but it was empty.
“Dad, why are you talking like this? What happened?”
As his focus dropped to the carpet, the empty smile collapsed.
“Alan turned me away at the Four Jacks. He said my reputation was . . .” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I begged him, Ellie. I told him how we’ve been living. How I’ve made you live. He . . .”
The words seemed to dry up. I reached out and took his hand. It was heavy, and the palm was leathery from years of handling coins and cards. It was a magician’s hand.
Dad let out a bitter laugh; it sounded nothing like him. “He offered to put me in touch with the producer of a reality show. He said our life would make good television.”
My mouth fell open. “Are you kidding?”
“No.”
“What did you say?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I almost punched him in the face. I walked out instead.”
“You should have punched him.”
Dad shrugged. “It’s not too late. We could go back.”
I smiled. He returned it and leaned back against the rickety bed frame.
“We have to do this, Dad. We have to go after Devereaux’s rig. It’s our only shot.”
He closed his eyes, set his jaw. “What if we’re caught?”
“Then we go to prison, and they feed us and give us meds.”
He shook his head. “I go to prison. You end up in foster care.”
“In which case, again, we both get food and meds.”
“Ellie, you need to take this seriously.”
“I am taking this seriously. I’ve got a week’s worth of pills left, and you’re next.” Dad’s face darkened. “We have no money, no transportation, nowhere to sleep. An old man ready to have a heart attack and a teenager on the verge of a breakdown. We are the worst candidates for homelessness I’ve ever heard of.
“I’ve thought about this, Dad. I’ve thought about it until my head feels like it’s going to pop. This is our only play. We have nothing left to lose.”
His eyes drifted out of focus, as if he were staring into the distance at something I couldn’t see.
“What if it goes wrong?” he whispered. “What if the truck drops, and I . . .”
Oh God. He wasn’t worried about the grift; he was worried about the show.
“Then you get paid five thousand dollars for humiliation you’ve already felt.” I took his hand again. “But if it goes right . . .”
For a moment, I thought he was going to cry, but when he spoke again, his voice was strong and clear.
“Then we give it all back.”
“Give what back?”
“All of it. The props. The money we’ve stolen.” He looked at me. “You’ve kept track?”
I nodded. “Every cent.”
He stood, crossed to the window, opened the drapes. I got up and joined him.
He was staring north, away from the Strip, toward old Vegas. I could just see the top of the California Hotel & Casino and the sparkling Golden Nugget sign. It was like a postcard.
“My father was an insurance-company actuary,” he said. “He assessed risk for a living.”
I watched him intently; my grandfather had died before I was born, and Dad talked about him even less often than he talked about my mother.
“The first time I ever flew in an airplane, he said, ‘Don’t be nervous. You’re two thousand times more likely to die on the way home from the airport.’ Needless to say, I nearly got sick in the taxi.”
I laughed. He smiled.
“Later that year, I told him that when I grew up, I was going to be a magician. I’ll never forget what he said. He got an expression on his face like he’d eaten a bad prune. ‘The odds are too high,’ he said. ‘You’ll never make it.’”
Dad’s face tightened, and suddenly I could see the ten-year-old he had been.
“That summer he put me to work at his company, filing. ‘A proper job,’ he called it. I hated him. I hated myself.”
He turned to me, his eyes shining, his mouth drawn downward.
“I never wanted that life for you, Ellie. Rules. Numbers. Closed doors. I wanted you to be free. To be whatever you wanted. And then, when you asked me to teach you magic . . .” His eyebrows drew together and he shook his head, struggling to speak through the emotion. “You had so much talent, right from the start. And all I could think was that you could do it. You could achieve what I failed to. I would make sure of it.” He turned away to face