It was ten at night and the eastbound 10 was empty.
It wasn’t light. It was empty. Four lanes of clean dark concrete ran out ahead of the Corolla’s headlights, and downtown slid by on the left like somebody had rented it for a car commercial and forgotten to invite the other cars.
Nate had been driving with both hands on the wheel since the on-ramp. He checked his mirrors, one after the other, for the third time.
“This doesn’t happen,” he said.
Joy wasn’t paying attention. She was busy with something on her phone. Nate glanced over and frowned.
“We’re witnessing a traffic miracle, and you’re playing that stupid game!”
“Stupid as it may be, I’ve almost got enough for another pull!” Joy said. This was accompanied by Chubbins’s trademark grunt as he body-slammed an enemy with a cartoon boing.
“Aaaand there we go!”
Nate rolled his eyes.
“And that gets me my stardust. Time to let it ride!”
She hit the summon button and felt herself light up in a way that typically took a needle and a rubber band to achieve. She sucked in a breath. Then, a moment later:
“God dammit!”
“No fox-girl?”
“Nope, screwed again.”
Nate gave her another glance. Joy was aware that she was still lit up, and that her smile had only just started to fade.
“Anyhow, like I was saying, it’s the 10. On a Saturday. I have driven this freeway since I was sixteen and this is the first time I’ve actually been able to see the asphalt.” He frowned at an overpass as though the traffic might be hiding behind it. “Every light on Wilshire was green, too. I counted. Eleven.”
“So what you’re saying is you stole all my gacha luck?”
“Maybe.” He didn’t take his eyes off the road. “If I were you, I’d be hoping all your luck is getting saved up for where we’re going.”
Joy thought about that, and then about her misadventures over the previous few weeks, and once again decided this was going in the “deal with this later” pile. She knew she had a few things in there that were going to start becoming a problem if she kept dealing with them later. She looked at the text she’d gotten from her mom a couple of hours ago and groaned internally. That one was pushing its way toward the front of the line.
She had her seat pushed all the way back and the envelope zipped into the inside pocket of her jacket, where she could feel it every time she breathed. In her other pocket was a granola bar she wasn’t allowed to touch until she was out of the car. She had made to open it right after they started moving, and the look she got from Nate had made her slowly put it back. The Corolla was one of the few things Nate was not chill about.
She’d asked Keiko what a person was supposed to wear to a secret mahjong game. Keiko had said “something you can run in.” Joy had assumed that was a joke. She hoped it was a joke.
“I hope the people are nice. Some of the guys at that poker game I’ve been going to are pretty weird,” she said, distinctly picturing Vic leering at her.
“I mean, it’s an illegal gambling ring. I kind of doubt most of the people there are going to need to go home early because they need to bake cookies for church tomorrow.”
“Wait, you get cookies in church?”
“Not really my point. And it’s not too late to back out.”
Joy gave him the most shit-eating grin she could muster.
“Aw, are you worried about me?”
“I’m always worried about you. You were a moron before you transformed, and now you’re a reckless moron.”
Joy nodded.
“Fair.” Then, to make Nate’s point: “Wonder if the food is any good there.”
She looked the place up. Eight Immortals Chinese Restaurant, on Valley Boulevard. Three and a half stars. The top review said the har gow were excellent and that the lady at the front had yelled at the reviewer’s husband. It closed at nine.
“Aw, bet the kitchen is closed.”
“You probably have bigger things to worry about,” Nate said. “And if we get out of this alive, you can buy us In-N-Out on the way back.”
Eight Immortals appeared to have been, in its past life, a Taco Bell. It was completely dark, and if Joy squinted, she could make out a jolly man in a scholar’s robe holding a bowl of noodles on the sign. The parking lot was dark too. Even the lights that should have been lighting up the lot all seemed to be out, save for one toward the edge that sat there glowing alone.
There wasn’t a single car in the lot.
Nate looked at the lot. Then he looked at Joy.
Ordinarily Joy wouldn’t have gone anywhere near a place this sketchy even if she didn’t know that it was full of criminal gamblers.
