The Privileges by Jonathan Dee Read Free Book Online

was born but they had no luck there at all; one took eighteen sick days in the first two months, and one was so out of it the doors of a city bus once closed with her on the outside and the children on board, though the other passengers had started yelling before the driver could pull away. And when the third one, whom they all loved, quit without notice to return to the Philippines, April was so upset that she’d come into their bed every night for two weeks. So Cynthia, who was down to part-time at work anyway, decided to try it herself for a while, because she just couldn’t put them through that anymore. Childhood was not supposed to be about loss. That was three years ago now.
    April came out of the kids’ bedroom after a while and leaned against her mother’s upper arm.
    “Still raining?” she said in a weary, grown-up voice. Cynthia nodded and laid her cheek on top of April’s head.
    “No playground today, sweet potato,” she said. “What shall we do instead?”
    April sighed thoughtfully. Her face was thinning, where her brother’s was still round as a ball, and she had her father’s small mouth and sharp eyes. She could read pretty well for her age and so Cynthia closed the
Vogue
she was looking at and laid it face down on the table.
    “Want to play Go Fish?” April said.
    Jonas got wind of it; April tried to discourage him from joining them by making up complex new rules, which wasn’t fair, and Cynthia said “of course he can play” just to forestall that awful whining note in their voices, the note that got in under her defenses and made her own voice turn scary. She could see it in their faces whenever this happened—they were like a mirror at her weakest moments—and then she would end up miserable after they had gone to bed, Adam rubbing her back with a pointlessness that only made things seem worse.
    Jonas’s hands were small and at one point he dropped his cards on the table. “That’s a nine!” April said.
    “No it’s not,” Jonas said as he gathered them up again.
    “I asked you if you had any nines and you said go fish!” she said hotly. “Mom!”
    “You did not,” Jonas said, “and anyway that’s a six. And it’s cheating to peek at other people’s cards, that’s what Mom said. Cheater.”
    “You dropped them right in front of me! And that
is
a nine, you’re looking at it upside down, here give it to me—”
    “No!”
    “Jesus, you’re an idiot!”
    That was two words she would get punished for, and Jonas looked eagerly at his mother, but a strange thing had happened: his mother was crying. The children withdrew into themselves, frightened, and Cynthia tried hard to stop frightening them, but it was not so easy.
    “Sorry,” she said to them.
    “It’s okay,” April said reflexively.
    “Yeah,” Jonas said—and then, fishing up from his kindergarten experience a sentence he’d been taught for the purpose of conflict resolution, but had never actually used, he said, “What game would
you
like to play?”
    When they were sweet like that you had to go with it right away, you had to do or say something, or else they’d really see you cry. So Cynthia said, “I want to play poker.”
    “Poker?” April said, wrinkling her nose for comic effect. She’d seen some mischief in her mother’s face, something that promised a return to form, and she tried to draw it out. “How do you play?”
    “Well, there’s a bunch of different ways, but I’ll teach you an easy one. Go get that big bowl of change off Daddy’s dresser.” She began shuffling and bridging, which the kids loved. Counting out equal stacks of pennies, dimes, nickels, and quarters killed a good amount of time, long enough for Cynthia to feel herself out of danger.
    She taught them to play five-card draw, and when they had the hang of it—one pair, two pair, three of a kind—she introduced the betting. She dealt out a hand, and Jonas, fanning out his cards, put his fist in the air and yelled