outside watering the patch of dead grass that passed for a lawn. A crow fussed in a stumpy palm tree. The Mermaid was no better or worse than most of the buildings around it, eyesores with peeling paint and gashes of rust, their every blemish illuminated by the sun. Mr. Smite had been married to a former showgirl, a bronzed angel of a woman (he kept a photograph of her in his pocket)