“Looks legit!” she said cheerfully.
“Yeah. More like it looks like we won’t be getting our In-N-Out tonight,” he said as he parked.
Joy got out, decided that the odds of her being able to get sweet and sour pork had grown exceedingly low, and scarfed down her granola bar.
Through the front windows the dining room was all shadows and upended chairs. The only light came from a TV over the register and from a fish tank along the back wall, where a single silver fish the size of an arm hung in the water and watched them with a fishy frown.
The door opened before Joy could knock.
Dana still looked like she’d walked out of a black-and-white movie. Tonight it looked like the last reel. She had a long dark coat on and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and when her eyes met Joy’s there was the spark again, the faint one, like static off a doorknob.
Then her eyes went to Nate.
“Who’s this?”
“Nate,” said Joy.
“I’m her ride,” Nate said, looking like he was trying not to say something.
Dana considered him for a moment. “He can come down. He sits where they put him and he keeps his mouth shut.”
“Down?” Nate asked, but Joy shushed him.
Dana didn’t smile. She locked the door behind them and stood there with her hand on the bolt for a second longer than it needed.
“You brought it?”
Joy patted her jacket.
“More than a thousand?”
“Oh yeah! Every dollar I have!”
Dana closed her eyes briefly, the way people did when Joy answered a question exactly the way they’d been afraid she would.
“Look, I know I’m the one who invited you,” she said. “But I need to warn you now, this isn’t like Ray’s poker night. There are people down there who can do very bad things to you if you’re not careful.”
“Are they going to tell me I have a, and I quote, ‘sweet ass,’ like Vic does?”
“No, but…”
“Well then we’re already one step ahead!” Joy said cheerfully, walking past Dana and then realizing she had no idea where she was supposed to go. If there was gambling going on up here, they were being very quiet about it.
She looked back at Dana. Dana sighed and Nate pinched the bridge of his nose.
She led them back between the tables. Over the register the TV was playing to nobody, with the sound off and the captions on. ALL NEW SEASON, it said, over a shot of a stadium kitchen full of smoke and spotlights. KITCHEN COLOSSEUM. THIS WINTER, A NEW CHAMPION ENTERS THE ARENA. A man in chef’s whites stood with his arms folded, not smiling. CHEF SUN. LE ROI SOLEIL, LAS VEGAS. He picked up a cleaver, split a whole coconut in one stroke without looking at it, and went back to not smiling.
“Oh, I’d watch that,” said Joy.
“You play phone games. You’re not exactly a tastemaker,” Nate replied.
The kitchen was dim and smelled like ginger and bleach. A row of ducks hung in a glass case. A cook was asleep on a stack of rice sacks with a newspaper over his face. Dana went past all of it to a door at the back marked STORAGE, with a line of Chinese characters underneath that went on a lot longer than the word storage should have needed, and opened it onto a staircase going down.
Joy gave up counting the steps somewhere after sixty. Nate didn’t.
“Ninety-four,” he said at the bottom, mostly to himself. “The building has one floor.”
Then Dana pushed open the last door, and the sound hit them.
It was like a hailstorm on concrete. Hundreds of tiles were clacking and scraping and slamming down all at once, under a roar of voices, none of which were in English.
Daniel had worked at a Taco Bell as a teenager, and Joy was pretty certain it hadn’t had any underground storage. It definitely hadn’t had this.
It looked like the inside of some sort of Chinese palace. Red pillars as big around as redwoods went up into a haze of cigarette smoke, each one wrapped in a carved golden dragon, and between them hung hundreds of paper lanterns and neon signs buzzing pink and green. There were forty tables, maybe fifty. There were grandmothers in sun visors, and men in undershirts, and a table of guys in very good suits, and somebody’s kid doing homework on an upturned crate. A little stream ran across the middle of the floor with orange fish in it, and over the stream there was a little red bridge.
“There’s a river,” Nate said faintly.
“I don’t think we’re in Taco Bell anymore,” Joy said, staring at one of the fish. It stared back.
