Page 21 of Dice & Dekes

“Dammit! I thought that bag was microwave safe!”

“Knova?” I adjust my grip on the phone, as ifthatwill somehow make it easier for her to hear me. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

There’s another noise, more muffled but also more chaotic. It sounds like she tripped and possibly knocked over some furniture at the same time.

“Knova?” My voice cracks. “Can you hear me?”

Miraculously, her voice comes clearly through the speaker this time. “Ow! Dammit. I dropped them. Flaming potatoes. Now the chair is on fire. Fuck! And there go the drapes.”

This is so her. Disasters somehow find Knova, and she never blinks. She fights fires mid-sentence and still calls you out like she’s sipping tea. It occurs to me that Knova also might just be messing with me—pranks have always been our thing—but there’s no way she could fake the sheer panic in her voice, or the faint crackle of what must be flames in the background.

“I’m on my way, Knova!” I tell her.

I’ve never run so fast in my life.

* * *

Two minutes into my drive, it occurs to me that I’m not going to be nearly as helpful as the fire department would be. I’m able to use my car’s Bluetooth to call 9-1-1, and they inform me that they’re already responding to an emergency at that address. Of course they are—Knova’s smart enough to call emergency services. The only downside to this information is that it means that the fire was too big for Knova to put it out on her own.

And that’s what wrecks me. The image of her alone, coughing on smoke, trying to fix it herself while I’m too far away to do anything. Being helpless is worse than being burned.

I see the smoke when I’m still blocks away, a thick black cloud rising from my parents’ neighborhood. My panic turns momentarily selfish as I imagine flames climbing the walls of my childhood home, consuming my sisters’ rooms and everything we’ve left there. I belatedly think to call my mom, who answers on the second ring.

There’s a weird dissonance as I wait. One minute, I’m a grown-ass man on the Venom’s top line. The next, I’m back to being sixteen and in trouble for parking my car behind hers. Again.

“We’re fine,” she says breathlessly in lieu of a greeting. “The house is fine. Poor Cash and Kingsley, though…”

I relax, though only marginally. “Are they okay?”

“Oh, yes. I’m out here with them right now.” Mom pauses. “How did you know already? Never mind, of course, Knova told you. The two of you have always been close.”

No comment.“Is she safe?”

“Yes, sweetie, they’re all here. The only damage is to property, thank God.”

I round the corner onto the street seconds later. There aresomany fire trucks. Their blaring sirens echo through my car’s speakers in the background of Mom’s call and through the windows at the same time, creating a surreal cacophony of surround sound. I pull into my parents’ driveway, well out of the way of the trucks, and haul ass toward the cluster of people standing in a little circle on the sidewalk. Mom is wearing pink bunny slippers and a matching fuzzy robe because she’s never not a Disney princess. Her blond curls fan out around her shoulders, damp at the ends. She must have been in the bath when they heard the sirens.

Weirdly, dad’salsowearing a robe, and his hair is visibly damp. Ugh, gross. They were totally banging in the tub.

I struggle with the whole ‘geezers getting it on thing.’ On the one hand, I want to still be getting it on when I’m sixty, but I don’t want to think about other sixty-year-olds banging it out.

And especially not my own parents.

When I get closer, I can finally see Cash and Kingsley standing in a small huddle. And then I see her. She’s not hurt. Not really. But she’s pale and shaking, covered in one of those silver emergency blankets. She’s in shock—the kind of quiet that screams.

I slow my stride as I reach Mom’s side. “What happened? How bad is it?”

Cash spins toward me and glares. “What are you doing here, Viktor? You’re like a bad penny. Every time something goes wrong with one of my kids, you just turn up… right in the middle of it.”

I brace for the hit. Cash and I have history, and not the good kind. He’s the one man I’ve never been able to win over. Probably because I’ve never earned it.

“Hey, now.” Mom rests a hand on my arm. “This isn’t Viktor’s fault.”

“Maybe not, but he showed up before my son.” Cash squints at me. “Seems suspicious.”

I grimace and run my hand through my hair. Cash might be a friend of the family, but he’s never liked me. Admittedly, I’ve given him plenty of reasons to view me with suspicion. I may or may not have enabled many of his son’s bad decisions in middle school. And high school. And in the two years since he moved back to Vegas, but who’s counting?

Oh, and there’s also that time I stood his daughter up on our one and only date and took zero accountability.

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