“You and me both, girlie.”
That made her smile, too. She threw four matches into the middle of the table, hoping three tens would beat whatever Stanley had.
He assessed her face and threw in six of his own matches.
She looked at the pile. Looked at her tens. “Fold.”
Stanley shook his head and swept all the cards and matchsticks toward himself.
“You’re running scared.”
He meant the cards, but she couldn’t deny the truth of the observation more generally. Not when she’d spent the past five hours quite deliberately not opening the boxes in the trailer.
Those boxes scared the crap out of her.
Even scarier, the way her eyes kept getting pulled back to Roman, as if he were the purpose of all this.
Her turn to shuffle. She eased the cards together, broke their backs, tapped them into a perfect rectangle. Again.
Again.
“Grandma sold Sunnyvale to Roman a few years ago,” she said. “I thought she was leaving it to me, but he’s going to knock it down and build a resort. I’m trying to make sure that doesn’t happen. Mitzi thinks he cheated Grandma. She thinks if I go through the boxes Grandma left me in the trailer, I might be able to find some evidence, a note or tax records or something.”
She was about to deal when Stanley said, “Cut.”
She set the deck in front of him. He cut it, and she took it up again and dealt three cards.
“What for?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you find out he cheated her, then what?”
“I save Sunnyvale.”
“And?”
“And I live there in the winter, like always. And you guys come down. Like always.”
“For how long?”
Forever.
That was her answer, but it was too childish to speak out loud. Stanley would be eighty years old soon, if he wasn’t already. There was no such thing as forever.
“I’m not sure,” she said lamely. “It’s home.”
“You know the place is a dump, right?”
“It’s not a dump. It just needs updating.”
Stanley chuckled. “You can update it, but it’ll still be a dump.”
“You guys come back every year. Why would you pay to stay at a dump?”
“Mike always complained.”
“He complained? About what? You live at a campground.”