this recipe?”
Well, no, of course not. Amber wasn’t surprised that the recipes didn’t turn out. She was ten. And she was guessing.
She sighed, looking for something that she could type up for this week. Here was one. “Spinach, Tomato, and Cheese Loaf”—that used two of the vegetables in the box. Amber started typing.
Two cups cooked, drained spinach. Okay.
Two and a quarter cups drained, canned tomatoes. Oops. No cans allowed. Make that, okay, three cups fresh, chopped tomatoes, because she really hated typing fractions.
One-quarter cup chili sauce. What was “chili sauce”? Amber typed, one cup catsup. No fractions, no chili sauce.
One-half pound grated hard cheese or crumbled feta. Wasn’t a half-pound an awful lot? Amber typed, one cup grated cheese.
One cup cracker crumbs. Okay.
Juice of one-half onion. What? How did you juice an onion? Amber wasn’t typing that. But her mom said she had onions for the box. Okay. That would work.
One chopped onion.
One-quarter teaspoon salt. No. Grammy said she had to watch her blood pressure, and she wasn’t eating salt. So no salt.
One-quarter teaspoon pepper. Okay. Pepper didn’t seem to have anything to do with blood pressure. But maybe she would add a little more, to make up for no salt. Several customers had complained that the recipes weren’t seasoned enough. Amber typed, one teaspoon pepper.
Then she typed up the baking directions.
There. One creative recipe done. Five more to go.
“The first recipe is Spinach, Tomato, and Cheese Loaf,” Amber said, struggling a little with the formatting.
“That sounds good, Sweetie,” Faith said, carefully wrapping the beets in bio-degradable plastic wrap and placing them in the bottom of the box she was packing. “We should try that one ourselves one night.”
Only if we follow the recipe in the cookbook, Amber thought. She didn’t know how the recipe would go wrong the way she did it, she only knew that it would. That’s what happened when you got too creative. You got a big mess. And she didn’t know any way to fix that.
As he’d promised he would, Marty called when he and Sharp Eddie arrived the next day. Hope’s other four uncles were already at the tables.
“Did you call Big Julie?” Marty asked now, as they headed into the casino. “What did he say?”
Hope had wondered if she’d recognize Marty and Eddie, if they’d recognize her, and what she’d feel when she saw them again. But when she met them in the lobby of the Golden Palace, it was almost like old times. Except for one thing.
“You’ve grown up, Little Hope,” Sharp Eddie had said. “Not so little any more.”
Hope had given them each a hug, she was so relieved that they’d come.
“I’m meeting him at two this afternoon,” she announced now, feeling happy and confident. “Thank you for setting up the meeting. Do you think he’ll let me play?”
“He’ll let you play,” Marty said. “He ain’t really got any options there. Come on, let’s get to the tables. We got some card playing to do.”
Hope followed Marty and Eddie into the card room, calling the other uncles from their high-stakes tables to the smaller-bet tables where Hope would relearn her game. Everyone settled in and bought some chips. The dealer brought out a new deck of cards.
Hope looked around the table at her uncles, men she hadn’t seen in a long time, professional card players who would revive her game and help her get the ranch back. They were the best. She couldn’t let them down.
The dealer dealt the cards. Hope took a deep breath. She couldn’t turn back now.
William Tanner Wingate, professional card player, consultant to federal law enforcement, and Tanner to his friends, was so startled by the scene in the Golden Palace card room that he stopped short, causing a waitress to bump into him and spill her drinks.
“Sorry,” he murmured, slipping her a red chip, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the table in the center of the room.
What was Marty the Sneak doing in Vegas? Marty came to Vegas only for poker tournaments, and there wasn’t a tournament going on—because if there was a tournament, Tanner would be playing in it.
And it wasn’t just Marty the Sneak. There was Sharp Eddie Toombs, Weary Blastell, Pete Wisniewski, Isaiah Rush, and Jim Thickpenny. The Jersey posse. And, even weirder than to see the Jersey boys all together at one table in Vegas when there wasn’t a tournament, was to see them sitting at the three-dollar table. If they went all-out, they could make a six-dollar bet.
Any one