Along the far wall, three men stood in a row with their arms folded. Each of them was wearing a suit and a wicker hat the size of a patio umbrella, and holding a spear topped with a blade the size of Joy’s forearm. They weren’t doing anything. Nobody seemed to notice or care about their presence.
By the foot of the stairs, where a normal restaurant would have hung its health inspection grade, there was a big laminated chart of the human body, the kind with all the organs drawn in and labeled in two languages. Somebody had written a number next to each one in red marker.
“This is not some Chinese place,” Nate said.
“Well, it’s definitely a Chinese place.”
The woman who ran the floor was called Auntie Lau, by everybody, including people who were clearly older than she was. She sat in a little booth at the near end of the bridge. She was somewhere past seventy, in a quilted vest, with a perm like a helmet and glasses on a beaded chain, and she counted Joy’s envelope by running her thumb down the edge of the stack once.
“You’ve played before?”
“All week!” Joy said with a smile that looked a lot more confident than she felt.
Auntie Lau looked at her over the glasses for long enough that Joy began to wonder whether she had committed some sort of faux pas. Then she slid a rack of chips across the counter.
“Table nine. You sit down, you finish the round. Four hands. Nobody leaves in the middle, nobody comes in in the middle.” Her eyes moved to Nate. “Boyfriend sits behind.”
“He’s my ride.”
“Your ride sits behind. No talking. No pointing. No coughing. He coughs, you forfeit the hand.”
“What if I actually need to cough?” said Nate.
“No coughing.”
Joy decided she liked Auntie Lau.
They were halfway across the bridge when Dana stopped walking.
There was a table by itself on the far bank, under a shrine piled with oranges, and at it sat the oldest man Joy had ever seen. He was tiny, in a wheelchair, with a blanket over his knees and a teacup in front of him, and his fingernails were as long as the fingers they were attached to. Everybody who passed his table dipped their head. Even the guys in the suits. Even, Joy noticed, Dana.
“Mr. Lo,” said Dana. “This is the girl.”
The old man turned his chair. It took him a while. Then he looked up at Joy, and for a moment longer than was strictly polite he looked straight into her eyes.
“Ah,” he said softly, as if she had answered a question.
Then he smiled and inclined his head.
“Miss Lockheed. You honor my house. Have you eaten?”
His voice was as thin as paper, and his English was the kind people used to learn out of very old books.
“A granola bar,” said Joy. “He’s hoping for chow fun.”
“I regret that the kitchen is closed.” Mr. Lo sounded as if he truly did. “Later, perhaps, if the evening goes well. But since it is your first time, I must tell you how things are done here. It is very simple. In my house, a debt is a sacred thing. In all my years I have never failed to collect what was owed to me.” He lifted one long finger. “And I have never once collected a penny more. You will find that I am a fair man, Miss Lockheed. It is the worst thing anyone has ever been able to say about me.”
“That’s… good to know?”
“It is,” Mr. Lo agreed. He smiled wider, and for an instant it looked like there was a light behind his eyes. Not the sparkling, gem-like light hers and Yin’s had, but something that made her very much want to stop talking to Mr. Lo.
“Play well,” said Mr. Lo, and turned back to his tea.
Nate waited until they were off the bridge.
“He knew your name.”
“Dana probably told him.”
“His eyes lit up.”
“Lots of guys’ eyes light up when they talk to me.”
“Dude…”
Table nine had two people at it and two empty chairs. Dana took one of the chairs.
“You’re playing?”
“House needs a fourth.” Dana started stacking chips without looking at them. “Mrs. Cheung. Uncle Wing.”
Mrs. Cheung was a tiny old lady in a pink sun visor and a jade bangle, with a fanny pack turned around to the front like a holster. Uncle Wing was a man whose hair seemed to have migrated from his head to his forearms, with a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He looked up when Joy sat down. He took in the blonde hair, the pink hoodie, and the grin, and went back to his tea with the quiet contentment of a man who had just been handed money.
Joy didn’t mind. She’d specifically gone out and bought an oversized pink hoodie just for this reason. Looking like this bought you about four hands of being underestimated, and she’d been planning to spend every one of them.
