one of these dinners when we were lingering late over dessert—talking about school, about all sorts of things (this new, involved dad! where had he come from?)—“you know, I really have enjoyed getting to know you since you’ve been out here, Theo.”
“Well, uh, yeah, me too,” I said, embarrassed but also meaning it.
“I mean—” my dad ran a hand through his hair—“thanks for giving me a second chance, kiddo. Because I made a huge mistake. I never should have let my relationship with your mother get in the way of my relationship with you. No, no,” he said, raising his hand, “I’m not blaming anything on your mom, I’m way past that. It’s just that she loved you so much, I always felt like kind of an interloper with you guys. Stranger-in-my-own-house kind of thing. You two were so close—” he laughed, sadly—“there wasn’t much room for three.”
“Well—” My mother and I tiptoeing around the apartment, whispering, trying to avoid him. Secrets, laughter. “I mean, I just—”
“No, no, I’m not asking you to apologize. I’m the dad, I’m the one who should have known better. It’s just that it got to be a kind of vicious circle if you know what I mean. Me feeling alienated, bummed-out, drinking a lot. And I never should have let that happen. I missed, like, some really important years in your life. I’m the one that has to live with that.”
“Um—” I felt so bad I didn’t know what to say.
“Not trying to put you on the spot, pal. Just saying I’m glad that we’re friends now.”
“Well yeah,” I said, staring into my scraped-clean crème brûlée plate, “me too.”
“And, I mean—I want to make it up to you. See, I’m doing so well on the sports book this year—” my dad took a sip of his coffee—“I want to open you a savings account. You know, just put a little something aside. Because, you know, I really didn’t do right by you as far as your mom, you know, and all those months that I was gone.”
“Dad,” I said, disconcerted. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Oh, but I want to! You have a Social Security number, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I’ve already got ten thousand set aside. That’s a good start. If you think about it when we get home, give me your Social and next time I drop by the bank, I’ll open an account in your name, okay?”
vi.
APART FROM SCHOOL, I’D hardly seen Boris, except for a Saturday afternoon trip when my dad had taken us in to the Carnegie Deli at the Mirage for sable and bialys. But then, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, he came thumping upstairs when I wasn’t expecting him and said: “Your dad has been having a bad run, did you know that?”
I put down Silas Marner, which we were reading for school. “What?”
“Well, he’s been playing at two hundred dollar tables—two hundred dollars a pop,” he said. “You can lose a thousand in five minutes, easy.”
“A thousand dollars is nothing for him,” I said; and then, when Boris did not reply: “How much did he say he lost?”
“Didn’t say,” said Boris. “But a lot.”
“Are you sure he wasn’t just bullshitting you?”
Boris laughed. “Could be,” he said, sitting on the bed and leaning back on his elbows. “You don’t know anything about it?”
“Well—” As far as I knew, my father had cleaned up when the Bills had won the week before. “I don’t see how he can be doing too bad. He’s been taking me to Bouchon and places like that.”
“Yes, but maybe is good reason for that,” said Boris sagely.
“Reason? What reason?”
Boris seemed about to say something, then changed his mind.
“Well, who knows,” he said, lighting a cigarette and taking a sharp drag. “Your dad—he’s part Russian.”
“Right,” I said, reaching for the cigarette myself. I’d often heard Boris and my father, in their arm-waving “intellectual talks,” discussing the many celebrated gamblers in Russian history: Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, other names I didn’t know.
“Well—very Russian, you know, to complain how bad things are all the time! Even if life is great—keep it to yourself. You don’t want to tempt the devil.” He was wearing a discarded dress shirt of my father’s, washed nearly transparent and so big that it billowed on him like some item of Arab or Hindu costume. “Only, your dad, sometimes is hard to tell between joking and serious.” Then, watching me carefully: “What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.”
“He knows we talk. That’s why he told me. He wouldn’t tell