Page 61 of The Woman By the Lake

“This is your best girl?” he asked.

She nodded.

“So she’ll get it, yeah?”

Her white teeth came out to bite the side of her lower lip, and he could feel that bite all over his flesh, so he stopped looking at her mouth and switched to her eyes.

They were so stunning, it wasn’t a whole lot safer, but it was safer.

“Yeah,” she finally said.

“So, you okay now?”

She nodded.

“Right, then let’s go in and finish dinner so we can eat cake.”

That made her smile, and it might not have been as carefree as the earlier ones, but it wasn’t weighed down like all the ones he’d had before.

So he’d take it.

THIRTEEN

Doesn’t Add Up

Riggs

Riggs sat in his couch, sipping a beer and watching Nadia and Ledger on their knees on the floor on opposite sides of the coffee table.

They were playing some card game Nadia taught his boy where you tossed cards one on top of the other and smacked any duplicates. If your hand got there first, you got the whole pile. But if one or the other threw down a jack, then you laid down a line of three cards, and the winner of the entire pile was the highest end card.

Ledger was competitive, and to an untrained eye, Nadia was too.

But Riggs was good at ferreting out a tell, so he caught her occasional brief hesitations that allowed Ledger to clap his hand on the cards before she got there.

This meant the three decks Riggs had dug out so they could play were mostly in his son’s hand.

They both laid down the final turn of four cards, which was all Nadia had left, before Ledger threw up his hands and shouted, “I win! Again!”

Nadia collapsed onto a hip and reached for her beer, muttering a fake gripe of, “Lightning Quick Ledger, fastest hand in the West,” before she threw back a drag.

“You said it,” Ledger crowed, shuffling the cards in his hands and asking, “Go again?”

“Buddy,” Riggs said low.

It was late. He had school in the morning.

His kid looked at him and his shoulders slumped.

He hated seeing that just as much as he hated stopping the fun, for both of them.

And he didn’t have time to deeply contemplate that Angelica wasn’t the card-game-playing-with-her-son type of mom. She was the park-your-kid-in-front-of-the-television—either with a show on, or a game controller in their hand—so-she-could-do-her-own-thing type of mom.

Angelica loved her son, kept him fed and clothed, made sure he got his schoolwork done and didn’t miss a parent-teacher conference or a football or baseball game.

But that night, Nadia’s teacher came out, and Riggs knew it wasn’t fair to compare, because it was only one night, she didn’t have a job, loads of laundry to do or any shit like that, but she was all about conversation and engagement and keeping his son’s mind active at the same time subtly challenging it.

She’d be an excellent mother.

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