Somebody put a stool behind her left shoulder. Nate sat on it. She could feel him not coughing.
Then Mrs. Cheung tipped the tiles out onto the felt, and the first problem arrived, which was that Joy had never actually touched one.
They were bigger than she’d expected, as heavy as bars of soap, white on the front and green on the back. All four of them were supposed to put their hands flat on the pile and swirl. Then everybody built a wall, two tiles high and a lot of tiles long. In Nate’s game there had been a button for this. Mrs. Cheung’s wall went up in about four seconds, with a sound like a zipper. Joy’s came out looking like a road in an earthquake, and Mrs. Cheung reached over and straightened it with two knuckles, without looking, the way you’d fix a child’s collar.
The deal went around. Joy stood her tiles up and started sorting.
It was a beautiful hand. She could tell before she’d finished: middle numbers, nearly all of it, already clumping together into runs. The only thing wrong with it was one tile on the end that she’d never seen before in her life. It had a little red plum blossom on it and the number one in the corner. She looked for a suit to put it in. There wasn’t one.
Mrs. Cheung clicked her tongue. She reached across, turned the plum blossom face up on the felt next to Joy’s hand, and pointed at the far end of the wall. Joy took a tile from there.
A bonus tile, then. Like a dora, probably. That was fine.
Behind her, Nate’s stool creaked, and she heard a sharp intake of breath.
They played. Everybody else threw their discards into the middle of the table in a heap. Joy lined hers up in front of her in a neat row, six across, the way the game did it. Mrs. Cheung looked at the row. She looked at it for some time.
Six draws later Joy was one tile away.
She took a chip off her stack, set it out in the middle, and turned her discard sideways.
“Riichi!”
Table nine went quiet. It was a small island of quiet in a very loud room. Uncle Wing’s toothpick stopped moving. Mrs. Cheung said something in Cantonese that went up at the end. Dana looked at her with actual surprise, and a moment later, Joy realized, not the good kind.
Auntie Lau was simply there, the way a cat is simply on a counter.
“What’s that?”
“Riichi?” said Joy, suddenly feeling like the coyote that had run off the edge of the cliff and was now waiting for gravity to do its thing.
“What’s it for?”
“I’m one tile away, so I’m betting on myself. It’s a thousand points. I didn’t know what a thousand points was in chips, so I guessed.”
Auntie Lau looked at the chip, and at the sideways tile, and at Joy.
“You’re telling the whole table you need one tile.”
“…Yes?”
“On purpose.”
“It’s worth more if I win!”
Auntie Lau said something to Mrs. Cheung. Mrs. Cheung said something back, and Uncle Wing made a small noise into his tea.
“Take your chip back,” said Auntie Lau. “Nobody here pays you extra for telling them your business.”
Joy took her chip back with a sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong, though she didn’t know what yet.
Nobody threw her tile after that. Nobody threw anything within a mile of her tile. Four turns later Uncle Wing drew a tile off the wall, grunted “Sik,” and laid his hand down. It didn’t look like much to Joy. It was all three-of-a-kinds, with no runs in it at all, and privately she thought he’d gotten lucky. Everybody paid him. Joy paid him sixty dollars, because that was what Auntie Lau told her to pay him.
Behind her, very quietly, Nate’s breathing had started to sound a little shaky.
The second hand came in even better than the first.
She got another flower, flipped it up and drew her replacement like she’d been doing it all her life, and by the fifth turn she was one away again. This time she kept it to herself. She sat very still, and thought about nothing, and on the seventh turn Mrs. Cheung threw the five of dots.
“Ron!” said Joy, and tipped her tiles over.
Mrs. Cheung leaned in. She counted Joy’s sets with one fingernail: one, two, three, four, and the pair. Then she sat back.
“Gai wu,” she said. It was the voice you’d use on a dog that had proudly brought you one of your own shoes.
“Chicken hand,” said Auntie Lau, who was there again.
“Is that good?”
“No faan.”
“No what?”
“Faan. You don’t have any.”
“It’s all simples!” Joy pointed. “No ones, no nines, no winds, no dragons. That’s a yaku!”
