Baby Needs a New Pair of Shoes by Lauren Baratz-Logsted Read Free Book Online

taught you how to play blackjack, Lila would roll over in her grave, and then where would I be?”
    â€œWhere you are right now,” I could have answered, “alone.”
    Where my dad was right now, physically speaking, was a one-bedroom apartment in a section of Danbury just a cut above where Conchita and Rivera lived. As a professional gambler, Black Jack Sampson had enjoyed his good years (we’d once lived in a five-bedroom house even though we’d only needed two of them) and his bad years (like the last one). And, if we’re being totally honest here, he was right: my mother wouldn’t approve of his teaching me how to play blackjack. But, oh, did I want those Jimmy Choos…
    â€œYour mother might even come back to life just to kill me if I taught you how to play blackjack,” he said.
    He was probably right about that, too.
    I studied my dad, a man whose personality was too big to be contained by his present tiny circumstances.
    Black Jack Sampson had just turned seventy but had only just begun to look even close to sixty, his neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, tall frame and lean body, combined with the fact that he always wore a suit even in summer, making him look more like he belonged on a riverboat in the middle of an Elvis Presley movie rather than with the polyester bus crew going off to play the slots at Atlantic City. Black Jack had met my mother, a schoolteacher who loved her work almost as much as she loved him, at a voting rights rally back in 1965—Lila was rallying while Black Jack made book on the side on whether the act would pass—and it had been love at first sight. He was thirty at the time and she was twenty-eight, but it had been twelve long infertile years before they’d been able to conceive a baby, me, hence the huge age difference between me and my parents, and there had been no more babies afterward, try as they might. True, these days having first-time parents in their forties wasn’t a rarity, but, when I was little, my mother looked more like a grandmother by comparison to my friends’ mothers.
    Not that I’d minded.
    Growing up, I thought my mother was the greatest lady who ever lived, a belief I’d maintained until the day she’d died ten years ago. And my mother, in turn, had thought my dad was the greatest man who’d ever lived…except for his gambling.
    â€œBlackjack killed your mother,” he said.
    We’d had this conversation enough times over the years for me to know he wasn’t referring to himself when he said, “Blackjack killed your mother;” he was referring to the card game.
    â€œBlackjack did not kill Mom,” I said.
    How I missed my mother! She was the steady parent, the one who didn’t suffer obsessions that worked against her. In her absence, I’d become Daddy’s Girl. But what a daddy! From my dad, I’d learned to be the kind of woman who could sit with men while they watched sporting events but nothing about what it was like to be the kind of woman men would want to do more romantic things with. I’m not complaining here, by the way, just stating.
    â€œBlackjack did not kill Mom,” I said again. “Mom died of cancer.”
    â€œSame difference,” he sniffed.
    â€œNot really.”
    â€œThere was a time, when you were just a little baby, Baby, that I dreamed of you growing up to one day follow in my footsteps.”
    I had a mental flash of a younger version of my dad, holding baby me in his arms and crooning, “Lullaby, and good night, when the dealer has busted…”
    â€œWe would have made quite a team,” I said. “And we still could,” I added, thinking about what becoming great at blackjack could achieve for me: a pair of Jimmy Choos.
    â€œYou don’t understand,” he said. “I promised your mom right before she died that I’d make sure you lived a better life than we’d