That night we had Louis Armstrong on the record player and Daniel had bought a huge bag of Doritos, along with three different dips to keep everyone happy. We were maneuvering around the various chipped bowls and using the food to try and distract each other-it worked best on Justin, who lost his concentration completely if he thought you were about to get salsa on the mahogany. I had just wiped out Rafe head-to-head-on weak hands he messed around with the dips, if he had something good he shoveled Doritos straight into his mouth by the handful; never play poker with a detective-and I was busy gloating, when his phone rang. He tilted his chair backwards and grabbed the phone off one of the bookshelves.
“Hello,” he said, giving me the finger. Then his chair came down and his face changed; it froze over, into that haughty, unreadable mask he wore in college and around outsiders. “Dad,” he said.
Without an eyeblink, the others drew closer around him; you could feel it in the air, a tightening, a solidifying as they ranged themselves at his shoulders. I was next to him, and I got the full benefit of the bellow coming out of the phone: "… Job opened up… foot on the ladder… changed your mind…?”
Rafe’s nostrils twitched as if he had smelled something foul. “Not interested, ” he said.
The volume of the tirade made his eyes snap shut. I caught enough of it to gather that reading plays all day was for pansies and that someone called Brad-bury had a son who had just made his first million and that Rafe was generally a waste of oxygen. He held the phone between thumb and finger, inches from his ear.
“For God’s sake, hang up,” Justin whispered. His face was pulled into an unconscious, agonized grimace. “Just hang up on him.”
“He can’t,” Daniel said softly. “He should, obviously, but… Someday.”
Abby shrugged. “Well, then…” she said. She sent the cards arcing from hand to hand with a fast, sassy flourish and dealt, five hands. Daniel smiled across at her and pulled his chair up, ready.
The phone was still going strong; the word “arse” came up regularly, in what sounded like a wide variety of contexts. Rafe’s chin was tucked in like he was braced against gale-force wind. Justin touched his arm; his eyes flew open and he stared at us, reddening right up to his hairline.
The rest of us had already thrown in our stakes. I had a hand like a foot-a seven and a nine, not even suited-but I knew exactly what the others were doing. They were pulling Rafe back, and the thought of being part of that sent something intoxicating through me, something so fine it hurt. For a split second I thought of Rob hooking one foot around my ankle, under our desks, when O’Kelly was giving me a bollocking. I waved my cards at Rafe and mouthed, “Ante up.”
He blinked. I cocked one eyebrow, gave him my best cheeky Lexie grin and whispered, “Unless you’re scared I’ll kick your ass again.”
The frozen look dissolved, just a little. He checked his cards; then he put the phone down on the bookshelf beside him, carefully, and tossed ten pence into the middle. “Because I’m happy where I am,” he told the phone. His voice sounded almost normal, but that angry red flush was still covering his face.
Abby gave him a tiny smile, fanned three cards deftly on the table and flipped them over. “Lexie’s drawing to a straight,” said Justin, narrowing his eyes at me. “I know that look.”
The phone had apparently spent a lot of money on Rafe and wasn’t planning to see it flushed down the bog. “She’s not,” Daniel said. “She may have something, but not the makings of a straight. I call.”
I was nowhere near a straight, but that wasn’t the point; none of us were folding, not till Rafe hung up. The phone made a big statement about a Real Job. “In other words, a job in an office,” Rafe informed us. The rigidity was starting to go out of his spine. “Maybe even, someday, if I’m a team player and I think outside the box and work smarter not harder, an office with a window. Or am I aiming a little high?” he asked the phone. “What do you think?” He mimed See your one and raise you two, at Justin.
The phone-it obviously knew it was being insulted, even if it wasn’t sure exactly how-said something belligerent about ambition and how it was about bloody time Rafe grew up and started living in the real world.
“Ah,” Daniel said, glancing up from his stack. “Now that’s a concept that’s always fascinated me: the real world. Only a very specific subset of people use the term, have you noticed? To me, it seems self-evident that everyone lives in the real world-we all breathe real oxygen, eat real food, the earth under our feet feels equally solid to all of us. But clearly these people have a far more tightly circumscribed definition of reality, one that I find deeply mysterious, and an almost pathologically intense need to bring others into line with that definition.”
“It’s all jealousy,” Justin said, considering his cards and flipping two more coins into the middle. “Sour grapes.”