“That’s a what?”
“A… the scoring thing. The pattern. You have to have one to win.”
“You have to have three to win. Three faan. That’s the minimum. You have four sets, a pair, and a chicken.” Auntie Lau held up three fingers, then pointed them one at a time at Mrs. Cheung, Uncle Wing, and Dana. “False win. You pay everybody the limit.”
“The limit of what?”
It turned out to be four hundred dollars. Each.
It took Auntie Lau about as long to count twelve hundred dollars out of Joy’s rack as it had taken her to count the envelope in.
Joy watched it go. So this house didn’t allow riichi, and it wanted three of something Nate’s game had only ever asked her for one of. The sinking feeling was turning into mild dread.
She twisted around on her chair.
Nate was the color of the tiles. He had his lips pressed together so hard they’d disappeared, and he was staring at the flower tile lying face up at the edge of the felt as though it had just told him something terrible. He opened his mouth.
“No talking,” said Auntie Lau, without turning around.
For the third hand Joy had six hundred and twenty dollars and a new plan, which was to collect things that sounded like they were worth something.
Dragons sounded like they were worth something. She ended up with three red ones and a great deal of bamboo, and by the middle of the hand she was waiting on either the four of bamboo or the seven.
Uncle Wing threw the four.
And there, third from the left in her own tidy little row, sat the seven of bamboo she’d thrown away on her second turn.
Furiten. People forget furiten all the time, Nate had said. Don’t forget furiten.
Joy sat on her hands and let the four go by, and felt extremely good about it. It was the first thing she’d done right all night.
Two turns later Dana drew her own winning tile, said “Sik” as if she were apologizing for it, and collected forty dollars from each of them.
Joy tipped her hand forward so the table could see. They seemed like people who would appreciate it.
“I was waiting on that four,” she told them. “But I’d already thrown the seven. So, you know.” She tapped her row. “Furiten.”
Mrs. Cheung looked at Joy’s hand. She looked at the four of bamboo lying in the heap. She looked at Joy. Then she said one short sentence to Uncle Wing, and Uncle Wing laughed for the first time all night. It was a single syllable. “Ha.”
“What?”
“She says you had it,” said Auntie Lau. “He threw your tile and you sat there.”
“I couldn’t take it. I was furiten.”
“You were what?”
“It’s a Japanese rule,” said a voice behind her. “They don’t play it here. I’m afraid they don’t play any of them here.”
Joy felt it before she saw it.
She couldn’t have described it if she’d tried, except that it was like the prickle you get up your back when you know somebody you can’t see is watching. But this was bigger. Much bigger. Normally Joy would have played it cool, but she felt almost physically compelled to turn and face the new arrival.
“Ah, ah. No tal…” Auntie Lau began, and didn’t finish.
The man standing behind Nate’s stool was the best-looking man Joy had ever seen. He was tall, in a dark suit with no tie, with features that looked like a team of designers had spent a lot of money to get just right. All around table nine, things were happening. Mrs. Cheung had taken off her visor and was fixing her perm. Auntie Lau, who had not smiled at anything all night, was smiling. Even Uncle Wing smoothed what little hair he had with a palm.
His eyes were emerald green.
Joy felt the spark the moment theirs met. They seemed to glow with a faint inner light, just like Yin’s, just like hers.
Dana had gone completely still and was looking at her tiles.
He smiled at Joy, and Joy realized she was smiling back.
“You’re playing riichi mahjong,” the man said. It was a wonderful voice, warm and gentle, but with a certain strength and authority to it Joy couldn’t quite place. “Japanese rules. It’s a lovely game. Everyone else in this room is playing Hong Kong old style, and has been since before your grandparents were born. Three faan to win. No riichi, no dora, no furiten.” He nodded at a flower tile lying face up by Mrs. Cheung’s elbow. “And those aren’t decoration.”
Joy managed to tear her mind away from his jawline for a moment and think about what he’d just said. Then she turned around on her chair again, all the way, until she was looking at Nate.
