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Show Blue Run/65 keep it steady while they sipped champagne and scribbled on scratch sheets, divining longshots, tri-fectas and daily-double combos. He can be gentle that way when he likes. To be sure, my husband-O.W -was the most luckless gambler I've met. He couldn't pick a horse if it walked up and bit him on the butt, but he was persistent, give him that, he kept trying He'd lose a week's paycheck in a day, then pawn his 30 ought-six. Then he'd lose the next week's pay and kite a check for in-between money. Of course, when I got wind of what he was doing, when we damn near got evicted from the our run-down mansion, I raised Cain We had a real fight then, all that open interior space for a battlefield; we've both got tempers. I could've killed him, but then the Greyhound tickets came through O W. brought them home in a white envelope with a loose yellow rose. "I'll stay here and work to catch us up," he said, a fingernail cut oozing a little down his jawline. "You three have fun." Two twenties and a ten were tucked inside. "Where'd this come from?" "Hove you," he said. O.W touched my eye "It won't happen again " All my life, I've believed. Dee's niece, Juanita, had been burned terribly as a young girl in a house fire, but she'd grown up fine and become a city planner in L.A., which seemed helter-skelter as any place could ever be. She was a riot, Juanita, picking us up at the downtown station, the traffic out of this world, driving with nubs at the ends of her arms, chainsmoking, punching the radio buttons from Merle Haggard to Miles Davis to the weather. "When's this fucking high pressure gonna break," she said with this big horsey laugh and real smile "How about Chinese?" Jimmy'd started to stutter by then, his chin locking into that hard cramp, the words all choked |