“It’s a Japanese game,” Nate said. His voice had gone somewhere very high and quiet. “The MMO. The whole thing is Japanese. The minigame just said mahjong. It never said which…” He stopped. “I have four thousand hands.”
“You’re ranked.”
“I’m ranked in a different game.”
“No talking,” said Auntie Lau.
“He’s talking,” said Nate, jerking a thumb at the man behind him without looking at him. Nate was not a fan of anybody who flouted the rules.
Auntie Lau thought it over. “One minute,” she allowed, and went back to smiling at the man in the suit.
Joy did her best not to look at him again, and instead looked at Nate. She looked at her tidy row of discards, and at the chip she’d tried to bet on herself with, and at the place on the felt where twelve hundred dollars had been. She had spent a week on it. She had stayed up until two in the morning. She had learned furiten.
She started to laugh.
It got away from her fast. She put a hand over her mouth as if that’d help, but it came anyhow.
“I learned the wrong game!” she said through her fingers. “Nate! I’m so good at the wrong game!”
“This isn’t funny!” Nate’s face was a mixture of anger and panic.
“It’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me!”
When she came up for air, wiping her eyes, the man in the suit was watching her with a very slight crease between his perfect eyebrows. He’d been expecting something, and that hadn’t been it. The crease was gone almost before she’d spotted it.
“You’re taking it well,” he said.
“I chased a tree with a chainsaw last week. My bar’s pretty high.” She stuck out her hand. “Joy.”
“I know.” He took it. His hand was warm and dry and held on for exactly long enough. He told her his name. It was a good name, one as handsome as the man wearing it, and Joy, who had called Keiko “Kiki” for the first six months she’d known her, forgot it before he’d finished saying it.
“And you’re a friend of Dana’s?” she asked.
“Dana and I go back.” He said it pleasantly. Dana still hadn’t looked up.
“Uh huh,” Joy said dubiously. “So what’s a faan?”
That was all the invitation he needed. He came around and crouched beside her chair, close enough that she could smell his cologne, which was also very good, and started laying it out on the felt with one finger. A faan was a double. All triplets, like Uncle Wing’s first hand, was three. One suit plus winds and dragons was three. One suit and nothing else was seven. Dragons were one apiece. He was a good explainer, patient and clear, and for about thirty seconds it was honestly helpful.
Then he kept going.
“Strictly speaking, it isn’t ‘Cantonese’ mahjong, although you’ll hear people call it that. It’s imprecise. There’s old style and there’s new style, and new style adds an entire secondary table of patterns which, frankly, nobody serious… and the three-faan floor isn’t universal either, you’ll find one-faan tables if you…”
“You know, you’d love Nate,” said Joy, tipping her head back toward the stool. As much as she liked the smell of his cologne and the sound of his voice, the line of her attraction had been intersected by the line of her boredom. “He talks like this about the lore in those games he likes where you play as a really sad knight.”
He stopped.
“I’m sorry?”
“No, it’s great! Lots of passion.” She patted his arm. “Keep going. You were on old style.”
For about half a second, something moved behind the emerald eyes that wasn’t charming at all. It was the look of a man who had just demonstrated he was the smartest person in the room and his audience didn’t care. Then the smile came back down over it like a tablecloth.
Across the table, for the first time that night, Dana almost smiled.
“The hand you just folded,” he said, standing, a shade more crisply than before, “was a half flush with a triplet of dragons. Four faan. It was the only legal win you’ve been dealt all evening, and you passed it up on a technicality from another country.”
“Huh,” said Joy. “I guess that makes me a natural!”
“One more hand,” said Auntie Lau, and dumped the tiles.
She had five hundred and eighty dollars, about ninety seconds of education, and one hand left before the round would let her go.
The tiles came in bamboo. Not all of them, but most, with a pair of winds on the end, and this time she knew what she was looking at. One suit plus winds. Three faan. A real hand.
The table had started making sense, too. She couldn’t have counted a faan to save her life, but she could look at people, and now she had some idea what she was looking for. Uncle Wing was nowhere. He’d been breaking up his hand for three turns. Dana was close to something small and didn’t seem happy about it.
And Mrs. Cheung had stopped fiddling with her bangle. She’d stopped looking at her tiles at all. She was sitting behind them with her hands folded on her fanny pack, as serene as a cat on a windowsill, and every so often her eyes went to Joy. Not to Joy’s discards. To her face.
She was waiting on something. Joy had no idea what. Every discard on the table was in one big heap in the middle, and she couldn’t have said who had thrown which.
She drew. Bamboo.
That left her with exactly one tile that didn’t belong: the six of dots. If she threw it, she was one away from a legal hand with her name on it. If she kept it, she’d have to break up the bamboo, and then she couldn’t win. She’d finish the round, climb ninety-four stairs, and go home with five hundred and eighty dollars.
That was the smart play. She could feel Nate thinking it at the back of her head so hard it was practically a cough.
She waited for the hum.
It didn’t come. It occurred to her that it hadn’t come all night. She’d been dealt four of the best hands of her life, one after another, and under her ribs there had been nothing but granola bar, and the pitter-patter of her heart every time she thought about the emerald-eyed man standing behind her watching. Now that she hadn’t actually looked at him for a few minutes, she was starting to wonder what the hell that had been all about.
But as for her luck, this didn’t feel the way it had playing poker with Ray and his rogues’ gallery, or almost getting her face taken off by an improperly secured chainsaw.
It feels like being good, Dana had said, on Ray’s lawn.
Joy looked at Mrs. Cheung. Mrs. Cheung looked at Joy.
She could play it safe and go home with five hundred and eighty dollars, or she could take one real shot at winning. For Joy, that had never been a hard choice.
She threw the six of dots.
“Sik,” said Mrs. Cheung, kindly, and laid her tiles down one at a time. Dots. Then more dots. Thirteen of them, and every one a dot.
“Pure flush,” said Auntie Lau. “Limit. And whoever throws the tile pays for the whole table.”
It came to more than Joy had. Auntie Lau took what there was.
Mrs. Cheung zipped the chips into her fanny pack and put her visor back on. Then she reached over and patted Joy’s hand.
“Good girl,” she said, in English. “You come back.”
Joy looked at the felt in front of her. There was a vacant green spot where her entire savings had been. Eighteen hundred and eighty dollars, the tree fairy’s change, the first real money she’d ever had. It had lasted four hands. By the clock over Auntie Lau’s booth, that was thirty-five minutes.
It should have felt worse than it did. Mostly it felt the way Monday had, coming down out of the air into a pile of arms and already shouting for the team to throw her again.
“Well, I guess we ought to get going,” said Nate. He sounded like he felt worse than she did.
“No chips, no seat,” Auntie Lau agreed.
“It seems like a waste, though. Doesn’t it?”
The man in the suit had come around to her side of the table again. He wasn’t crouching this time. He set a rack of chips down on the empty felt in front of her. They were black, with a thin gold rim, and there were a lot of them.
“You played four hands of a game you’d never seen, out of somebody else’s rulebook, and you were one tile away in every one of them. I was watching. I’ve never seen anyone get that close that fast.” He let that sit for a second. “Now you know the rules. I’d be very curious to see what happens next. Wouldn’t you?”
He nudged the rack an inch toward her.
“Five thousand. We’d call it a marker. No interest, between friends. You pay it back out of what you win, whenever you win it.”
It was a good pitch. It was a great pitch, honestly. It went in exactly where she lived. And she could read him now, the same way she’d finally been able to read Mrs. Cheung. He was sitting on something. He wanted this a great deal more than five thousand dollars’ worth.
Across the table, Dana was looking at the black chips like he’d just put a venomous snake down in front of Joy.
“Come on, Joy. I’ll even buy the In-N-Out,” Nate said. He was looking at the chips warily too.
Joy didn’t answer either of them. She wasn’t looking at the chips. She was looking past the man’s shoulder, across the little red bridge, at the big laminated chart by the foot of the stairs with the numbers written on it in red marker.
Her lower lip had started to push up.
Nate had only known that look for about a month. A month had been plenty.
“Oh God,” he said. “Joy. Whatever that is. No.”